Is there principal a possibility of installing Plasma as flatpak?
I know this would need some work on SDDM to recognize sessions in /var/flatpak/exports, but I could think that there were some benefits:
It was much easier to install and test a development version
User of LTS distributions could use the latest version of Plasma
If the setting are saved within the sandbox, there wouldn’t be any issues with other installed desktop environments.
Is that technically possible? Or does flatpak not allow to run a wayland compositor. I’ve tried installing COSMIC using distrobox and it works, so why should Plasma not work as a flatpak?
Flatpaks for one take up much more space, then you have the fact that it’s bad enough you have meta packages that some distros use so one can just remove some applications cause they are integrated in the meta package. Flatpak most likely would be handled the same way. Take in my case I don’t use Ktorrent, Kget, and a couple of others. I have seen distros where if you want to remove say Kget you’ll break the desktop.
I don’t think the flatpak should contain any apps. In only thought about KWin, plasmashell and Systemsettings (the basic desktop). All the other stuff should be installed separately.
Like I said, the flatpak should mainly provide the possibility of testing a development version of Plasma. So there wouldn’t be the need of included applications, since they were already installed. If someone wants to test them too, there are already nigthly-flatpaks of the most apps.
So basically, the flatpak would replace a vm and use much less disk-space at the end. And if someone prefers the flatpak over a native installation, there would be the possibility.
modularity and containerization, overall is always a great idea for many reasons, but many people also hate it. This is what atomic distros like Silverblue or Aurora Linux are trying to achieve, where you can update the OS independently from the apps or vice versa, and switch to testing versions of the OS or easily roll back anything or back to stable. There are no conflicts, no dependency errors, no nothing and everything is reproducible. Literally the dream of how any OS should work, and how stuff like macOS and mobile OS’s work. But most people hate this so its being very slow to pick up pace.
No, due to its isolated nature it’s simply not possible. There’s a reason why very few flatpak apps are command line only.
But I would say the better tool for the job would be nix or the GNU equivalent guix. Both are meant to install a wide array of programs isolated from the system (Compared to flatpak, isolated in this context means it won’t conflict with system packages yet can still have full interaction with the host) and guix is the official package manager of the GNU operating system.
Guix uses scheme (like lisp but smaller) and I believe nix uses its own lisp like dialect. But yeah, flatpak is meant to be similar in idea to the apple or google app stores where each application is not truly meant to interact beyond what permissions you give it with the host and especially not as much with other flatpak apps.
each application is not truly meant to interact beyond what permissions you give it with the host and especially not as much with other flatpak apps.
This should to be honest be the default of all third party software nowadays on linux for security purposes. I would really love for linux to embrace this flatpak idea of third party apps being only able to access specifically what you let them and nothing else. Linux is not imune to malware, but even when not talking about malware, just privacy.
However I fully understand that first party software like the KDE plasma itself would hardly work at all on an environment like this, but the KDE apps themselves could be containerized more. As a privacy minded person, I don’t really like the feeling that any app on my system can access anything it wants all the time, and thats why I love the idea of flatpaks and heavily avoid native packages, and would love for distros to embrace this on more things. KDE can’t be containerized however KDE apps like Krita could very well be. I don’t need Krita to access my whole disk, libraries, etc. We can trust that Krita (just as an example) will never do anything malicious but… should we trust? This gets worse when we talk about third party apps like Balena Etcher or Chrome, two apps that are known to break privacy and apps that love the idea of “knowing about everything you have installed on your device”.
So to complement the original post:
Maybe plasma itself (its base components) can’t ever be a flatpak, understandable, but all their apps could, and many are already. It would be nice to keep switching more and more KDE apps into flatpaks in the future.
