2 Billion Downloads & Other Milestones from 2024 So Far

Lettuceeatlettuce , 1 hour ago

Flatpaks aren’t perfect, but they are really solid in almost all cases.

For the general user that just wants a simple way to download apps on Linux, it just works.

For power users, they will know already the upsides and downsides.

Railison , 2 hours ago

Regardless of how you interpret the statistics, I think that this is a sign that the long vexed problem of software distribution for Linux has been significantly improved. Not quite solved, but for most desktop apps this is fantastic news.

Diplomjodler3 , 4 hours ago

How do they count active users? I have four machines that use flatpaks. Is that four users or one?

that_leaflet , 4 hours ago (edited 4 hours ago)

I wonder how inflated that 4 million active user number is. They say it’s measured by “count[ing] the number of updates to that runtime we’ve served between two releases”. But that method doesn’t account for people distrohopping/reinstalling or QA testing by distros.

I maintain a snap package and something I really like about the Snap Store is the metrics they give. Note that this data is aggregated, I can’t see anything specific about a user. I am able to see:

• weekly active users
• distro and version
• CPU architecture
• country
• which version of app
• which channel (stable, beta, edge, etc)

But Flathub only measures total downloads. An app could get a thousand downloads and those thousand people could immediately uninstall the app and you would have no way of knowing that. With snap, you would see a week later a drop off of a thousand users.