Testing flatpak in EasyOS

As the Purism guys might be using flatpaks for the Librem 5 phone, I decided to check it out. They could also be used in EasyOS, as there is a nice collection available online.

Flatpaks, like Ubuntu's snaps, are self-contained applications, with everything bundled to run in any Linux distro. They may also be configured to run in a sandbox, basically, a container. Flatpak uses a container mechanism called Bubblewrap.

I thought that it might be possible to use Easy Containers, as they are far more efficient to setup a container, compared with the way Flatpak/Bubblewrap does it.

It took many hours chasing dependencies, and I compiled it all, and finally got Flatpak to work. I won't document it here, yet, as need to sort out some details, where I was messing around.

I installed Krita, a KDE app, from this Flatpak repository:

https://flathub.org/home

...and it was a massive download, 359.7MB, actually, it might have been more than that, I went away for awhile, and it downloaded some more stuff.

Finally, ran it:

# flatpak run org.kde.krita

...surprise, it actually worked. However, I saved a file, at "/root", but I haven't got a clue where that "/root" is actually located. Somewhere in /var/lib/flatpak probably, but I couldn't find it. It was there somewhere, was able to open it.

Updates, apparently, are smaller, as it uses a delta difference system.

However, the initial download is too big. I don't think that this is suitable for a phone, as is.

Tags: easy