Install Manage Flatpak Apps

Install & Manage Flatpak Applications

By Bob L | October 16, 2018
Flatpak is the new way to install and run applications on Linux. Unlike distribution maintained applications, flatpak is a great way to deploy Linux applications without worrying about “which” Linux distro specifically.

You might have realized almost all Linux distros provide the same software but differing versions. One such example is, a distro comes bundled with the latest version of LibreOffice (let’s say v6.0.3) and another distro comes bundled with LibreOffice but not the latest (let’s say v5.2.7). Flatpak is here to eradicate that issue.

​But alas there’s this situation when the computer doesn’t belong to you; you’re on a standard user account, and you encounter a situation in which the computer asks administrative password to install the program. Great news! Flatpak applications can be installed for a standard user account also called per-user mode and not system-wide. Read on below how you can achieve that.

Browsing Flathub

Head over to this given site flathub.org, you’ll see the home page cluttered with popular apps and some editor’s choice apps. Take your time and browse around it, you might even find apps worth trying. But for now, let’s assume LibreOffice is the choice.

Install Flatpak from Flathub

browse flathub applications

Click on Browse the apps button to get to the categories page. Click on Productivity and then choose LibreOffice. Scroll down, you’ll be shown the command on how to install it on your computer. Copy that command and paste it on your terminal program, then append “–user” at the end of the prompt before hitting Enter key. So the actual command would be:
flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice.LibreOffice –user
Once installed you can launch it and check the “About LibreOffice” from the program menu bar to see the program info. You’ll notice “Flatpak version”  on the dialog box.

install libreoffice flatpak

How To Uninstall Flatpak

Suppose the flatpak app you installed is no longer needed and it’s time to uninstall the app. It’s simple and easy, remember the above command we used to install LibreOffice? Let’s assume we wish to remove LibreOffice from the computer, the below command would uninstall it:
flatpak uninstall org.libreoffice.LibreOffice –user

So the actual syntax for uninstalling any flatpak app is:

​flatpak uninstall <app name> –user

The disadvantage with installing and uninstalling any flatpak app is their very long weird application names. And in case you forget what the name for the application was you installed a long time ago, you could execute the command below to see the list of currently installed flatpak applications on your standard user account:

flatpak list –user

Conclusion

Remember to always append –user when executing flatpak command on the terminal program. Otherwise, you’d end up trying to install an app as system-wide (or uninstall it), which requires the administrative password. The only downside for installing an app as per-user mode is the installed app won’t be available on other standard user accounts i.e., you’d have to install it manually for every other user accounts. But that’s a bad practice, instead asks your admin to install the app as system-wide. Hope this article has been helpful and in case you run into issues, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

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gnome 3.30 desktop environment

GNOME 3.30 Desktop Environment Now Available with Flatpak

By Bob L | October 2, 2018

Oct 1, 2018 23:04 GMT  ·  By Marius Nestor 

 

GNOME Project’s Abderrahim Kitouni announced today that the latest GNOME 3.30 desktop environment is now available as Flatpak runtimes for installation on GNU/Linux distributions from the Flathub portal.

Dubbed “Almeria” after the host city of the GUADEC 2018 conference, the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment was released on September 5, 2018, with numerous new features and lots of improvements for fans of the GNOME desktop, which is used by default in dozens of GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

But the GNOME desktop environment is not a small project, so it takes a few weeks to arrive in the software repositories of various popular distros. This usually happens when the first point release, GNOME 3.30.1 in this case, is out, which was released last week. And now, it’s available for installation as Flatpak runtimes from the Flathub repository.

“The flatpak story for GNOME 3.30 wasn’t very smooth as we moved away from building the runtimes from gnome-sdk-images to the BuildStream-based gnome-build-meta, and moved from freedestkop-sdk 1.6 to 18.08. The wait is now over as the GNOME 3.30 flatpak runtimes are now available on flathub,” said Abderrahim Kitouni on behalf of the GNOME Release Team.

Here’s how to install GNOME 3.30 as Flatpak

If the GNOME 3.30 packages haven’t arrived in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, there’s now an easy way to install it using the universal binary format known as Flatpak, which lets application developers distribute their apps across multiple Linux-based operating systems. And GNOME 3.30 is now on Flathub, the app store for Flatpak packages.

So if you wish to install the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment right now on your favorite distro, head over to the Flathub website and set up your operating system for Flatpaks. Supported distros include Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, OpenSuSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Arch Linux, DebianGNU/Linux, Gentoo Linux, Solus, Endless OS, Alpine Linux, Mageia, elementary, Raspbian, and Pop!_OS.

To complete the setup, you’ll have to restart your system. With the official Flathub repository installed, you can now install the GNOME 3.30 packages on your GNU/Linux distribution using the Flatpak package manager. Some of the packages are already at version 3.30.1, but they will be automatically updated to newer versions as they become available on Flathub.

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Flatpak

New Flatpak Linux App Sandboxing Release Makes Installations and Updates Faster

By Bob L | June 8, 2018

Flatpak, the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework formerly XDG-App, received a new major update that brings lots of new options and commands, as well as various other improvements.

Flatpak 0.11.8 is now the most advanced version of the universal binary format used to make the distribution of Linux apps a breeze across multiple Linux-based operating systems. It adds a new “–allow=bluetooth” permission to allow the use of AF_BLUETOOTH sockets and tab-completion for the zsh (Z shell) UNIX shell.

It also introduces a new and handy “flatpak repair” command that allows users to check and repair Flatpak installations and introduces new “-all” and “–unused” arguments to the “flatpak uninstall” command, allowing users to remove everything along with the remaining runtimes.

Also new in Flatpak 0.11.8 release are the “–show-location,” “–show-runtime,” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak info” command, as well as the “–show-runtime” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak remote-info” command. Additionally, the framework now sends a new “Flatpak-Upgrade-From” HTTP header during upgrades.

P2P operations now work offline, faster installations and updates

Among other noteworthy changes implemented in Flatpak 0.11.8, we can mention that P2P operations now work offline, Flatpak now makes use of p11-kit-server, if it’s installed on the host OS, to forward the host certificate trust store to the sandboxed application, and defaults new Flatpak installations to bare-user-only repos for compatibility with file systems that do not support xattrs.

To make it easier for application developers to implement installation and updates in frontends, Flatpak 0.11.8 introduces a new transaction API in the libflatpak library. This release also adds an extra layer of optimizations to Flatpak installations and updates, especially for pruning and triggering operations, making them a lot faster than in previous releases of the sandboxing framework.

Last but not least, the “flatpak uninstall” command has been updated to no longer allow users to remove a runtime if it’s required by an installed application, adds a workaround for a hang that might occur on some hosts during app startup, and makes the “flatpak info,” “flatpak list,” “flatpak search,” and “flatpak remotes” commands work correctly on hosts that don’t include /var/lib/flatpak.

Flatpak 0.11.8 requires bubblewrap version 0.2.1 for system-bwrap, and respects multiple extension versions match during automatic downloading of extensions. Watch out the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for this release in the coming days and update as soon as it’s available for installation. Alternatively, you can download the sources and compile it yourself.

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