First, thanks to Samuel Henrique for giving notice of
recent Firefox
CVEs in Debian
testing/unstable.
At the time I didn't want to upgrade my system (Debian Sid) due to the ongoing
t64 transition transition,
so I decided I could install the Firefox Flatpak app instead, and why not stick
to it long-term?
This blog post details all the steps, if ever others want to go the same road.
Flatpak Installation
Disclaimer: this section is hardly anything more than a copy/paste of the
official documentation, and with time it
will get outdated, so you'd better follow the official doc.
First thing first, let's install
Flatpak:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install flatpak
Then the next step is to add the
Flathub remote
repository, from where we'll get our Flatpak applications:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
And that's all there is to it! Now come the optional steps.
For GNOME and KDE users, you might want to install a plugin for the software
manager specific to your desktop, so that it can support and manage Flatpak
apps:
$ which -s gnome-software && sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
$ which -s plasma-discover && sudo apt install plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
And here's an additional check you can do, as it's something that did bite me
in the past: missing
xdg-portal-* packages, that are required for Flatpak
applications to communicate with the desktop environment. Just to be sure, you
can check the output of
apt search '^xdg-desktop-portal' to see what's
available, and compare with the output of
dpkg -l grep xdg-desktop-portal.
As you can see, if you're a GNOME or KDE user, there's a portal backend for
you, and it should be installed. For reference, this is what I have on my GNOME
desktop at the moment:
$ dpkg -l grep xdg-desktop-portal awk ' print $2 '
xdg-desktop-portal
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
Install the Firefox Flatpak app
This is trivial, but still, there's a question I've always asked myself: should
I install applications system-wide (aka.
flatpak --system, the default) or
per-user (aka.
flatpak --user)? Turns out, this questions is answered in the
Flatpak documentation:
Flatpak commands are run system-wide by default. If you are installing
applications for day-to-day usage, it is recommended to stick with this
default behavior.
Armed with this new knowledge, let's install the
Firefox app:
$ flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
And that's about it! We can give it a go already:
$ flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox
Data migration
At this point, running Firefox via Flatpak gives me an "empty" Firefox. That's
not what I want, instead I want my usual Firefox, with a gazillion of tabs
already opened, a few extensions, bookmarks and so on.
As it turns out, Mozilla provides a brief
doc for data
migration,
and it's as simple as moving Firefox data directory around!
To clarify, we'll be copying data:
- from
~/.mozilla/ -- where the Firefox Debian package stores its data
- into
~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/ -- where the Firefox Flatpak
app stores its data
Make sure that all Firefox instances are closed, then proceed:
# BEWARE! Below I'm erasing data!
$ rm -fr ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/
$ cp -a ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/
To avoid confusing myself, it's also a good idea to rename the local data
directory:
$ mv ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/firefox.old.$(date --iso-8601=date)
At this point,
flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox takes me to my "usual"
everyday Firefox, with all its tabs opened, pinned, bookmarked, etc.
More integration?
After following all the steps above, I must say that I'm 99% happy. So far,
everything works as before, I didn't hit any issue, and I don't even notice
that Firefox is running via Flatpak, it's completely transparent.
So where's the 1% of unhappiness? The Run a Command dialog from GNOME, the
one that shows up via the keyboard shortcut
<Alt+F2>. This is how I start my
GUI applications, and I usually run two Firefox instances in parallel (one for
work, one for personal), using the
firefox -p <profile> command.
Given that I ran
apt purge firefox before (to avoid confusing myself with two
installations of Firefox), now the right (and only) way to start Firefox from a
command-line is to type
flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -p <profile>. Typing
that every time is way too cumbersome, so I need something quicker.
Seems like the most straightforward is to create a wrapper script:
$ cat /usr/local/bin/firefox
#!/bin/sh
exec flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox "$@"
And now I can just hit
<Alt+F2> and type
firefox -p <profile> to start
Firefox with the profile I want, just as before. Neat!
Looking forward: system updates
I usually update my system manually every now and then, via the well-known pair
of commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt full-upgrade
The downside of introducing Flatpak, ie. introducing another package manager,
is that I'll need to learn new commands to update the software that comes via
this channel.
Fortunately, there's really not much to learn. From
flatpak-update(1):
flatpak update [OPTION...] [REF...]
Updates applications and runtimes. [...] If no REF is given, everything is
updated, as well as appstream info for all remotes.
Could it be that simple? Apparently yes, the Flatpak equivalent of the two
apt
commands above is just:
Going forward, my options are:
- Teach myself to run
flatpak update additionally to apt update, manually,
everytime I update my system.
- Go crazy: let something automatically update my Flatpak apps, in my back
and without my consent.
I'm actually tempted to go for option 2 here, and I wonder if GNOME Software
will do that for me, provided that I installed
gnome-software-plugin-flatpak,
and that I checked Software Updates -> Automatic in the Settings (which I
did).
However, I didn't find any documentation regarding what this setting really
does, so I can't say if it will
only download updates, or if it will
also
install it. I'd be happy if it automatically installs new version of Flatpak
apps, but at the same time I'd be very unhappy if it automatically upgrades my
Debian system...
So we'll see. Enough for today, hope this blog post was useful!
This is my very first post, just to make sure everything is working as expected.
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