AppCenter for Pantheon desktop with our Flatpak backend

[davidak]

Elementary's AppCenter will use Flatpak in the future for their packages.

https://twitter.com/DanielFore/status/1179086985299779585
elementary/appcenter#1076

Since we support Flatpak, we would be able to support AppCenter.

If we support PackageKit, it would even be possible to install Nix packages with AppCenter. (Needs #21230) In that case native Nix packages should be preferred.

I think AppCenter would be perfect for elementary's Pantheon desktop and we should support it (if possible). That way we would also be able to install all Apps from their store and even pay the developers. It would be great to be able to pay-what-you-want even for native Nix packages installed with AppCenter!

@worldofpeace what do you think?

Related to #58161

[worldofpeace]

Sounds great @davidak, I believe to start I can just package Appcenter.
I'll do that as a part of #69052

[worldofpeace]

It seems fedora gave up on Appcenter

• https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/appcenter/c/fc122bee492d6574f44cae28d2b809afaa043efa?branch=master

But I think with flatpak they've given it some future in other distributions.

[stale]

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[davidak]

would still be nice

[wmertens]

I used the Software app in gnome3 and the flatpacked software is pretty meh.
I could replace all the ones I was interested in with native NixPkgs.

I think it's achievable for us to have a packagekit backend again, listing all the packages that have .desktop files in them.

This would have many advantages over flatpack and give NixPkgs a chance at mainstream success.

[davidak]

@wmertens while i agree with your long term goal, this is probably easier to achieve. And the elementary AppCenter has only original programs designed for elementary OS mostly not packaged for Nix. https://appcenter.elementary.io/

[wmertens]

Having had a look at it, I wouldn't object to having the appcenter in nixpkgs, but I won't be the one packaging it :)

[davidak]

@wmertens you don't have to :)

another idea i had was to automatically package all AppCenter apps for Nix (#90244).

To have a great desktop experience with a graphical package manager, a packagekit backend would be perfect. That way we don't have to develop our own GUI and it's perfectly integrated in the desktop. (#21230)

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[bobby285271]

I am not sure about the status of appcenter before my last push in #130380, and I am not sure if the patch can resolve something (this does not actually clean up everything related to packagekit, so maybe not a solution to elementary/appcenter#1076). But I am able to install some apps with the flatpak backend from it now (you can try by adding https://flatpak.elementary.io/repo.flatpakrepo or https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo).

Update: Just dropped more stuff.

[davidak]

I would say this works now. I can install, update and remove flatpaks.

I just had to enable flatpak support and install appcenter.

  services.flatpak.enable = true;
  xdg.portal.enable = true;
  xdg.portal.extraPortals = [ pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gtk ];

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    pantheon.appcenter
  ];

And add the elementary repo:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists appcenter https://flatpak.elementary.io/repo.flatpakrepo

@bobby285271 should we document these steps?

[bobby285271]

Yeah the manual needs update (https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/unstable/index.html#sec-pantheon-faq), I didn't noticed that when doing #130380. I am also thinking of whether we should make appcenter installed by default.

[davidak]

I am also thinking of whether we should make appcenter installed by default.

We should do that only when it's usable. So we would have to enable flatpak too, but i think most nixos users wouldn't want that by default. It also should add the elementary repo automatically.

I would like to have appcenter installed by default when it supports nix packages via packagekit.

[bobby285271]

Hope this works... Not familiar with appcenter's code base and cannot do more so far...

• build: add packagekit_backend meson option elementary/appcenter#1739

[bobby285271]

92a6ad8 is just merged, I will see if the patch is still needed.

[jtojnar]

Probably still need #15932 for the appcenter to display stuff (at least I assume that is why nothing is displayed in GNOME Software).

[bobby285271]

I just realized that I am stupid and did not enable services.packagekit.enable in previous testing. 🤦

The (only) motivation of the patch is to prevent the non-working packagekit backend from blocking the flatpak backend functioning, after some testing I came to the conclusion that it should only be the case when services.packagekit.enable is not enabled.

I will make a pull request soon.