Please reconsider Flathub support

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First off, thanks for the app, its great for my notes and has genuinely helped me and many more as Joplin has become a generally celebrated app.

In fact, it is one of the top 100 apps on Flathub with over 200k downloads. If I'm correct to assume that the Joplin statistics page doesn't include Flathub downloads, that still means that at least a quarter of Linux users use Joplin through Flathub. That percentage could also be drastically higher as Github likely calculates each update install as a separate number while Flathub doesn't. That, I believe, is a significant number since neither the main page nor most of the coverage suggesting Joplin, even directly link to Flathub. The manifests that are required to publish there are said to have been made more accessible since the first discussion on the topic here as well.

Therefore, I wanted to ask you to reconsider officially supporting flatpaks as a means of installation. Additionally perhaps pointing users there and/or possibly ensuring the package quality. I realize that there is a community port thanks to catsout but Flathub seems to deserve more attention. A supported and advertised flatpak version could benefit both the Joplin ecosystem and theirs as fellow GPL projects.

I understand that this is a F(L)OSS project with limited resources so please don't take this as a demand. I just wanted to point out that Joplin could benefit from better utilizing its and Flathub's increasing popularity.

Note: I can't mention catsout because I'm a new user.

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You can get a reasonable estimate of the amount of users by looking at the peaks of the upload stats. There's likely about 10000-12000 Flatpak users.

Meanwhile there's about 18500 users of the snap.

IMO, there's probably more people using unofficial distributions on Linux than official.

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I've got no evidence to back it up but this is probably quite likely due to the various "stores" on popular distros.For example on Linux Mint or Fedora, if you type Joplin then you get the flatpak come up (and I imagine on Ubuntu it is the same but brings up the snap).

Appimages don't really have a proper and universally recognised "package manager" (quoted because I know thats not really the point of appimages) that is found as a source on these various store apps.

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We don't officially support it because it's a lot of work, and the unofficial one seems to work well so why would we change that?

That's actually a good example of open source working as it should, with skilled enthusiasts doing work that helps maintainers (mostly me) focus on other things. I'm grateful that I don't have to maintain the Homebrew, Snap, Flathub, Chocolatey, F-Droid and many other such popular packages because it's already done so well by independent developers.

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Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know about that.

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I understand, thanks for taking the time to respond.

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Yeah, that was a huge oversight on my part. You're likely accurate in your assumption.

Oh and one reason for Appimages not being preferred is of course their initial lack of security in the supply chain. Hence my other post here:

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