Can flatpaks be installed and accessed from another partition on the same drive?
Can flatpaks be installed and accessed from another partition on the same drive?
My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I'd like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly.
What I would like to achieve is to have my small handful of flatpak apps and flatpak steam games on a separate partition to quickly access while I test and troubleshoot issues.
Is that possible to do with flatpaks?
Permanently Deleted
I've spoken to another user who has the same issue as me and they made a couple suggestions including disabling certain options in BIOS or trying a distribution with a newer kernel.
At first I thought it was issues with iGPU and dGPU switching but I'm beginning to suspect that's not the case.
Reproducing when it freezes is a challenge because it's very inconsistent and does not leave and crash reports.
The only improvement I've seen yet is switching from Linux Mint 21.2 to LMDE 6 but the kernel is still older compared to the versions that I was suggested for my hardware.
I would like to try a newer kernel just for the sake of trying.
I feel you. The bugs that get the machine to crash and you have zero chance of getting any useful debug information, are by far the most annoying ones.
In my experience it's most of the time some driver issues in the kernel or the (NVidia) proprietary drivers. Or an hardware issue. On Debian I can install several kernel versions alongside each other. So there would be no need for me to install more than one distribution. Most of the times a proper crash isn't caused by the userspace anyways, so it boils down to the different kernel versions and configurations anyways. You could also try an older kernel.
Have a separate home partition and just keep using it across distributions?
Additionally, ensure that flatpaks are installed within that home partition. Some distros (like Fedora) default to installing flatpaks system-wide (and thus flatpaks end up being installed in
/varinstead). So, after ensuring that your home folder is correctly found within the home partition, just install flatpaks with theflatpak install --user *package-name*command.I'm not experienced enough with linux to understand if this is a question or a statement on what I can do. In either case, I don't know how to interpret what this means.
They are confirming that, yes, it is an option to have a partition dedicated to just the user’s (your) home environment and folders
and
asking if that is an option that appeals to you or you have already considered.
It is what I prefer, but there are people who have good reason to not like that. It’s worth trying out imo, and later if you find that it doesn’t suit you, that’s okay, you’ll just need to find another solution
I have my steam library on a second drive but I am not using the flatpak of steam.
I think it's possible to have the steam flatpak use a second partition, if you use flatseal to allow the steam flatpak full access.