Hypothetically run UT apps on regular Ubuntu 18.04?

nontrivial

This is more of a question to help me try to understand more about Ubuntu Touch than it is me actually asking how to do it:

How would one run UT apps from the app store on regular old Ubuntu? In other words, I am currently running Ubuntu 18.04 on my desktop (and probably 20.04 here in a few months) and if there is a way to run the Open Store on my desktop and install apps and webapps how would you do that?

If you can't do that what are the main reasons that you can't?

3T_Ed

After a few weeks of mobile use only I was just updating Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on my desktop computer and was wondering the exact same thing.

AppLee

@nontrivial
This is not possible at the moment.

The Open Store distributes apps and their dependencies as binaries.
Most apps from the Open Store are for armhf or arm64 so not compatible with a regular PC.

But there is always a way. Developers use clickable as a convenience tool to build packages.
And clickable provides an easy way to build an app for desktop and run it.

So if you're ever willing to do it, you can install clickable, download the sources of the app and build yourself the app for desktop.

dobey

The two main reasons are:

PackageKit in Ubuntu 18.04 no longer support plug-ins, so the current way clicks are installed/removed by OpenStore app won't work.
None of the core dependencies are available in Ubuntu 18.04 directly, and need to be built/installed to work there and provide the necessary frameworks for the apps to work.

However, some things may be compiled and run on Ubuntu 18.04 easily enough. For example, I use authenticator-ng directly on my PC running Debian testing, though built locally and not from the click in OpenStore.

nontrivial

@dobey Bummer that it's not currently possible to use the Open Store with mainline Ubuntu. I understand it isn't a priority, but is it on the todo list at all?

@AppLee Actually I've been messing around with clickable and have created a couple webapps with it, so I can create clicks for amd64. Once I have a click how would I install it on my desktop? Is there an equivalent to "dpkg -i" ?

hummlbach

Another way to run UT apps on a usual amd64 desktop linux is packaging them as snaps. That has been done for fluffychat and dekko for example:
https://snapcraft.io/fluffychat
https://snapcraft.io/dekko2
However probably only a few UT apps are packaged as snaps yet and there may be some restrictions for the snap builds. I.e. there is no "desktop replacement" for content hub in dekko yet to attach files to mails...

dobey

@nontrivial said in Hypothetically run UT apps on regular Ubuntu 18.04?:

but is it on the todo list at all?

The list is extremely long and ever-growing, as the rest of the world continues to change in different ways around UT.

@nontrivial said in Hypothetically run UT apps on regular Ubuntu 18.04?:

Once I have a click how would I install it on my desktop? Is there an equivalent to "dpkg -i" ?

You need to get https://github.com/ubports/click installed first, and then you can use click to install a package. Though, with other things missing on Ubuntu it may not get you very far.