Flatpak: Provide flatpak for Ubuntu LTS 14.04
Ubuntu LTS is currently 14.04 and will be so until 2019
Could flatpak be provided for current Ubuntu LTS ?
JLuc
All 3 comments
I believe its possible to create one (there was a 14.04 build at some point). However I don't really have time to do this.
alexlarsson
on 14 Aug 2017
Ubuntu LTS is currently 14.04 and will be so until 2019
The most recent LTS is 16.04. 14.04 may well still be supported by Canonical, but it is not the current or recommended LTS release.
If you are in an environment that is so change-averse that you cannot upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, then installing unofficial third-party builds of software for the host OS (including Flatpak) is probably not a great thing to be doing either...
The main issue in backporting Flatpak is its dependency on GLib. Flatpak 0.8.x officially requires GLib 2.44 (Ubuntu 15.04 or later). It is possible to backport it to GLib 2.42 (Debian 8) with the patches in https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/flatpak, so that would be a good starting point. I don't know whether anything else is needed to go back from 2.42 to 2.40 (which is in Ubuntu 14.04).
You are unlikely to get a particularly good experience by using Flatpak for typical desktop applications without xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which in addition to GLib requires a recent GTK+ (significantly newer than Debian 8). Debian 9 and Ubuntu 17.04 are suitable, but running xdg-desktop-portal-gtk on older distributions like Debian 8 or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS would require additional backporting work. Ubuntu 14.04 is probably too old for backporting to be feasible.
smcv
on 30 Aug 2017
New Ubuntu 18.04 is LTS too
JLuc
on 31 May 2018
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Most helpful comment
The most recent LTS is 16.04. 14.04 may well still be supported by Canonical, but it is not the current or recommended LTS release.
If you are in an environment that is so change-averse that you cannot upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, then installing unofficial third-party builds of software for the host OS (including Flatpak) is probably not a great thing to be doing either...
The main issue in backporting Flatpak is its dependency on GLib. Flatpak 0.8.x officially requires GLib 2.44 (Ubuntu 15.04 or later). It is possible to backport it to GLib 2.42 (Debian 8) with the patches in https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/flatpak, so that would be a good starting point. I don't know whether anything else is needed to go back from 2.42 to 2.40 (which is in Ubuntu 14.04).
You are unlikely to get a particularly good experience by using Flatpak for typical desktop applications without xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which in addition to GLib requires a recent GTK+ (significantly newer than Debian 8). Debian 9 and Ubuntu 17.04 are suitable, but running xdg-desktop-portal-gtk on older distributions like Debian 8 or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS would require additional backporting work. Ubuntu 14.04 is probably too old for backporting to be feasible.