I am on a Steam Deck with 64 GB of storage running default Plasma 5 and I have an external SD card with 512 GB. My flatpaks take a substantial amount of space and I'd like to move the place where they're stored to the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1). But according to https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/tips-and-tricks.html#adding-a-custom-installation and https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/flatpak-installation.5.html this needs root, which is discouraged to do manually. I'd like Discover to have a setting option for this as suggested here by a flatpak contributor: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1224#issuecomment-1310764573
I am confused. > this needs root, which is discouraged to do manually. Where do the manpages say that? And how would it be any different to what discover would do under the hood?
> Where do the manpages say that? "more system-wide installations can be defined via configuration files /etc/flatpak/installations.d/" A user path like ~/.local/share/flatpak/installations.d doesn't seem to work. See: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4403 > And how would it be any different to what discover would do under the hood? I don't know. I'm not familiar with how root files persist in immutable distros yet.
(In reply to Thiago Sueto from comment #2) > > Where do the manpages say that? > > "more system-wide installations can be defined via configuration files > /etc/flatpak/installations.d/" > > A user path like ~/.local/share/flatpak/installations.d doesn't seem to > work. See: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4403 But where is it discouraged?
> But where is it discouraged? Sorry, I meant to say it's generally discouraged to do root operations *in immutable distributions*. SteamOS is one, and they caution the user (twice) that they should know what they're doing and that their changes might be reset, and they don't have a sudo password by default, as mentioned in https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/671A-4453-E8D2-323C.
All these caveats apply to us as well though. Fundamentally we'd not do anything different from https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/tips-and-tricks.html#adding-a-custom-installation just expressed as code. I've talked to some people and we've concluded that this feature isn't a good fit for discover at this time.