Some Ubuntu(-derivates) need ppa for suitable version

[Nikilauz]

Some apps require a certain flatpak version and some distros are notoriusly slow in updating the flatpak version in their repos. For this, there once existed a hint in the flatpak installation guide, that showed how to add an appropriate ppa, namely with those simple shell commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install flatpak

However, this has been removed from the installation guide. It's still an issue*, so please add it somewhere to be found, preferably also by flatpak/linux newbies...
Thanks a lot (:

*(e.g. when installing JASP on ubuntu 20.04 LTS. On newer LTS's it now finally works, but who knows if it'll reappear on future jasp/flatpak/ubuntu versions...)

[razzeee]

20.4 lts is end of life this month

[Nikilauz]

Yeah, but this was already an issue for a longer period of time before and may reappear due to ubuntus traditionally lazy support of flatpak...

[smcv]

This repository is only for the Flatpak upstream code. Transferring to flatpak/flatpak-docs which is where the source code for setup/Ubuntu lives.

[razzeee]

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io would have been the correct repo

[smcv]

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io would have been the correct repo

Oops, transferred again.

[smcv]

e.g. when installing JASP on ubuntu 20.04 LTS. On newer LTS's it now finally works

For some context:

Unfortunately, Ubuntu has a tendency to promote older LTS releases as being supported for many years, but then leave it to third-party developers to deal with the consequences of that. Just because Canonical is backporting security fixes into the oldoldLTS branch, that doesn't mean that the rest of the world is prepared to support software releases several years old, and it also doesn't mean that the software in oldoldLTS has the latest features.

If you are using Ubuntu, I would recommend using the newest LTS release, whatever that is at the time (currently 24.04); that release is between 0 and 2 years old, depending where we are in the 2-year LTS release cycle. Similarly, for users of Debian I would recommend the newest stable release (between 0 and 2 years old, and approximately 1 year out-of-phase with Ubuntu LTS).

Older Ubuntu LTS releases and older Debian stable releases are only for change-averse environments where everything staying the same is a higher priority than having recent features, or even recent bug-fixes. They are more suitable for servers than for desktop installations, and adding PPAs undermines the purpose of staying on an older release.

The https://launchpad.net/~flatpak/+archive/ubuntu/stable/+packages PPA is not supported by Canonical or Ubuntu, and in practice is maintained by one developer who doesn't normally use Ubuntu (hello, it's me, I am that developer). The amount of time I can allocate to it is very small. If the Ubuntu community wants newer Flatpak versions in a reliable way, they will need to either discuss what it would take to get official backports within the Ubuntu infrastructure (noble-backports, etc.), or help to maintain the PPA.

[Nikilauz]

Thanks for the context (and your effort maintaining the ppa)!

I didn't want to open a big discussion on ubuntu's efforts of (not) supporting flatpak and I have no idea about the historics that come with all this...
I neither wanted to request more efforts in manually backporting packages to support questionable old OS'.

The initial problem, however, already occured back in 2022, when 20.04 was indeed the newest LTS.
So just to be able to add the ppa already helps a lot, no matter how far back its support reaches. And being a person without that much Linux-specific knowledge, it just helps to have the ppa mentioned somewhere (outside launchpad).

Is there a concrete reason why this hint was removed from the install guide (other than that it's supposedly not needed)? Because I think it would indeed help quite a few people out there, thats all I wanted to point out with this issue (:

[smcv]

Is there a concrete reason why this hint was removed from the install guide (other than that it's supposedly not needed)?

It seems to have been lost in #699, as a result of flathub-infra/website#4137, which seems to have been based on the idea that the PPA was only necessary or desirable for Ubuntu 18.04 (perhaps that was true at the time, but not so much now).

Perhaps instead of saying things like "For Ubuntu 18.04, use the PPA: ...", it would be better to have more generic wording, maybe something like this:

LTS versions of Ubuntu include a similarly old version of Flatpak, which is not always compatible with newer apps. Upgrading to the newest LTS branch is recommended, unless you have a specific reason to stay on older software. Newer branches of Flatpak might be available from a PPA:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install flatpak

[smcv]

20.4 lts is end of life this month

As a side note, the stable PPA no longer contains the latest stable Flatpak release for older LTS branches, because over the multi-year lifetime of an Ubuntu LTS release it becomes increasingly time-consuming to backport and test newer Flatpak releases. At the moment it has the latest Flatpak 1.16.x for Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04, but is stuck on the older Flatpak 1.14.x for Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04.

Similarly the development PPA will get Flatpak 1.17.x when we start seeing development releases, but probably only for the latest Ubuntu LTS at the time, and not for older branches.

[Nikilauz]

In the initial case, 1.14 already did the trick, every version helps (: