r/Universalblue

For those of us that wish to use Plasma-Discover for our flatpak needs (for the many, many reasons discussed earlier), the Aurora developers seemed to have gone out of their way to prevent it from working on release 44. It's technically "installed" with the RPM, however the binaries have been removed. Making it impossible to layer it back in. It's already "there" but the binaries have been stripped out. Somebody over there REALLY doesn't want you to use Discover, even if you want to layer it in yourself.

Distrobox to the rescue. There's a bit of a trick to it because it needs access to the system flatpak without actually INSTALLING flatpak in the container. Here's how I did it and got everything working:

First, make the container:

distrobox create -n uncurated-discover --image fedora:44 \
--additional-packages "plasma-discover plasma-discover-flatpak kuserfeedback fuse3" \
--volume /var/lib/flatpak:/var/lib/flatpak:rw \
--volume $HOME/.local/share/flatpak:$HOME/.local/share/flatpak:rw \
--additional-flags "--device /dev/fuse" \
--init-hooks "mkdir -p /run/dbus /var/cache/swcatalog && ln -sf /run/host/run/dbus/system_bus_socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket && rm -f /usr/lib64/qt6/plugins/discover/fwupd-backend.so && rm -f /usr/lib64/qt6/plugins/discover/packagekit-backend.so"

This will create the container with plasma-discover and plasma-discover-flatpak already inside it, as well as stripping out the fwupd and packagekit back-end libraries since they will throw a pop-up error on launch.

Then, install all the flatpak RPM except for flatpak itself

distrobox enter uncurated-discover
cd /tmp
dnf download --arch=x86_64 flatpak
sudo rpm -Uvh --force --excludepath /var/lib/flatpak flatpak-*.rpm
rm flatpak-*.rpm

Easy enough. That puts all the ostree and sundry other libraries flatpak needs in the right place in the container. But since the distrobox can see the main system's flatpak installation, we can't install the RPM as is. Just placing some files where Plasma-Discover can find them.

Finally, export the app so it appears in your menu as normal and exit the distrobox container:

distrobox-export --app plasma-discover
exit

Done.

When you load it up, don't forget to uninstall Bazaar and enjoy your less GNOME-ified KDE experience. :-)

I keep seeing references to a Surface-specific image (auror-dx-surface) but cannot find it in the downloads or instructions on how to replace the Core Image with one that has the Linux-surface kernel.

i think that there is just info that is out of date. can anyone point me to the latest info on using Aurora on Surface devices (Book 3, Go 3, and Pro 7)?