Command line: Flatpak

Flatpak is a cross-Linux-distro deployment system commonly used for packaging desktop applications.

Options

Flatpak has a similar interface to Git being composed of subcommands with specific options.

• -v, --verbose - just print more information

Most of the query-related subcommands (e.g., search, list) has the following options.

• --columns=${COLUMNS} - print the columns listed; useful for extracting the information you want you can find the related fields from the respective manual page

Subcommands

• info PACKAGE [BRANCH] prints related information of the package.

  • -M, --show-permissions prints the permissions of the package in a INI-like format.

  • -m, --show-metadata prints the metadata in a INI-like format.

• remote-ls [REMOTE] lists all of the packages of the given remote.

  • --app only includes standalone applications.

  • --runtime only lists runtimes.

Examples

Flatpak has a lot of stuff so we'll bring some examples to get started.

Basic usage

Or at least how I think it would be for a starting user.

flatpak search ferdi

flatpak install ferdi

flatpak uninstall ferdi

Package installation interface

fzf is the star here.

flatpak search ${QUERY} --columns=application \
    | fzf --multi --prompt "Choose Flatpak package(s) to install > " \
    | xargs --replace="{}" flatpak install --noninteractive {}

Package uninstallation interface

If there's one for installing packages, there's also one for removing them.

flatpak list ${QUERY} --columns=application \
    | fzf --multi --prompt "Choose Flatpak package(s) to remove > " \
    | xargs --replace="{}" flatpak uninstall --noninteractive {}