Why does Bazzite have the user Flathub remote configured by default?

[salim]

Yesterday, I installed Bazzite for the first time, before I already used Bluefin. I noticed that when I run

flatpak install flathub some.id

in Bazzite, I’m asked whether I want to install the app as --user or as --system.

On Bluefin OTOH, only the system flathub remote is configured by default, so apps get installed system-wide unless the user has manually run flatpak remote-add --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo before (--system is generally the default for flatpak actions).

On this forum I couldn’t find much information about this topic. A recommendation from @j0rge to a curious Bluefin user was to stick with the default system install.

Now I’m wondering why Bazzite chose to have the user Flathub remote configured by default.

In my understanding, per-user Flatpak installations are not really a mainstream feature since they’re only really a benefit if one user wants to use a different version of an app than another user, e.g. testing vs. default branches.

For regular users, having to choose system vs. user installation is unnecessarily confusing IMHO.

[nicknamenamenick]

This is planned to remove for new installations. We had both for user’s choice but there has been an agreement that it does cause confusion and the System remote has advantages for specific applications where it is required for certain functionality.

For now, you can safely remove the User remote and I recommend using Warehouse to do that in case you have applications installed that you can reinstall as System.

Also, if for some reason this did change for new installations + a future note:
Emudeck installs Flatpaks with the User remote if I remember correctly, so if anyone uses that, it will add that back regardless.

[salim]

Thank you for the explanations and outlook! Looking forward to the removal of the default user remote.