Flatpak Distribution on Linux

Installation & Packaging
23

I created a pull request to remove the permission to wayland socket until someone make it work on wayland.

I tested with the flathub app, and removing this permission with flatseal makes it work as mentioned above.

1 Like
24

Note: Flatpak isn’t supported officially, So Please open issues on github repository of Mailspring’s flatpak instead.

3 Likes
25

I did install through Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

I have to say, i did discover Malspring browsing FlatPak “FlatHub” !

So thanks guys for getting to FlatPak.

2 Likes
26

I love Mailspring and would love to see Flatpak being preferred over Snap on the downloads page.

4 Likes
27

Flatpak version is unofficial and unmaintained at the moment.

Still Mailspring at Flathub count about 96,964 installs. It would be interesting if the team maintain it so that it could get the verified star as well.

3 Likes
28

Bumping it up. In my first year with Mailspring, I had to reinstall it and set everything up from scratch THREE times due to Linux updates and how snap unreliable is. Installed via flatpak - 0 problems ever since in over a year.

3 Likes
29

Flatpak should have been the choice to support because of how fast the community adopted it. The markers were obvious. Hope the team will release a verified version on Flathub.

30

With the way things are going, I doubt they will put out an official flatpak anytime soon. You might have better luck reaching out to whomever made the unofficial flatpak instead…

31

There is currently no maintainer for the unofficial flatpak. The previous guy said so himself :confused:

prateekmedia commented last week

I am not actively maintaining this repository.

1 Like
32

With the growth of Atomic/Immutable Linux distros, an official Flatpak is becoming more important. While there often are still ways to install it, it is not efficient or ideal due to how they work. Snaps are generally not well-received outside of Ubuntu distros.

1 Like
33

Yes need this. It is a pain to use it on Bluefin.

3 Likes
34

With the way things are going, If security issues aren’t fixed with Mailspring, the unofficial Flatpak and Snap will no longer exist at some point…

35

I strongly agree that an official flatpak version should be made available (instead of snaps) since flatpak is much more widespread and adopted by the community and by different linux distros. Especially with the release of the steamdeck which uses flatpak exclusively to install apps (as well as most immutable distros)

The only reason why I have not used mailspring yet is because of this. But I would like to try it and I don’t want to use an unofficial version of it.

Please consider this request, no one really uses snaps… I am certain that a lot more people will give it a try then. :+1:t2:

Cheers.

1 Like
36

@bengotow I think the flatpak is in a pretty good state right now. What do you think about making it official?

37

I think that’s a great idea - thanks for all your work on it!

I’ve added it to the available Linux packages on the download page - Mailspring - The best free email app, what else do we need to do to make it official?

38

I talk about giving it the verified status on Flathub. From their doc:

Verification is the process by which Flathub and developers confirm that an app is published by the original developer or an authorized party.
Verification is done by verifying the developer’s identity through their ownership of the domain associated with the app ID.

In short, you need to put the token 3fa1a49d-8602-4003-95c6-ca56857ff953 in either one of these places:

After that, just a button press in the developer portal is needed. If you accepted the invitation to the manifest Github repo that was sent to you some time ago, you can login with your Github account and do it yourself. If not, tell me when its done, then i will do this. In this case i can also request ownership for you once again, i think you should have write access too.

39

Thanks for sharing the YAML manifest steps! Getting Flatpak permissions dialed in for Electron apps like Mailspring can definitely take some trial and error. Glad to see the Flathub package active now — definitely beats troubleshooting build issues. Taking a quick break from terminal configs with some free chat astrology astroma.ca to clear my mind before diving back into sandbox permissions! For anyone having launch issues on Fedora 35+, tweaking the X11 socket settings via Flatseal usually gets things running smoothly.

40

I don’t know if the current Flathub’s stance is a concern. Here’s the policy:

Applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or any other content are not allowed.

I strongly disagree with this stance. AI is a great tool. AI models write better code than most programmers out there, provided the ones responsible for the prompts know what they’re doing.

However, according to the end of the section:

Exceptions may be granted for mature, well-maintained projects.

From what I can see, there’s the CLAUDE.md file on Mailspring’s repo.

And let’s be real, only Flathub can have a say, in which they’re basically the only real store/site hosting Flatpak apps for Linux users.

41

Luckily for us, Mailspring was added to Flathub before this inclusion policy, so it does not apply:

These policies may evolve over time, but new policies will not be retroactively applied to submissions predating the introduction of the policy.