Flatpak

Updated 458 Days AgoPublic

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One of many foolish modern heresies, specifically within the wider containerized app packaging movement.

Some notes

For a GUI frontend, Discover is recommended. The flatpak command works as a CLI frontend.

To give Flatpak apps permissions to access the main filesystem and other such stuff, there are two levels, official permissions and sandbox escaping permission. Flatseal is the recommended GUI option. CLI option see the official documentation but I think it's flatpak override or flatpak run with options for the scary stuff, or just flatpak set-permissions for normal permissions?

If you want to run something manually from the terminal (for example, to run contour help for Contour), the default place Flatpak symlinks all installed apps into is /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin. Some stuff doesn't publish to there and you may need to dive into /var/lib/flatpak/runtime/, thus are the wonders of containerized packages...

Examples

# It's possible no flatpak repos are enabled, isn't the future wonderful? You can enable Flathub if so
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

# Search for an application
flatpak search contour

# Install an application (using the full ID, ick)
flatpak install org.contourterminal.Contour

# Run a command
/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.contourterminal.Contour help

Specific fixes

Google Chrome in Flatpak form often fails to play DRM'd stuff. For some reason, just setting this ownership seems to work:

sudo chown -R root:root ~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/config/google-chrome/WidevineCdm/