devpod Reconsider Flatpak packages

Is your feature request related to a problem?
Installing DevPod on other Linux distributions comes with challenges dealing with AppImage dependencies. It would be nice to have packages provided by Loft.sh for Flatpaks on Flathub so installing DevPod is as easy as any other software.

Which solution do you suggest?
I noticed you are now working on the Tauri v2 migration, which comes with a lot of improvements. The one I'm most looking forward to are the Flatpak and RPM support which should make providing these packages trivial. Flatpak is distro-agnostic, and works across many distributions, so I'd suggest starting with this to provide the most value to users.

Which alternative solutions exist?
I, along with the other Universal Blue collaborators, have been maintaining Fedora COPR RPM packaging of DevPod for a couple years, though this has a ton of problems, especially when running with Nvidia GPUs. I'm hoping the switch to Tauri v2, and Tauri's native support for this format, will resolve these issues.

Additional context
This has previously been rejected since Tauri v1 didn't support these packaging formats, which is why I'm hoping we can give it another shot. :crossed_fingers:

Nov 12 '24 13:11 p5

Hey @p5, you're right, with tauri v2 we should have a significantly easier way of distributing flatpak and RPMs. In the past we've shied away from supporting more than one linux package type because of the added support and maintenance overhead.

It's amazing that you and other collaborators stepped up and created their own packages, thank you!

I'm going to leave this issue open until we've changed the pipeline

Nov 12 '24 15:11 pascalbreuninger

Happy to run into ya'll at Kubecon! As (quickly) discussed, I'd be happy to help link you up with the right folks at Flathub to get you going as fast as we can. Let me know how I can help, thanks!

Nov 16 '24 22:11 castrojo

I've scoped this issue down to only providing Flatpak packages hosted on Flathub.
Flatpaks reduce the need for RPMs and other distribution-specific packaging, so it seems the most valuable format to look at first (and it uses the pre-existing, and working, .deb formats behind the scenes).

Nov 20 '24 20:11 p5

@p5 Agree, we've been working on flatpak support pre tauri v2 already but stopped because tauri added it natively @castrojo Thanks for chiming in :)

Nov 25 '24 08:11 pascalbreuninger

Is there any specific timeline where we can expect the flatpak to be published?

Dec 17 '24 15:12 ghost

Hello everyone! I have been working on a few flatpaks recently due to some limitations with Achillobator regarding SELinux and I believe I could help out with the development of the flatpak version. I've seen that you all dropped development on https://github.com/loft-sh/sh.loft.devpod/, but it seems like it doesnt require that many changes. If I fix that up and add some metadata and stuff, would there be any change we could publish this to Flathub?

I believe the only change that would be necessary upstream (in this repo) is having the appdata.xml and devpod.desktop files here instead of on the flatpak definition.