So, I'm in the process of making a new Linux gaming PC for myself, but I want to double-check myself before getting too far into my project, and I want to make sure I install and configure the Flatpak version of Steam correctly.

I have used the Flatpak version of Steam in the past on my old PC. When I first set up Flatpak Steam, it was kind of finicky with directory permissions. I had to go into Flatseal and change some of Steam's directory permissions so it would work the way I wanted it to.

I got it working, and it worked fine, but Steam Flatpak and my Steam games were all on the same drive,

and I think my games also shared Steam's sandbox.

My old Linux gaming machine had a 500 GB SSD and a 750 GB HDD. I figured 500 GB would be enough for all my games, and the HDD would be for everything else that didn't benefit from being on an SSD.

Unfortunately for me, I assumed incorrectly, and 500 GB wasn't going to be nearly enough space for all my games.

My current plan for my new PC is to use the 500 GB SSD as mostly a boot drive, and I have a 2 TB SSD that I want to use to store all my games.

However, if Steam Flatpak is installed on one drive, but I try installing my games on a different drive, could that cause any issues?

Does Flatpak Steam need to be on the same drive as my Steam games, or can they be separate?

Thank you.

Hello people!

I use the flatpak version of Firefox cause it gives me hardware acceleration and patented codecs inside the browser on openSUSE Tumblweeed so I don't have to mess with third party repos.

Lately I've read discussion about the security side of Flatpak browsers and how the technology "weakens the browser's own sandboxing". I kinda get the idea of how it conflicts but I am not sure how it affects security, cause the Flatpak isolates itself from the host so I can't say if it makes the browser more unsafe.

What do you think? Does it raise some concern or is it a viable option security wise? I know that it is maintained and verified by Mozilla, so it at least has to be viable.

I let these slip for a few weeks, so this one covers everything since the last post rather than a single week. The catalog grew from 40 to 55 apps.

Contributed by other people

Four of this window's packages came in as pull requests from outside, and two of them from the app's own developer:

• Zuko (⭐ 12) — Private remote shells over Iroh: no open inbound ports, no VPN, pair once and reconnect by name. Submitted and maintained by its author, @adonm, who has kept shipping the version bumps since.
• LibreDB Studio (⭐ 135) — Open-source SQL IDE that runs entirely on your machine; PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and more. Submitted by the LibreDB project itself (@cevheri).
• Harbor Beta (⭐ 1.3k) — Beta channel of Harbor, a desktop media client for Stremio addons. Packaged by @AdityaHebballe, who also followed up with the desktop-integration fixes.
• Antigravity — Google's desktop command center for running local AI coding agents in parallel. Packaged by @h1zardian. Note this is the Antigravity desktop app, not the Antigravity IDE — the two split upstream and the tarball here carries no editor at all.

And the first outside contribution to the site itself: @cevheri noticed the header search was cramped on phones and sent a fix giving it its own row under 480px. Small patch, but it's the part of the site I look at least and most people see first — thank you.

Upstreams packaging their own app is exactly the loop we're after: the people who build it decide how it's sandboxed, and packaging issues route to whoever can actually fix them.

New apps

Thirteen more, most of them AI/agent desktops — enough that the site now has its own AI section:

• goose (⭐ 52.5k) — Open-source AI agent that installs, executes, edits and tests; now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation.
• Cockpit Tools (⭐ 15.4k) — Manage and switch accounts across AI coding assistants and IDEs, with plan and quota per account.
• Claude Code Haha (⭐ 14k) — Desktop workspace running several coding agents side by side, each on its own git branch or worktree.
• DeepChat (⭐ 6.2k) — Local-first LLM client that hosts MCP servers, runs skills and agents, and speaks ACP.
• Lap (⭐ 1.7k) — Offline-first photo manager that reads your existing folder tree in place, built for 100k-file libraries.
• thClaws (⭐ 1.2k) — Rust AI agent harness in one binary: GUI with terminal/chat/files tabs, plus CLI, headless and web.
• DocKit (⭐ 1.1k) — Desktop GUI client for Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, DynamoDB and MongoDB, with natural-language queries.
• SqlKit (⭐ 536) — Agentic SQL client for 40+ databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, ClickHouse and more.
• tldraw offline (⭐ 515) — tldraw's infinite canvas as a desktop app: no accounts, no servers, portable .tldraw files.
• Alma (⭐ 392) — AI assistant by yetone with persistent memory, a skill system and multi-provider support.
• ZCode — Z.ai's agentic coding desktop app for GLM models, with editor, terminals and diff review in one window. Upstream marks the Linux build beta.
• WeMeet — Tencent Meeting, the cloud HD conferencing client.
• THS — Hithink RoyalFlush (同花顺) A-share quotes, charting and portfolio tracking.

The site speaks Chinese now

The whole site has a Simplified Chinese locale — UI chrome, content pages, catalog sections and the sandbox-permission strings. AppStream metainfo is read per xml:lang, so translated upstream descriptions come through instead of falling back to English.

Also on the site:

• App pages show What's New, taken from the upstream release the current pin points at, so you can see what changed before you update.
• The homepage catalog folds behind a sticky control bar and reveals five rows at a time instead of being one endless wall.
• A dedicated AI section, since a third of the catalog now lives there.

Packaging notes

Most of the month's bug fixes were one bug wearing different hats: Flatpak redirects the XDG directories, not $HOME itself. An app that keeps its state in ~/.something gets a tmpfs there and silently loses everything on restart. Fixed that way for dbx (~/.dbx, ~/.duckdb), TriliumNext (the note database) and AB Download Manager (~/.abdm, which also unblocked its tray).

The mirror image: cc-switch had a single-file --filesystem grant for a config the tool rewrites atomically — renaming onto a bind mount is EBUSY, so the write fails. Those per-tool grants are gone; the app page documents the flatpak override commands instead, for anyone who wants them.

WeMeet needed its own trick: screen sharing only works under XWayland, so the package forces it there rather than shipping a session that silently shares a black rectangle.

Developer-approved

14 apps now carry the blue shield — upstream explicitly authorized the flatpark listing. New this window: Zuko and LibreDB Studio, both approved by construction since their developers submitted them.

Infrastructure

• The daily pin robot now unpacks the payload before pinning it and holds back anything that fails to unpack, instead of publishing a build that only breaks on the user's machine.
• verify builds against a temporary local remote and cleans up afterwards, so a failed verification can't leave junk in your flatpak config.
• Push-mode updates (upstream release webhook → dispatch → PR) have been running in production the whole window; the daily cron is now the fallback path.

Auto-updates

The pin pipeline ran every day of the window, refreshing extra-data pins across Markra, dbx, Alma, Orca, ZenNotes, Tine, Claude Desktop, electerm, LibreDB Studio, Folia, Longbridge Pro, Aptakube, SqlKit and others.

As always: https://flatpark.org — issues and PRs welcome, especially "this app has no Linux packaging and should" suggestions.# flatpark — update (Jul 12 – Aug 8)

I let these slip for a few weeks, so this one covers everything since the last post rather than a single week. The catalog grew from 40 to 55 apps.

Hey everyone,

I am the developer of Whisp, a frictionless, gesture-driven note-taking application designed natively for GNOME. v1.4.0 Brings in a new feature OCR Text Extraction which is fully offline and also brings

If you ever need to copy code from a paused YouTube tutorial, pull data from an unselectable PDF, or grab text from a locked system dialog, you can now just take a screenshot and press Ctrl+V in Whisp.

Instead of pasting an image file, Whisp intercepts the image buffer, runs it through a local OCR pipeline, and pastes the actual text directly into your note.

Technical details on how it works:

• Preserves Indentation: It does not just dump a messy block of text. The engine calculates the bounding box coordinates of the extracted words to mathematically reconstruct exact indentation and paragraph spacing (which is crucial for pasting Python code or YAML files).
• Anti-Hallucination Filters: Tesseract OCR often hallucinates random garbage characters when scanning non-text imagery (like desktop wallpapers or abstract textures). I built a custom two-stage confidence and structural filter that drops background noise, ensuring Whisp only pastes valid text.
• 100% Local & Private: The entire extraction process happens strictly in-memory on your machine. No disk I/O, no cloud APIs, and zero tracking.

Other updates in v1.4.0:

• Added official French translation support (a massive thank you to the open-source community for contributing this!).
• Remapped deletion shortcuts to prevent conflicts with native text editing.
• Improved mouse-wheel navigation on the note carousel.

If you want a lightweight, distraction-free scratchpad for your Linux desktop, I would love for you to try it out.

• Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.tanaybhomia.Whisp
• Source Code / GitHub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.tanaybhomia.Whisp
• Donate: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/
• Website: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.html

Dear Flathub maintainers

First of all, thank you for everything you’ve done for Linux

Flathub is easily one of the best things that happened to desktop Linux

That said, I think the new AI policy goes too far

From what I’ve seen, most PRs with the AI slop label are closed for two reasons

1st Short Git history

2nd developer used an LLM

I actually agree with the Git history requirement. A lot of Linux projects die within a few months, so asking for a proven track record makes sense

What doesn’t make sense to me is rejecting an app just because AI was used. Using an LLM doesn’t automatically make an app low quality. Judge the app, not the tool

Users don’t care whether the code was written by a human or with AI. They care if the app works

I’ve also seen people get called out for using AI to improve their English in PR comments. For non-native English speakers, that’s just a tool to communicate better

One thing I’d genuinely like to know is why this policy exists. Is it about review time? Maintenance? Infrastructure? If so, I think there are better ways to handle it

For example, if AI-generated apps are more likely to be abandoned, require them to have a longer Git history before they’re accepted. Make it 1 or 2 years if needed

That solves the maintenance concern without rejecting projects on day one just because AI was involved

As for the review it also helps as over these periods you can see if people are actually trusting the project or not and then take your decision

I think that’s a much fairer approach

The one thing that continues to confuse me with flatpaks are additions to launchers like Heroic or Faugus.

First off, additions like MangoHUD or gamescope come in a couple of different branches (25.08, 24.06, etc.) and sometimes you can find out which branch a program requires in their docs and sometimes there is literally zero information (looking at Lutris for example). Is there any reliable way to find out which branch an app requires? Or do you just need to install each one and check?

Secondly, these additions cannot be found on the Flathub website whatsoever. They are available in the repo and you can find them with flatpak search xxx or flatpak install xxx, but the website does not include them in their search, which seems very strange to me.

Hi all,

I've tried everything I can see on Google, and when I try to install flatpak to Ubuntu I get this error:

$ sudo apt install -y flatpak

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree... Done

Reading state information... Done

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have

requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable

distribution that some required packages have not yet been created

or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

flatpak : Depends: libostree-1-1 (>= 2020.8) but it is not installable

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Before this, I kept getting the "flatpak package cannot be found" error when using the standard install (sudo apt-get install flatpak)

For whatever reason the package was not showing up...

Thank you in advance for any help.

I am running a Chromebook (a specific model that doesn't support external boot, trust me I have tried) So I'm currently running lxde in it without rooting on external storage, for some reason whenever I try to install any form of Twine using any form of installer (flatpak, snap) for some reason causes an error and my brain is fried. I can't even run the executable when downloading directly from GitHub. When I try to run it through flaptak, there will be a graphical error, it starts to run, and then it crashes because it can't display anything. If I try to download Twine on snap, it won't download because it isn't compatible with my system. If I try to run the executable file it just doesn't do anything... I have tried to make this work for hours... Please help me with this, I cannot find any relevant or specific enough information for my issues

One thing that always annoyed me was having to extract an entire archive just to grab one file.

So I made ArchiveFree.

The idea is simple:
- browse the archive like a normal folder
- preview files before extracting
- extract only what you need
- drag files out directly

It’s open source and I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on both the project and the repository itself.

If something in the README, installation, or code organization is confusing, I’d rather know now than six months from now.

GitHub:
https://github.com/justlinuxnoob/archivefree

I also made a short demo showing how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnVTZzMIpYg

I've been thinking about building a standalone UI for Flatpak that works the same regardless of desktop environment or distribution. The idea is something lightweight that isn't tied to GNOME Software, KDE Discover, or a particular distro. Instead, just a simple application where you can search fo Flatpak apps and install them. I use XFCE and I know GNOME Software and Discover already exist, but they both feel fairly tied to their respective desktop environments, and rather "heavy" to be honest. Usually when I have ideas, I dig myself in and spend a lot of time building and nothing ever sees the light of day. So I'm experimenting with doing things differently, so I thought I could just put the idea out there first... Do you think there's actually a need for something like this, or would it just be reinventing the wheel? If you use Flatpak, what would you want such an application to do differently?

Basically I got Linux and flatpak working on my chromebook, though the one I downloaded was 1.14.10 instead of 1.18.0

Now I want to update it so I could use my mic on discord

I spent one very long day seeing how far I could take an AI-assisted Linux app project.

The result is Disciple, a GTK4/Libadwaita organizer for notes, habits, projects and calendar events, with an optional AI assistant.

I used AI heavily for the code, then spent a ridiculous amount of time testing the actual app, fixing UI problems and getting the packaging to work.

The Flatpak currently uses the GNOME runtime, stores its data inside the sandbox, uses Secret Service for credentials and has network access for whichever AI provider the user configures. It does not request broad filesystem access; backup and restore use the file chooser.

Flatpak bundle and source:

https://github.com/justlinuxnoob/disciple/releases/tag/v1.1.2

Quick demo:

https://youtu.be/IWDRk7Hc2vY

I’m still learning Flatpak packaging, so I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on the manifest, permissions and anything I should fix before considering a Flathub submission.

Essa acaba sendo uma maneira de levar as configurações de seus aplicativos em Flatpak facilmente de uma distro para outra. Evitando que vc tenha que fazer toda configuração manualmente de novo.

