blobjim [he/him]

The main Chrome flatpak currently just installs the official RPM file for Chrome. You’re right that the Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium ones do seem to build from source a bit more. I imagine it will just mean a better build process with less patching.

But you can see exactly what it means right in the ticket:

• Create chrome/installer/linux/flatpak/ with packaging scripts and templates for metadata, AppStream metainfo, and launcher entrypoint.
• Add enable_flatpak GN build argument (default false).
• Add package_format to InstallerConfig and omit host desktop integration artifacts (system desktop files, /usr/bin symlinks, AppStream appdata, GNOME default apps, manpages, and AppArmor profiles) when packaging for Flatpak.
• Update common/installer.py with Flatpak configuration and App ID mapping for Chromium (org.chromium.Chromium*) and Google Chrome (com.google.Chrome*).
• Generalize common/desktop.template to support both Flatpak and system-wide desktop execution commands.
• Disable setuid sandbox and zlib compression for non-official builds.
• Update BUILD.gn with flatpak packaging targets and aliases.

Linux has an API now for allowing sandboxed apps to simulate keyboard input. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any simple Flatpak apps that use it to provide a virtual keyboard.

The article says

Firefox on Linux to date has focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that works well for some vendors but lacks official support from NVIDIA unless using the independent NVIDIA-VAAPI driver project that layers VA-API on NVDEC. There are also various embedded drivers and more not supporting VA-API

So it’s basically just because the existing video decoder API in Linux doesn’t have support for various hardware devices for various reasons. But those devices still have Vulkan support. Not sure why Vulkan support for those devices wasn’t just added to VA-API, who knows.