Flathub itself is leaving GitHub
In a GUADEC presentation about Flathub, a transition to a Forgejo instance gets mentioned and is met with applause.
At this week's GUADEC conference in the city of A Coruña, Spain, director of the GNOME foundation Cassidy James Blaede spoke on the future of Flathub. That future, according to the presentation, involves replacing Flathub's development on GitHub with a Forgejo instance.
A planned migration
Blaede, speaking for the Flathub project at GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) on July 18, 2026, listed several items under "Flathub Plans." Among them most notably was "GitHub -> Forgejo migration."
- When Blaede mentioned this item, it was met with applause from GUADEC attendees. None of the other items on the list got an applause.
The presentation didn't include any specifics about when that transition might actually happen or even begin.
Reality check: It wasn't a secret that was unceremoniously unveiled as part of an otherwise dull roadmap. Bartłomiej Piotrowski, systems administrator of Flathub, has been hinting at a Forgejo transition, or at least an exploration, for a while now. That's evidenced in the Mastodon post below and discussed in a Flathub Discourse post.
Bart Piotrowski
Confused? Forgejo is an open source, self-hosted code collaboration platform. It's an alternative to the most conventional platform, GitHub, and provides the basis for the popular alternative Codeberg.
Flathub joins several open source projects that have left GitHub in recent history. I reported earlier this year on Ghostty announcing its move from GitHub, citing reliability problems. GitHub is owned by Microsoft and has become progressively more inundated with Copilot integrations since the advent of generative coding a few years ago, another sore spot for some developers.
Zooming out
Why this announcement matters: GitHub has long been the go-to place for open source developers to, well, develop. Its now-infamous reliability issues and its insistance on
My take: More independence from big tech like Microsoft is always better, in my opinion.
Jordan Gloor
Diving in
Go further: If you want to watch the Flathub presentation yourself, you can find it on YouTube at the 53:24 timestamp. It's only a few minutes long, so it's worth a watch, if just for the surprised pause Blaede takes when applause erupts.
