What’s the difference between Fedora repositories, Flathub, and RPM Fusion?

A regular RPM is more like buying a specific part from a hardware store: it uses shared components already provided by the operating system. Flatpak is more like a kit that brings many of its own components along, so it depends less on the exact libraries installed on your system. That can make Flatpaks easier to run and update across distributions, although they may use more disk space and sometimes integrate less naturally with the system. As a beginner, start with Fedora’s official RPM packages when available, then consider RPM Fusion or Flathub if the software isn’t available there or you need a particular version.

They’re broadly like different software stores, but they distribute software in different package formats and under different policies. Fedora’s official repositories provide Fedora’s standard RPM packages and are usually the best first choice. RPM Fusion provides additional RPM packages that Fedora cannot include in its own repositories, often because of licensing, patent, or other legal restrictions. Flathub distributes Flatpaks rather than RPMs, and each Flatpak generally includes many of the libraries it needs, which can make it work consistently across different Linux distributions.