Sebastian Wick will be talking about the next generation of Flatpak at LAS 2026

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WalkySK@reddit

You may also know him for stalling lots of wayland protocols and threatening to NACK them which got him temporary ban on freedesktop gitlab.

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Natural_Night9957@reddit

What a guy: IBM, GNOME and Wayland. smh

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You may also know him for picking up the maintenance of Flatpak and un-stalling it after it had become essentially unmaintained. He's doing really important work, including working with other people and projects, for the software that is right next to Proton in making the Linux desktop viable for all of the new users that it's seeing.

People are complicated. It's hard to find one that you agree with on everything.

I've had complaints with GNOME developers making decisions that I've felt have held back the Linux desktop going back probably 20 years, so I understand the frustration, but things are rarely black-and-white. Individual developers certainly don't deserve to become targets for social media mobs that have no concept of nuance.

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mrlinkwii@reddit

, so I understand the frustration, but things are rarely black-and-wh

somethings are , in terms of wayland its mostly black-and-white

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BashfulMelon@reddit

Oh hey, it's the complete lack of nuance I was talking about.

If it was black-and-white he'd either still be prohibited from participating, or nobody would bother merging protocols into Wayland, and since neither of those are true, maybe we don't need to bring up 2 year old drama that benefits no one.

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LvS@reddit

It's not.

He made the color management protocol a reality - while he was banned btw, people had to merge his changes for him during that time.

And even the ban wasn't black-and-white, because the question was if all these new protocols should be shipped as "official" Wayland protocols or as external random protocols, because there's an expectation that official protocols get implemented by compositors.
The result of that discussion was that these days everything is "official" so there's a single place to go for protocols, but there's no longer an expectation that they're all implemented.

You can compare the current list of protocols with the archive.org from the time of the ban to see the difference.

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shroddy@reddit

What did he do? Is he comparable to that Metux guy?

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mrlinkwii@reddit

What did he do?

the tldr is basically stalling wayland devepment ( from time wasting , to threatening to NACK protocols , derailing MR threads, starting coc arguements etc) to the point he was got banned from Freedesktop for a very good while

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1es38o0/sebastian_wick_got_banned_from_freedesktop/

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

your thoughts on that depend on what you think of his NAKs.

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Infinity-of-Thoughts@reddit

Hopefully that future includes something like a "prompting client".

If Canonical can figure it out, surely the Flatpak guys can.

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BrageFuglseth@reddit (OP)

From the conference page:

An exploration of the mistakes we made the first time around, how the world around us has changed, and how the next generation of Flatpak and Portals will look like.

Sebastian Wick is working on Flatpak, XDG Desktop Portal, and all kinds of desktop infrastructure. He is a GNOME Foundation member and works for Red Hat.