CentOS v10 (upstream distro for future Red Hat v10 that will be released in Feb/2025) was released and for desktop apps very interesting announcement related to GUI applications users to install GUI apps from flapaks (or use EPEL repo):
The message is, the ones that want to target enterprise supported desktop environment, the expected target is flatpak. This will be beneficial for Blufin and other Universal Blue variants and wider ecosystem.
Thanks for posting this. I feel like these release notes compress like 10 years of Linux development into one page lol.
There is a massive amount of new things in CentOS v10 and Red Hat v10 beta..
It is also very interesting what is removed.
| Removed from CenOS v10/Red Hat v10-beta |
|---|
| Firefox → install from Flathub |
| GIMP → install from Flathub |
| LibreOffice → install from Flathub |
| Inkscape → install from Flathub |
| Thunderbird → install from Flathub |
| Xorg → Wayland |
| older x86-64 → x86-64 v3 |
| VNC → RDP |
| Linking to 32-bit packages in development tools |
| Totem media player → install from Flathub |
| Qt5 → Qt6 |
| Evolution → install from Flathub |
| Eye of GNOME → Loupe |
| Cheese → Snapshot |
| GNOME Terminal → Ptyxis |
| Inkscape → install from Flathub |
| PulseAudio → PipeWire |
and many more…
This is great news, especially from enterprise-focused distributions
They usually are very conservative with changes, which proves that Universal Blue was right all along
I have now installed CentOS Workstation and interesting very few GUI apps are installed by default, just like announced in release notes:
I though Flathub is turned on by default, but it isn’t. Typing “firefox” in Software does not return anything:
I don’t know, why they decided to not install web browser. Maybe the mantra is:
In my humble opinion Blufin does it better, just installs most used apps by default from Flathub. The ones that don’t want flatpaks, can uninstalled them and use apps for example from distrobox containers.
Actually @j0rge (Jorge Castro) was rights one year ago in his excellent article The distribution model is changing celebrating idea Rad Hat to not package LibreOffice anymore as native package and instead recommends flatpaks. The only part from the article that is obsolete by now is title “is changing”, from the CentOS v10 announcement we can conclude “has changed”. 
Kinda crazy no browser included. 
Not even Epiphany?
Well, at least they put “Flathub” first
It has been renamed GNOME Web btw : )
I can’t find one. It looks like web browser is not installed at all.
From Software application the Installed tab looks like:
From Software application the Explore tab looks like:
and clicking on one app it returns:
On top right I click on “CentOS” to see if flatpak is enabled and it is not only native CentOS repository is enabled.
I don’t know maybe what they should do is to create some wizard or something to do one click enable Flatpak and/or one click enable EPEL repo.
EDIT: Maybe… the idea is: This are all of the applications we support. Do you want anything else? Use other officially not supported solutions (Flathub/EPEL or other). It will probably work, but we don’t grantee that and don’t report bugs on our bug tracker, go upstream.
Interesting… from enterprise point of view, Flathub flatpaks are latest and the greatest versions, constantly changing applications, that time to time brake (not the way enterprises want). EPEL is not maintained by Red Hat (if I am not mistaken this is Fedora repository), also not the greatest for enterprises.
I didn’t say that GNOME Web was installed by default, but that Epiphany was renamed to GNOME Web : )
Ugh don’t get me started on Gnome’s drab naming scheme.
Nautilus - Files
Epiphany - Gnome Web
Loupe - Image Viewer
Etc etc…
No pizazzzzzzzzzzz
Nothing memorable.
No spice… Like british food 
I personally like generic and intuitive names, but anyway, please let’s stay on subject 
What is actually additionally interesting that CentOS (from first post in this thread) suggests to install flatpaks from Flathub.
From Fedora perspective there are two flatpak repositories:
According to the Fedora Magazin’s article Comparison of Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub remotes there are few of the differences:
| Fedora flatpak | Flathub flatpak |
|---|---|
| Fedora iniciative | Wider organizations project Gnome, KDE, Freedesktop,… |
| Flatpaks are crated from RPM packages | Flatpaks are build from source code on Github using manifest file (but other options are also possible e.g. build from DEB, snap, AppImage, but not recommended) |
| Idea is how to most quickly build as many flatpaks as possible | Get optimized deduplicated programs |
| only open-source licensed software | open-source and proprietary software |
| flatpaks are in OCI format | flatpaks are in OSTree format |
Wouldn’t that be Fedora instead of Flathub ?
I also don’t really know what an OSTree formatted Flatpak could be
Wow this is weird to see, thanks
Can you send a link?
Link is my two posts above. Here it is again:
