I've freshly installed Fedora Silverblue and am attempting to enable flathub by following the instructions on Fedora Flathub Setup:
Flatpak is installed by default on Fedora Workstation, Fedora Silverblue, and Fedora Kinoite. To get started, all you need to do is enable Flathub, which is the best way to get Flatpak apps. Flathub is pre-configured as a part of the Third-Party Repositories. Alternatively, you can download and install the Flathub repository file.
Now all you have to do is install apps!
The above links should work on the default GNOME and KDE Fedora installations, but if they fail for some reason you can manually add the Flathub remote by running:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
The problem that I'm having is after I issue flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo and then I issue flatpak remotes it says:
Name Options
fedora system,oci
I am expecting another line under fedora listing flathub, but it still just lists fedora.
What am I doing wrong? Is there some other step I have to do before I follow these instructions?
I believe I could easily enable flathub through the Software Manager app, but since I tend to distro hop, I'd like to do this through the command line so that I can start building a library of scripts to get up and running as effortlessly as possible after a fresh install.
Thanks!
EDIT: I'm able to add the flathub repo at the user level, which is probably good enough for my purposes since I'm the only user on most of my machines anyway, plus maybe it's supposed to be hard for me to configure anything at the machine level by nature of immutable distros.
me@fedora:~$ flatpak remote-add --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
me@fedora:~$ flatpak remotes
Name Options
fedora system,oci
flathub user
me@fedora:~$ flatpak search syncthing
Name Description Application ID Version Branch Remotes
SyncThingy SyncThingy = Syncthing + simple tray indicator com.github.zocker_160.SyncThingy 0.8.1 stable flathub
Syncthing GTK GUI and notification area icon for Syncthing me.kozec.syncthingtk v0.9.4.5 stable flathub
Syncthing Tray Tray application for Syncthing v1 and v2 io.github.martchus.syncthingtray 2.0.6-1.c6a6063 stable flathub
Right, there's the immutable root aspect. Guessing the other answer you got fills in the missing piece there and that Silverblue perhaps mounts the system flatpaks on a different r/w filesystem than the read-only
/. Check output ofmountto see.At the end of the day it's up to you if you prefer to keep the system clean and run flatpak unprivileged, or centralize updates under root.
The one catch I can think of with
flatpak --useris that it obviously won't work if/homeis mounted withnoexec, which is otherwise a good security measure (and IMO not doing that defeats a lot of the security wins of immutable distros). Unless you apply the same mounting strategy to the flatpak xdg user dirs, which is certainly an option but not something everyone will bother with. But then again maybe that's exactly what you want anyway to make your Flatpak installations smoothly portable across distros.