Pharo-launcher as flatpak in flathub or Appimage?

[gozes]

Given that the Pharo launcher and the Pharo images are very much a self-contained environment it will be great to have it as either a flatpak that can be run on a bigger variety of Linux systems that is currently not supported by OBS. For example, it will be really fun to run Pharo on the Steamdeck but to be able to do so without having it wipe and needing to reinstall it on every update it needs to be either a flatpak or an appimage as the normal pacman workflow does not play well in that environment.

So can we please have the pharo-launcher as ether a flatpak in flathub or an app image?

[estebanlm]

this is more complex than that (but you can propose a flatpak build if you want). the pharo launcher approach is not very nice with linux distributions, because it offers a lot of compatibility but at the price of download the vm from a standard build, standard build that, sadly, will work just on debian distributions and more precisely, in ubuntu. The Steam Deck is an Arch based distro but I have no experience on it... still, as arch... you should be able to use pacman, isn't? In that case the OBS builds for arch (to install the vm) should work.

[gozes]

sadly pacman is not a good option on the Steam deck because it uses an immutable filesystem. you can disable the immutability but whatever you install may be wiped on the next update not to mention that you probably don't want to messup with pacman on it because you risk introducing dependency conflicts and the like into the system that's why a flatpak or appimage is the best option in that case. granted is a nish case but I think the overall idea to have pharo as an app image or flatpak will be nice to have and way more portable than OBS because if at any time SUSE decides to clamp down on OBS then there goes all of the pharo Linux distribution all in one