Lot of interesting work on xdg-app lately!

I’ve created a new runtime based on the latest unstable gnome, and during the Gnome developer experience hackfest we made bundles for a bunch of core Gnome applications.

I’ve set up a nightly build of these so that anyone can play with the latest Gnome apps on any distro, without having to build anything.

Additionally, Richard and I have been working on making gnome-software able to work with xdg-app.

The culmination of this is using xdg-app to install gnome-software and then using that to install more xdg-apps:

This works out of the box on Fedora 23, just make sure you have xdg-app 0.4.11 installed (it’s in updates-testing at the moment). For other distributions, I have made packages which are available here.

Once you have xdg-app installed, its very easy to test them. First you need to add the remote repositories:

$ curl -O http://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/keys/nightly.gpg $ xdg-app --user remote-add --gpg-key=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly http://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo/ $ xdg-app --user remote-add --gpg-key=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly-apps http://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo-apps/

Then you need to install the runtime:

$ xdg-app --user install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Platform

And then you can install some app:

$ xdg-app --user install gnome-nightly-apps org.gnome.Weather

At this point the app is installed and you should be able to start it like any regular app in your desktop. You can also manually start it via xdg-app:

xdg-app run org.gnome.Weather

The list of available apps can be seen with:

$ xdg-app --user remote-ls gnome-nightly-apps --app

Or you can install and use gnome software like in the demo.