Flathub to the rescue!

In my use of Linux and recording audio/music at home I have constantly been in a dilemma. I want to have a stable environment to be able to focus on the recording and not fixing my computer. However, I also want, if not the latest, a recent version of the applications I use. In my case the DAW Ardour. My Linux distro of choice is Debian. It’s stable and I’m so used to an Ubuntu/Debian OS I have had a hard time changing to something else. The price we pay for a stable environment is that you have older, well tested, applications. There are ways to backport or use PPA’s to get a more recent version installed, but sometimes it just doesn’t work that well and it can be a hassle to set up. Luckily, with my limited recordings it usually haven’t been that much of an issue for me. Until there was a major update to Ardour that would really help me. So what to do?

Being loyal to Debian I went for upgrading to Sid. Sid is the unstable version of Debian, but still quite stable according to multiple articles I came across. With this I would get both a newer version of Gnome, with the features I miss using a touchpad, as well as the version of Ardour I wanted. All was well. Well, except that I need to update Sid a lot to keep it stable. Or so I’m told (by the articles I read). While it’s not a major problem (and nothing has broke yet) after some months I’m growing tired of the constant updates.

Then I rediscovered the world of flatpaks. I learned about them some time ago but didn’t pay much attention, I already had everything I wanted from the repos. Right? Apparently not. But now I read the articles with another eye. Would this mean I could run my “older” stable distro of choice and yet install the latest version of Ardour as a flatpak just as easy and trusted as from the distro repo? Apparently so! I found all the applications I used (and more) at Flathub.org. This way, it seems, I can have my cake and eat it too!