[Wishlist]: Add Flatpak as alternative to Snaps for Linux

[polarathene]

Just adding a wishlist issue here for Flatpak packaging for Linux distribution. If it garners enough thumbs up from others maybe it can also be supported?

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[imolorhe]

Hey @polarathene,

I am not aware of any standard way of deploying flatpak packages from CI (but there is a travis snap provider for publishing snaps). If you can show a way to publish electron builds as flatpak through a CI job, then I would be more than happy to make your wish come true. 😊

[polarathene]

Yeah I understand. I have setup my own electron app with CI since and supporting snap is no problem, but flatpak wasn't supported by electron-builder.

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[acao]

would love to help revisit this now that electron-builder supports flatpak!

shall I open a new ticket?

[imolorhe]

Reopened the issue! 🙂

[acao]

awesome ty! #1966 would be an open duplicate of this ticket, it would seem

looking into it further, generating a .flatpak build will be possible with electron-builder and flatpak-builder, however publishing to flathub or other repositories might be a bit trickier. it appears it requires pushing to a standalone configuration git repository in the flathub org that contains some of the manifests. the submission guidelines to get set up appear to be relatively involved.

the other electron-builder publishing modules appear to interface with both HTTP apis and CLIs programmatically, however none of them involve working with an external git repository. The current electron builder support for flatpak bundles the manifests & such to a single file, so publishing to flathub is currently ruled out which requires seperate files for manifest/etc in a repository.

[imolorhe]

Did some browsing around. It seems the packaging/publishing experience for flatpak files is not great. However like you mentioned, building the .flatpak build files should be possible.

I would have expected that the publishing pipeline would have some support for github releases or maybe even using a github repository as the flatpak repository, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

[imolorhe]

We now create flatpak single file bundles as part of the release process. However the path to publishing to a flatpak remote is still not straightforward. Hopefully the "plans" to enable this for flathub yields something. There are other flatpak remotes but it isn't clear to me that these will allow the bundled flatpak to be used in the various linux distros (since they require different runtimes), but even trying some of them seem to have hard requirements that we can't meet (e.g. elementary doesn't support electron based apps). So unless something changes (or there's other options I'm unaware of), the single file bundles is the only flatpak option we can support.