Hi there - I’m trying to make use of flatpaks, but keeping them isolated from my host (as I need to experiment with a bunch of settings and I don’t want to bork my host environment. Again.)

Has anyone had actual success making this work? I’ve only been able to get anything to install by sudo-ing, but even then, I cannot get things to run. It’ll fail with file not found (but which file? verbose mode doesn’t help) or fail to connect to the system bus.

I’ve seen some posts about unmounting /var/lib/flatpak on initialization but I’ve had no luck there. (I’m on Fedora 39, which, to be honest, I’m rather enjoying.)

Is this a technique that anyone has had luck with? Worth pursuing?

FWIW, my big goal is to run bottles and I’ve had far more luck with bottles (which strongly recommends flatpak) than with winehq.

  • indigomirageOP
    41·
    11 months ago

    It’s not the flatpak that’s the issue, it’s all the other stuff surrounding it that I need to contain. Much easy, potentially, if they are all in the same environment.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      3·
      11 months ago

      But flatpaks when done right have all their settings in their container.

      If you want a totally vanilla experience, maybe run it from a systemd-enabled rootful distrobox? Flatpak needs systemd and that is not supported in rootless distroboxes

      • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Many Flatpaks aren’t done right (though this is easy to fix after installing them, no need for Distrobox in this case), and Flatpaks don’t require systemd.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          1·
          11 months ago

          Really? But afaik I couldnt install flatpak in distrobox. Maybe the apps themselves dont require it but the install process?

          They may not require systemd but some init system.