How to test Flatpak on our Ubuntu

Last week we have known a new universal parcel system called Flatpak and that it is powered by the Fedora team among others, but that does not mean that we cannot test and install it on Ubuntu. It is more, in the official guide There is only talk of installing it in two famous distributions and their derivatives, these distributions are called Fedora and Ubuntu.

The installation in Fedora seems simple and in Ubuntu it is also, although a little longer than usual, because in Ubuntu you have to use external repositories for its use. Things may change over time, but for now we have to use external repositories.

As for the apps, to make use of them we also have to install an external repository from which Flatpak will extract the few applications that currently exist for it. In this repository we find the apps that the development team has created on the Gnome apps.

As we said installation is long but not difficult, so we start to open a terminal and write the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak</pre>

wget https://sdk.gnome.org/keys/gnome-sdk.gpg
flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=gnome-sdk.gpg gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/repo/
flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=gnome-sdk.gpg gnome-apps https://sdk.gnome.org/repo-apps/

How to use Flatpak

Now that we have Flatpak installed, we need to do a number of things to make it work properly. The first step we have to do is install the runtime or the base of the apps, so for the Gnome repository we have to write:

flatpak install gnome org.gnome.Platform 3.20

Once we have installed the environment, we can install the app we want, in the case of the Gnome environment we have to write the following:

flatpak install gnome-apps org.gnome.[nombre_de_la_app] stable

And after installing it, we have to run the apps with the following command:

flatpak run org.gnome.gedit

Now it may seem like a very long and tedious thing, but it is a matter of getting used to it, such as installing deb or tar.gz packages, packages that Windows users think are difficult to use but with the passage of time one gets used to it Do not you think?