I’m developing a open source education application in Qt, is possible put this application in endless os?
Thanks.
Hi!
It’s so great to hear that you are developing an application for education!
Short answer: it may be possible to put a Qt application in Endless OS, but there are some difficulties with publishing it for everyone.
Endless OS uses Flatpak to publish apps. The KDE desktop is working on a Flatpak runtime for Qt apps, but it’s only experimental at this point. You can try it out, though, here is more information: https://community.kde.org/Flatpak
If you build your app using Flatpak and the experimental KDE runtime, you can install it on Endless OS yourself. The instructions on http://flatpak.org/#users will work on the command line on Endless systems to add extra repositories. (The apps available in those 3rd party repositories will appear in the Endless App Center as well once you’ve done this manual step.) You can follow the developer steps on the same page to make your own Flatpak apps, and you can find some existing apps at http://flatpak.org/apps.html.
However, there is a problem: publishing your app. At the moment, even if you have written an app, there is no way to publish it in our app center for everyone without doing some manual steps first. If you create your own Flatpaks you can create a local repo and use it to install your own apps from, or you can publish it on a web server, then you and other people can install the apps after adding that local repo.
The longer term idea is that Endless doesn’t need to be responsible for creating Flatpaks of all apps that can be used on the system, and instead we make it easier to access 3rd party open source repositories, and over time we may move to our own app store kind of model where people can upload their apps for Endless users to download.
(Thanks to @ramcq who helped answer a similar question, I’ve included some of your answer in mine!)
Ok, thanks for the answer and congratulations for the wonderful idea that is endless.
And how about electron and other javascript like apps. Are you planning support this?
Thanks.
Yes! We are planning to support electron apps. In fact I’m currently working on it .
There’s not a great story for creating an Flatpak application from an electron app at the moment, but we are hoping to create some good tooling so that is an easy process. Then you will be able to create electron apps for Endless OS and any other flavor of linux that has Flatpak support. Of course, keep in mind everything ptomato said above about publishing Flatpak applications on Endless.