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.
Distrobox, by default, doesn’t provide much isolation/sandboxing - it’s main aim is desktop integration and filesystem transparency. So if you’re trying to use it for isolation, it’s a bad idea.
However, you can create a new container which will isolate your filesystem and prevent such conflicts, using the
--unshare-devsysflag. (if you want FULL isolation though, use the--unshare-allflag).Then enter the container and install the flatpak app as usual.
I just tested this on Fedora uBlue and an Arch container and it works fine, didn’t have to unmount anything.