Ramifications of Purism's new flatpak runtime and repository

Hardware Librem 5
1

When I got my Librem 5 in installed Flathub’s runtime and repository, and some flatpak applications from the flathub site.

Now this article https://puri.sm/posts/introducing-flatpaks-on-pureos/ says that Purism has its own repository and runtime for flatpak applications that are optimzed for PureOS. Questions from me, a person who barely understands this stuff:

  1. Will I see problems in the Librem 5 if I install Purism’s runtime and repository alongside flathub’s runtime and repository that is already on my device?
  2. If the same application is in both repositories, how would I “migrate” it from flathub’s to Purism’s? Uninstall it and reinstall it?
  3. Would I see any advantage or avoid any problems by moving existing flatpak applicaitons from flathub’s repository to Purismis?
4 Likes
2

  1. There’s no problem installing both repositories and installing apps from both side by side. You won’t be able to install the same app from both at the same time though.

  2. Yes uninstall and reinstall, though you could script that if you have a lot of apps

  3. I’ve tried installing about 30 apps first from Purism’s repo, then from Flathub. For the vast majority I could tell no difference. For 1 or 2, I found the Purism version crashed while Flathub’s didn’t (issue filed), and for one or two Flathub seemed to have a recent version update. None of the apps I tried seemed to need the runtime customisations - though I don’t know what they are so it’s possible I just didn’t know what to look out for - so for now I’ve just stuck with Flathub since it also has non-GTK apps.

6 Likes
3

Has anybody already found apps from the new repository that work better than the equivalent from the Flathub?

4

If apps from the PureOS flatpak repository are optimized for the L5, why doesn’t the Satellite app communicate with the GPS?
It doesn’t request use of the location services, and there is no GPS data showing up in the app.