Applications installed with Flatpak are keeping user data and configuration under ~/.var/app/
(see Wiki and documentation).
I would like the applications installed with Flatpak to reuse the configuration and data left from the system versions of the same applications. That is, I want them to keep user data in ~/.local/share
, ~/.config
, ~/.cache
, instead of under ~/.var/app
.
At first I was hoping that configuring environment variables XDG_CONFIG_HOME
, XDG_DATA_HOME
, XDG_CACHE_HOME
could suffice, or that it could be enough to start the application with --filesystem
options:
$ flatpak run --filesystem=xdg-config --filesystem=xdg-cache \
--filesystem=xdg-data <application-id>
However, this did not seem to work.
What is the correct way to make Flatpak applications reuse user data and configurations in standard locations?
Best Answer
I was able to get this to work by specifying the directory after
--filesystem=xdg-config
and including mount parameters after that. I'm not sure if the mount parameters are necessary, but try putting this in thisfinish-args
section of your application's manifest .json.