Flatpaks can give your Linux desktop access to newer apps, but only if your system is set up to use them. Here’s a straightforward guide to getting any distro Flatpak‑ready.
Are your Linux machines Flatpak‑ready? If they are, you’ve probably already noticed how much Flatpaks can improve the desktop Linux experience. If they’re not – or you’re simply not sure – here’s how to get your system ready for Flatpaks so you can install them easily and unlock a lot of software that wasn’t available to you before.
Flatpaks offer benefits beyond easier access to more software. They’re containerized, meaning each app is bundled with its own independent dependencies to do away with ‘dependency hell’ — those messy conflicts with shared system libraries. This enables strong sandboxing, which controls what the app can access, thereby shielding your system from potential security issues if a vulnerability arises.
Perhaps the biggest benefit — for both Linux users and vendors — is that developers no longer need to build and maintain separate packages for every major distribution. Instead, a single Flatpak can run on any distro that supports Flatpak, which finally comes close to delivering on Java’s old ‘write once, run anywhere’ promise.
That cross‑distro reach has made desktop Linux more attractive to developers who previously saw packaging for multiple distributions as more trouble than it was worth.
The key here is that Flatpaks work “on any distro that supports Flatpak.” Unfortunately, not all distros do. Fortunately, fixing that is so easy that even the greenest of Linux newcomers can do it.
Distros Supporting Flatpak Out of the Box
The good news is that many popular distros already ship with Flatpak support. That number is also growing as distro maintainers realize that Flatpaks make it easier to provide up‑to‑date applications than was practical with repo packages alone.
Distros supporting Flatpak out of the box include Linux Mint, which now actually integrates Flatpak with the other apps in its app store, and clearly labels apps that will be downloaded from Flathub. ElementaryOS takes that a step further, by only including Flatpaks in its AppCenter. If you want to install by any other method, you’ll have to open a terminal and use the command line.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that all Fedora editions support Flatpak, since Red Hat, the distro’s parent, early on made the technology available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For that reason, Flatpak is also supported in the RHEL clones Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. This includes both distros’ live versions, which deliver versions of RHEL that include desktop environments for desktop use.
If you don’t know whether your distro supports Flatpaks, you can find out easy enough by opening a terminal and running the command flatpak --version. If a version number is returned, Flatpak is installed. If you get an error message, such as “command not found,” Flatpak isn’t installed.
Making Your System Flatpak Ready
If your distro doesn’t support Flatpak out of the box, don’t despair because the fix will be easy.
Some distros include Flatpak in their repository, meaning you can install it directly from your software manager. For most distros, however, you’ll need to run a couple of commands from a terminal. The first command you run depends on what distro you’re using:
- Debian/Ubuntu and other apt-based package manager:
sudo apt install flatpak - Fedora/RHEL/Alma/Rocky and other DNF-based distros:
sudo dnf install flatpak - Arch/Manjaro and other Pacman-based distros:
sudo pacman -S flatpak - openSUSE (Leap/Tumbleweed):
sudo zypper install flatpak
On other distros, install the package named flatpak with your usual package manager.
After installing Flatpak, you’ll need to install one or more Flatpak stores. For our purposes here we’ll use Flathub, which is kind of the superstore of Flatpak repositories and should be all you’ll need. There are others, and occasionally you may have to install an alternate source in order to download software that’s not available in Flathub.
To install Flathub on any distro run: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Voila! You’re done! All you have to do now to install a Flatpak is run the following line — while inserting the application ID from the app’s Flathub page in place of the bold text: flatpak install flathub app.id.here.
There’s a GUI for That
You’re ready to go, but at this point you’re going to have to use the command line, like it or not.
If you’re like me and would prefer the ease of a graphical interface, that’s available.
For starters, you can look at your distro’s App Store to see if it includes Flatpaks, which might be the case if your distro already supported the method. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to look a little further.
One thing you can do is install Bazaar, an app we use at FOSS Force. It’ll automagically connect to Flathub for you and act as your own app store. It’ll also do some cool stuff for you, like keeping tabs of all the Flatpaks you have installed and letting you know when one of them has an update.
And it installs as a Flatpak, so since you’ve just made sure your machine is Flatpak capable, this might as well be your first installation. Just open a terminal and run flatpak install flathub io.github.kolha_kid.Bazaar.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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