Silverblue 32 - S01E01: Preinstalled Apps are Flatpaks!

So, here I’m on a Silverblue 32 right after the installation. For the first videos I will use Quick Emulator, so I can have everything default and clean! But that also means kiss animations goodbye! Anyway, lets start! The first thing to notice is how minimal a Silverblue installation is, something that everyone will appreciate! If we go to the applications, we will see a very small set of icons, and some more are inside utilities folder. Now, if we open a terminal, and do a “flatpak list”, we’ll see that most of pre-installed applications are actually Flatpaks. So if we go back to the applications, Calendar is Flatpak Clocks is Flatpak Contacts is Flatpak Files is native Firefox is native but in next release will be probably Flatpak Maps is Flatpak Settings is native Software is native Text Editor is Flatpak Weather is Flatpak Inside Utilities, Archive Manager is Flatpak Calculator is Flatpak, Characters is Flatpak Disks is native Document Viewer is Flatpak Fonts is Flatpak, Help is native Image Viewer is Flatpak Terminal and System Monitor are native, but Tilix is Flatpak Screenshot and Logs are Flatpaks. Next lets go back on Terminal to show you one more thing.

01:49 - All these Flatpak applications are running on Fedora Platform 32. So what exactly Fedora Platform is? That’s basically a Flatpak runtime, and if we go inside the build manifest file, we will see all the files that contains. That’s pretty much a full Fedora “/usr/” container, which helps Fedora to auto-generate all their normal packages as Flatpaks. In next episodes I will explain in more detail what a Flatpak runtime is, and how to create a custom one, so you will understand better how it works. So you can imagine this runtime is gonna be big, and most specifically if we run an info, we will see it is around 1.8GB. And also it is on branch 32.

02:37 - Flatpak runtimes and apps are under “/var/lib/flatpak/”. So that’s the runtime folder, and if we run an “ls” we will see the Fedora Platform. And if we run a “du”, is around 1.8GB as info told us already. Now, that’s only the runtime, but if we want to install the SDK, we should do something like, “flatpak install org.fedora project.Sdk.” It will find the Sdk on Fedora remote, and then it will ask us if we want to install from branch 32 or branch 31. Having multiple runtimes available, guarantees us that if a package for some reason is incompatible with a newer runtime, we can use the old one till the problem is fixed.

03:27 - Anyway, I will pick Sdk 32, and it is going to be something also big, because Sdk includes all the development files and headers of the Platform. Normally you will never need to use a Fedora Sdk though. For example, if you want to build a GNOME or Qt app, you will use GNOME or Plasma Sdk respectively. So here the question becomes very obvious. Should we use GNOME apps from Flathub and GNOME Platform, or we should keep those from Fedora Store? But that’s for another episode! .