Spotify on Fedora 25 using Flatpak

by Lucas Burson

Spotify is a great application where the web version just isn't as useful as the Desktop app. Spotify has a debian installer and no support for rpm distros, typically we'd be SOL on Fedora. But with flatpak it's easy to install Spotify on platforms like Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, etc without deb or rpm!

What is Flatpak

Flatpak is a way to create a single installation package that works across both Debian and RedHat distros, and securely run the app in a sandbox. That means less work for package maintainers and better support/security for end users!

From the Flatpak website: "Flatpak is the next-generation technology for building and installing desktop applications. It has the power to revolutionize the Linux desktop ecosystem."

Spotify for Fedora 25

It's as simple as installing flatpak, adding the gnome remote, and installing Alex Larsson's Spotify flatpak package. This will automatically pull down the required runtime environments.

sudo dnf install flatpak xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

sudo flatpak remote-add gnome \
  https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo

sudo flatpak install --from \
  https://s3.amazonaws.com/alexlarsson/spotify-repo/spotify.flatpakref

More to read

Flatpak is really interesting and there's a good amount of documentation.

  • A few more flatpak apps are listed here (Spotify, Twitch, Skype, ...)
  • Read more about Flatpak features here
  • For you developers, Flatpak has a great Hello World for your first package
  • readthedocs manual
  • Contribute at the Flatpak Github