Jan Grulich

Telegram desktop client for flatpak #3

I have been working lately on fixing issues we had with telegram when using Qt’s flatpak platform plugin to have portals support. This was all crashing due to system tray. Qt tries to fallback to xembed when platform theme doesn’t provide any system tray implementation. Unfortunately Qt assumes that we are using xcb platform plugin (used everywhere by default) and tried to call some functions on it, but unfortunately we were using flatpak platform plugin which loads xcb only internally and because of that it was crashing. To solve that I had to implement my own xembed support into our flatpak platform plugin without using xcb specific functions. This was all happening only on Gnome, because in KDE our platform theme has it’s own implementation of system tray using SNI and xembed is not used there at all. With all those fixes I decided to make telegram to finally use flatpak platform plugin by default.

What is also new is that I created one more branch with alpha releases. Right now I have master branch with latest stable telegram in version 1.0.29 and devel branch with latest alpha release 1.0.37 bringing support for calling.

You can get it the same way as before, following instructions from previous blog post, except that now you have to specify branch you want to install.

4 thoughts on “Telegram desktop client for flatpak #3

  1. I want to learn a bit of packaging. What’s the best way to go around it at this time? Learn RPM packaging or Flatpak. I would love to get latest versions of Skoorge on Fedora.

  2. It depends, to package something for Fedora you either need to be sponsored so you can push packages to dist-git and you need to go through a review process or alternatively you can have it in Copr, price for this is worse discoverability but you are free to play with it. With flatpak you can target all distributions with one package and writing a manifest is easier than writing a spec file, at least if the application is well written.

    I see that skrooge is already packaged for Fedora, it’s just outdated so maybe the easiest way is to contact the maintainer and ask him to update it, in this case it’s Rex Dieter and as I know Rex, he will happily do that. If you want to have it packaged for Flatpak then you can use already existing KDE runtimes, but you need a place to host the repository.

  3. tried telegram flatpak in fedora workstation 26 and it’s working well so far…the only problem is that is missing native notifications…will that ever be adressed or we should stick to the rpm version for those wanting native notifications?

Leave a Reply to Sudhir Khanger 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