Jan Grulich

Month: February 2017

Telegram desktop client for flatpak #2

- jgrulich 31 Comments

Some time ago I posted a blog post about how I packed telegram desktop client for flatpak. I’ve been updating it since then in some reasonable intervals as I don’t have time to update it more often and mostly because the telegram client’s build system breaks my build quite oftenly. Recently I discovered that someone managed to patch telegram to use system Qt libraries instead of building own patched Qt and building linking it statically. After some time I managed to adjust those patches and make them work with my build which allows me to use Qt from KDE runtimes. Here are new instructions how to get this work:

Add KDE runtimes repository and install runtimes
$ flatpak remote-add kde --from https://distribute.kde.org/kderuntime.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install kde org.kde.Platform

And then you can install and run the telegram desktop client:
$ wget https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/telegram/keys/telegram.gpg
$ flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=telegram.gpg telegram-desktop https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/telegram/repo/
$ flatpak install telegram-desktop org.telegram.desktop
$ flatpak run org.telegram.desktop

Or install it from bundle
$ wget https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/telegram/telegram.flatpak
$ flatpak install --bundle telegram.flatpak

The reason I did the hard work to build it with Qt from KDE runtimes is that now you can use telegram with portals support if you run it with “-platform flatpak” parameter. Unfortunately this only makes openURI portal to work as telegram has some internal hacks or whatever to use gtk filedialog so for that reason I still allow to access user’s home directory. There is also a bug if you use telegram under KDE where it tries to use QSystemTrayIcon instead of libappindicator and unfortunately telegram’s system tray icon (the one using QSystemTrayIcon) works only with Qt 5.6.2 and in KDE runtimes we have Qt 5.7.1. The system tray icon is visible, but its context menu doesn’t work so if you want to have fully working system tray icon you have to use “–env=XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=gnome” flatpak parameter to force it to use libappindicator.

And that’s it. Sorry you had telegram broken for couple of days while I was fighting with it, but hopefully it will work perfectly now.

KDE Discover flatpak backend

- jgrulich 6 Comments

As some of you might already know, I’ve been focusing lately on Flatpak and its integration into KDE. You can check my work on Flatpak KDE portals, which are being currently included in our KDE runtimes and repositories were migrated to KDE git so there has been made some progress since last time I talked about them. Recently I started looking into adding Flatpak support to KDE Discover, to have same support for Flatpak as Gnome has with gnome-software. From the begining it was a nightmare for me as I have never used any glib based library so that slowed me down little bit. I also went through gnome-software code to understand how flatpak integration is done there to get some inspiration. Things went well since then and I have already quite nice stuff to share with you. We currently support most common functionality, like listing available/installed flatpak applications in Discover with possibilities to install/remove/update and of course launch them. We also support flatpak bundles and flatpakref files already. If you don’t believe me then here are some screenshots:

This is quite exciting stuff for me. There is still plenty of things we need to solve and improve, as well as adding possibility to manage flatpak repositories which is quite important feature to have too. This all is already possible to try in master branch of discover, you just need to enable flatpak backend. We will keep intensively working on this and hopefully we will have fully functional flatpak support in Discover soon and ready for the next Plasma release. See you soon!!.

Scroll To Top