There is at least intentions to try to create a snap package by Ubuntu, but the big problem is that some scanners have backends provided by the producers and are not opensource. If the application is sand-boxed and only can access the bundled libraries, you cannot access scanners that have proprietary or third-party backends.

Hi Kåre Särs!

Thank you for the fast reply.

After going through KDEs repos I found this repo that hosts KDEs nightly flatpak packages: https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-applications/-/tree/master, which is publishing them to this flatpak repo: https://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo. Skanlite seems to be also hosted there (see https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-applications/-/blob/master/org.kde.skanlite.json), and I was able to install Skanlite locally.

> If the application is sand-boxed and only can access the bundled libraries, you cannot access scanners that have proprietary or third-party backends.

I don't have a deep knowledge with the scanner devices' intricacies, but AFAIK the flatpak-way to access host resources (outside of the sandbox) is via a portal interface. As of today, flatpak does NOT provide a Scan portal (see https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/218; opened on Aug 30, 2018 :( ). The way I see it, is that the nightly Skanlite flatpak would only work with non proprietary or third-party backends. I've tested my Epson network scanner and it worked without problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but considering the above comments, I think then I will close this ticket because the Skanlite flatpak partially work and for an official package to work that's not enough.

There's already a flatpak package: https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.skanlite

It's in beta though, which means not visible publicly because of outstanding issues. You can follow up at https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.skanlite/issues.