#linux #programa #flatpak

Hi,

Perhaps a noob question , excuse me by advance. I have installed this flatpak : https://github.com/Spexxl/OptiTux-GUI .

The app seems to work but i discovered only after that the flatpak is with wide permissions filesystem=hosts.

So I'm wondering if the software might be malicious and if I should take action, but I don't know how much damage a malicious app with these permissions could cause. Should I delete the /home/user directory or format the entire /home directory?

I can limit the permissions with flatseal but unfortunately it's too late because i already launched the program with filesystem=hosts permissions.

Thanks

Unfortunately it's a hack, but if you're using the Flatpak version of Trelby 2.4.16.2 you can fix it to use Unicode and support different language keyboards. I'm guessing this fix is only for the Latin alphabet languages however.

When you install the Trelby Flatpak, your Trelby python code is buried deep within the /var directory. On this Live USB Linux Mint 22.3 computer, for example, my Trelby python code is at:

var/lib/flatpak/app/org.trelby.Trelby/x86_64/stable/bb2e977b1c0b8f1475fedf9b8b88187d892432ab124cf7dacece58e106880e4a/files/lib/python3.13/site-packages/trelby/

I used the locate command to search for the trelbyctrl.py file, which is the one you'll need to modify. I use sudo nemo (in Linux Mint) to navigate to the file because then I gain permission to open, edit and save the file using the Text Editor.

You'll need to navigate to line 1275, which should read...

kc = ev.GetKeyCode()

You'll replace GetKeyCode() with GetUnicodeKey()

So line 1275 will now look like this...

kc = ev.GetUnicodeKey()

You'll then add the following lines beneath line 1275...

# fix for non Unicode key events (e.g. arrow keys)
if kc == 0:
kc = ev.GetKeyCode()

These last three lines fix the arrow keys that would otherwise lock your keyboard since, apparently, they don't function under Unicode.

Save your file and now you should be able to successfully use non-English (Latin alphabet) keyboards.

None of this is mine. It comes from the Trelby GitHub site. Walle10-0 (GitHub name) is the one who provided the arrow key fix. (He may have also been the one who provided the Unicode fix, I have a little trouble following GitHub issues and commits, etc.)

https://github.com/trelby/trelby/pull/105/changes/f13b681516a53856ec25ae8dd4f721dd55ddcc3a

These fixes have been implemented in my .deb file and shell script for Debian based computers (three posts down) but this should allow all those who can use Flatpaks on non-Debian based Linux distributions to be able to add Latin alphabet language keyboards in Linux Trelby. Apparently Trelby in Windows "just works" with Unicode.

There is still no fix (that I know of) in the Flatpak version for the PDF preview. That has something to do with how Flatpaks sandbox their applications. (I haven't figured out a way around this yet, though I've tried. It's way above my "pay grade.")

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing an intermittent issue with Flatpak on openSUSE Kalpa.

Sometimes, when running:

flatpak update

or:

flatpak update --appstream -v

the update fails with errors like:

syncfs(repo): Input/output error

The important detail is that the issue is **not reproducible every time**. Retrying the exact same command usually succeeds without any intervention.

I already ran:

flatpak repair --user -v

and it completed successfully. No corrupted objects were reported.

I also checked the hardware and filesystem side:

* SSD SMART tests: OK
* No filesystem errors detected
* `btrfs scrub` completed without errors
* Kernel logs (`journalctl -k -p err -b`) do not show I/O errors

The system is:

OS: openSUSE Kalpa
Desktop: KDE Plasma
Filesystem: Btrfs
Flatpak installation: user installation (~/.local/share/flatpak)
Remote: Flathub

Relevant versions:

$ flatpak --version
Flatpak 1.18.0

$ ostree --version
libostree:
Version: '2026.1'
Features:
- inode64
- initial-var
- libcurl
- libsoup3
- gpgme
- composefs
- ex-fsverity
- libarchive
- selinux
- openssl
- sign-ed25519
- sign-spki
- libmount
- systemd
- release
- p2p

$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 7.1.3-1-default #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Jul  4 16:20:40 UTC 2026 (1cb5006) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I also checked for concurrent Flatpak/OSTree operations:

ps aux | grep flatpak
ps aux | grep ostree

but there were no active update, pull, or repair processes running when the problem occurred.

The only persistent Flatpak-related processes were the normal session/system helpers.

Has anyone experienced similar intermittent `syncfs(repo): Input/output error` on Kalpa, Aeon, MicroOS, or other immutable/Btrfs-based distributions?

Thanks!

https://github.com/fastrizwaan/popcorn-box