I’m encountering a lot of paper cuts with Chrome and Edge installed as Flatpaks. The biggest is dock icons and separation from the main browser. If a PWA is available, then all seems good. I can “install” it, and a separate icon can be pinned to my desktop.
But … there are a number of web sites I want to install as apps that don’t have PWAs. For example, Gmail or Youtube. In Chrome, you’d normally do Save and Share → Create Shortcut. In Edge, you’d click Apps → Create new App. But in either case, it either doesn’t work or a generic icon is produced. Painful.
Here’s an example. I installed Youtube in Edge (in Chrome it doesn’t even work this far) using Apps → Install Youtube. When I start it, it just appears as another Edge window.
This happens so frequently – so many web apps these days – I don’t want to use these browsers as Flatpaks unless I can solve this problem. Which leads me to pondering … can I install browsers with rpm-ostree? I know this is not the recommended path, but I can’t help but think it would solve all these problems, which I bet is related to the Flatpak version of them.
You can install browsers with rpm-ostree but updates will take longer to complete. You can test it by layering the browser(s) and if it fixes it, great. If it does not, it can be easily uninstalled with rpm-ostree uninstall <pkg>.
You can also make a Fedora (or whatever Linux OS you feel comfortable with) Distrobox container and install the browser there and export it to your host, and see if that works before layering, but this can be a little more complicated and clutter your home directory if you don’t specify a custom one.
By the way, have you tried the Web Apps application that is preinstalled on Bazzite? It may work better than the method you tried.
I have tried the Web Apps – it did launch say Gmail but I had to open the Web Apps app first (strike 1). And it didn’t work to create a separate icon. (strike 2)
I finally got Chrome installed via rpm-ostree. Took some footwork to install the repo file. But finally did get it installed and rebooted.
And… it works … but doesn’t successfully set up separate icons. I created a shortcut for Youtube. It does put it into the application menu.
But it doesn’t get a separate icon in the taskbar. Just another Chrome window.
This is not how Chrome works in Gnome 45 on Nobara 39 (my other machine). The whole idea is to make Web Apps look and behave like regular applications.
Now I wonder whether this is a KDE problem rather than something to do with Flatpaks or immutable distros.
Solved (at least for the rpm-ostree version). Turns out you need to flip a Chrome flag to Wayland. Now things work, though oddly every web app I install gets copied onto the desktop like old school Windows (I can delete them though).
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454600
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