Flatpak Distribution

[t3chguy]

Investigate distributing electron build in a flatpak to support moar distros

[ara4n]

the core team doesn't have bandwidth to support moar distros, so this bug is open to whoever wants to pick it up :) (i vaguely remember someone already working on one? plus there's already Revolt too)

[Croydon]

You could replace the current offered .deb version with it since Flatpaks are running also on Ubuntu and Debian. Furthermore since Ubuntu is moving back to Gnome they will get even more Flatpak-ish.

Promoting a Flatpak version to an official version would be nice :)

[mcatanzaro]

Why Electron? That requires bundling a separate copy of Chrome just for Riot... and again for every other Electron app you might want to use. Why not use WebKitGTK+, the web engine that comes for free the GNOME flatpak runtimes? Revolt uses it:

flatpak install --from https://flatpak.perezdecastro.org/revolt.flatpakref

[t3chguy]

@mcatanzaro funnily enough, author of revolt submitted a PR to package this electron based app into flatpak (#3723)

[aperezdc]

@t3chguy @mcatanzaro I am sticking with Revolt myself, but I already have some experience building Flatpaks so it seemed interesting to the contribute the packaging to Riot. If that helps getting more users, and helping support more distributions, then it's a good thing thing for the Matrix ecosystem 😉

[jgarciao]

Riot.im is available as flatpak application on Flathub since a couple of days ago. It works very well in my Debian 9 machine. I think by the directives of the store you can request authorship and maintain the package if you are interested.

https://flathub.org/apps.html

Quick Installation from the command line:
flatpak install --from https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/im.riot.Riot.flatpakref

Repo with the build file: https://github.com/flathub/im.riot.Riot

[Mikaela]

Would electron-userland/electron-builder#512 be blocking official Flatpak distribution?

[t3chguy]

not blocking but means it's not as simple as changing a config line, and instead the whole packing process has to be done/used

[uhoreg]

The flatpak from flathub (https://flathub.org/apps/details/im.riot.Riot) seems to be currently maintained (it's been updated to the latest version). It's based on the official Riot deb file, which is a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but looks like a simple way of doing it.

http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/electron.html has information about building a flatpak for an Electron application, which is probably a more proper way of doing things (which element-hq/element-web#3723 might be doing).

[ell1e]

It was suggested to me to comment here pointing out the flatpak on flathub currently only supports x64. For the PinePhone, Pinetab, Librem 5, and Raspberry Pis, an ARM64 flatpak would be very useful. So that would be cool if that could happen one day, either through whenever official flatpaks happen or in some other way.

[Croydon]

In my opinion, if the Element Team decides to provide a Flatpak official they should make the Flathub one the official one. The Element Team can request access at Flathub for the Element Flatpak repository if they don't have access yet.