The Problem

If you’ve switched to Flatpak for gaming you may notice that Mesa is sometimes a little bit old. The issue I had myself was that my 6000 series AMD graphics card didn’t have up to date graphics drivers, resulting in OpenGL games not running on the graphics card, but rather the CPUs OpenGL implementation, which made games such as CS:GO and Minecraft run at 5 or 10 FPS.

The Solution

To get the latest Mesa git on Flatpak you can install it like this:

flatpak install org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.mesa-git org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.mesa-git

This will allow you to install the latest Mesa graphics drivers to allow applications to detect hardware properly and run better. Make sure when you are prompted for a version of Mesa to install you choose the latest version number that doesn’t have “beta” at the end.

Usage

Once you’ve done this you can run your Flatpak like this to use Mesa git.

FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=mesa-git flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam

You can also export FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=mesa-git in your .bashrc or .profile to use Mesa git for all Flatpak applications. This may cause issues though, and I’d personally advise you only use it when it’s needed.

Introduction

I was using Fedora Silverblue for nearly a year before I realized I had been using Flatpak’s for nearly all my software, which mind you isn’t much, but I can use Firefox, Chrome, and play any video game I want using Flatpak alone so it makes sense for me.

To get this working all you need is a distribution where you can install Flatpak. I’m using Alpine Linux edge with musl and even that works. Using Flatpak allows me to use proprietary video and audio codecs in Firefox and Chrome since musl doesn’t support those codecs as of right now.

Setting up Flatpak

If your distribution doesn’t already come with FlatHub like Alpine, you’ll need to add it.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Installing Applications

This will allow you access to the entire Flatpak library. You can search for software using:

flatpak search steam

Then install using:

flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam

Make sure you periodically update your Flatpak’s as well using:

flatpak update

Steam and Gaming

For Steam to work you’ll likely need to install some other Flatpak’s as well, but once they’re installed all your other gaming Flatpak’s should “just work”.

flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam.CompatibilityTool.Proton

You might also want to install your distribution’s steam-devices package if you want to use a game controller.

sudo apt-get install steam-devices # ubuntu / debian
doas apk add steam-devices         # alpine

Managing Permissions with Flatseal

I like to give the Steam Flatpak access to my external drives so I can keep games there instead of on my hard drive. To do this I simply install Flatseal and use Flatseal to give rw (read+write) access to the directory where my drives mount to.

flatpak install com.github.tchx84.Flatseal

Google Chrome

Next if you want to install Google Chrome.

flatpak install com.google.Chrome

Conclusion

That’s all you have to do, then you would have Google Chrome installed.

Flatpak uses it’s own runtime, remember to update all your Flatpak’s periodically with flatpak update to avoid security vulnerabilities and other issues.

Introduction

X11Docker is a nice command line tool that allows you to run graphical applications inside podman or docker by passing them to xpra or your wayland socket. To do this you first need a Containerfile or Dockerfile to build an image with the application you want to run. In this example I’m going to run telegram-desktop.

Building a Container Image

FROM ubuntu:latest

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y telegram-desktop

CMD ["telegram-desktop"]

Running the Application with X11Docker

We build this image with podman build . -t telegram and wait for it to install our packages. When it’s done we can simply run it with x11docker localhost/telegram and it starts Telegram in Xpra.

Running with Wayland

If we wanted to start it under Wayland instead, we could run x11docker --wayland localhost/telegram however the package for Telegram on Ubuntu doesn’t seem to have support for Wayland when I tried it.

This should work for any graphical software, even that which isn’t in the repositories. You can even install more than one piece of software in a single image. Then you pass the CMD as an argument to x11docker like so x11docker localhost/telegram telegram-desktop.