Add Flatpak option to publish Flutter apps on Linux

[12people]

What information is missing?

Currently, the only officially documented deployment target for Linux is a Snap. However, Snaps are being widely rejected by the open-source community due to their closed source backend, with Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, and elementary OS rejecting Snaps in favor of Flatpaks. They're also nearly impossible to install in a permanent manner on immutable operating systems, such as the popular SteamOS or Fedora Silverblue, and can't be run on systems without systemd.

As such, it'd be great to add documentation on creating Flatpaks of Flutter apps. Flatpaks are the preferred packaging format on a range of popular Linux distributions, including Fedora, Pop_OS!, Linux Mint, and SteamOS. They also don't have some of the restrictions of Snaps, such as a closed source, centralized backend or SystemD dependency.

How would you like us to fix this problem?

Add a section about deploying a Flatpak on Linux to the official documentation.

[atsansone]

@Hixie : Considering Snap has closed source, should we consider dropping support for it?

[Hixie]

I think if people want to contribute documentation for different package managers, especially if they will maintain it, we would be happy to accept it. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Snap or whether Snap is open source or not. The App store, the Play store, and the Windows store aren't open either, and we're not going to avoid documenting how to get your apps on them. :-)

[atsansone]

@jacob314 : Do we want to offer FlatPak as a Linux publish option?

[jacob314]

Documenting how to publish to FlatPak does seem worthwhile an appears to be possible today and many users want to use FlatPak rather than Snap. Here is an example of how to publish a Flutter app to FlatPak today. https://github.com/Merrit/flutter_flatpak_example Perhaps in the future this could be made simpler if flutter tool adds a plugin story. Fyi @christopherfujino.