Jan Grulich

KDE Discover flatpak backend

As some of you might already know, I’ve been focusing lately on Flatpak and its integration into KDE. You can check my work on Flatpak KDE portals, which are being currently included in our KDE runtimes and repositories were migrated to KDE git so there has been made some progress since last time I talked about them. Recently I started looking into adding Flatpak support to KDE Discover, to have same support for Flatpak as Gnome has with gnome-software. From the begining it was a nightmare for me as I have never used any glib based library so that slowed me down little bit. I also went through gnome-software code to understand how flatpak integration is done there to get some inspiration. Things went well since then and I have already quite nice stuff to share with you. We currently support most common functionality, like listing available/installed flatpak applications in Discover with possibilities to install/remove/update and of course launch them. We also support flatpak bundles and flatpakref files already. If you don’t believe me then here are some screenshots:

This is quite exciting stuff for me. There is still plenty of things we need to solve and improve, as well as adding possibility to manage flatpak repositories which is quite important feature to have too. This all is already possible to try in master branch of discover, you just need to enable flatpak backend. We will keep intensively working on this and hopefully we will have fully functional flatpak support in Discover soon and ready for the next Plasma release. See you soon!!.

6 thoughts on “KDE Discover flatpak backend

  1. First of all, thank you for the info.
    I am on Ubuntu 16.04.4 platform. It’s not KDE desktop. I added kdeapps repo to flatpak and installed KDE apps but they fails to open file chooser dialog browser. I installed xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-kde, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. Doesn’t flatpak support KDE apps in non KDE desktop environment?

Leave a Reply to jgrulich Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll To Top