Flathub has gained popularity among Linux users as a one-stop shop for searching, installing, and updating Flatpak apps, offering over 2,000 apps from over 1,500 collaborators.
As our media informed you recently, the platform started a wholly revamped version with new features such as a more pleasant way to navigate and find out apps, verified apps, and more comprehensive app information.
But now Flathub has gone a step further, allowing filtering in the search results of non-free apps.
Flathub: Search Only among Open Source Apps
One of the challenges that open-source enthusiasts face is finding high-quality, non-proprietary apps to use. Fortunately, Flathub’s latest move made a significant update that addresses this issue.
The latest update to Flathub allows users to filter out non-free apps in their search results. Added a toggle switch, “Only show Free Software,” through which users can filter the results.
This means that users can now quickly identify entirely open-source apps, making it easier to support the development of non-proprietary software.
Here are the default results when the filter to exclude non-open-source apps from the search is not turned on.
And here it is for the same search, but with the filter turned on to show only open-source ones.
As can be seen, some of the search results have been removed. In other words, Flathub’s new filter makes it easier for open-source enthusiasts to find apps that align with their values and also helps to promote the development of open-source software.
The most curious can look at the latest commit in Flathub’s GitHub repository from a few days ago enabling this functionality.
