Moving to darktable Flatpak from distro install

Software darktable
1

Hi-

As the title says, I’d like to change my darktable installation to a flatpak install. What files/folders do I need to move to avoid having to set it up again from scratch? I have the usual watermarks, custom exports, import presets and module presets to contend with. Would like to avoid re-importing files as well

Thanks

2

Hi!

From what I’ve read on the web (I don’t use snaps, flatpacks or appimages), in the case of flatpack the folder should be in the ~/.var/app/org.darktable.Darktable user tree.

Somewhere under this tree, you should find a darktable directory containing data.db, library.db and many other files and sub-dirs.

You then could rename this darktable dir to, say, darktable.old and copy from ~./config/darktable to the same place.

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3

May I ask for the reason to do so?

4

This is correct. Start the flatpak first to find out exactly which folder.

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5

That’s a question, sure.

@Marcsitkin if you change to flatpack to install a latest release than your distro is able to provide you, you could just have a look to this page for the latest stable version depending on you distro release and here for the master branch (unstable).

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6

After the flatpak install, no opencl:

❯ flatpak run org.darktable.Darktable -d opencl
darktable 5.0.1
Copyright (C) 2012-2025 Johannes Hanika and other contributors.

Compile options:
  Bit depth              -> 64 bit
  Debug                  -> DISABLED
  SSE2 optimizations     -> ENABLED
  OpenMP                 -> ENABLED
  OpenCL                 -> ENABLED
  Lua                    -> ENABLED  - API version 9.4.0
  Colord                 -> ENABLED
  gPhoto2                -> ENABLED
  GMIC                   -> ENABLED  - Compressed LUTs are supported
  GraphicsMagick         -> ENABLED
  ImageMagick            -> DISABLED
  libavif                -> ENABLED
  libheif                -> ENABLED
  libjxl                 -> ENABLED
  LibRaw                 -> ENABLED  - Version 0.22.0-Devel202403
  OpenJPEG               -> ENABLED
  OpenEXR                -> ENABLED
  WebP                   -> ENABLED

See https://www.darktable.org/resources/ for detailed documentation.
See https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/new/choose to report bugs.

     0.0001 [dt starting]
 darktable -d opencl
     0.1136 [dt_get_sysresource_level] switched to 1 as `default'
     0.1136   total mem:       61874MB
     0.1136   mipmap cache:    7734MB
     0.1136   available mem:   30937MB
     0.1136   singlebuff:      483MB
     0.1302 [opencl_init] opencl disabled via darktable preferences
     0.1303 [dt_dlopencl_init] could not find default opencl runtime library 'libOpenCL'
     0.1303 [dt_dlopencl_init] could not find default opencl runtime library 'libOpenCL.so'
     0.1305 [opencl_init] opencl library 'libOpenCL.so.1' found on your system and loaded, preference 'default path'
     0.1534 [opencl_init] found 1 platform
     0.1534 [check platform] platform 'rusticl' with key 'clplatform_rusticl' is NOT active
[opencl_init] found 0 device
     0.1534 [opencl_init] FINALLY: opencl PREFERENCE=OFF is NOT AVAILABLE and NOT ENABLED.

(darktable:2): Gtk-WARNING **: 14:35:53.468: Failed to measure available space: Error getting filesystem info for /boot/efi: No such file or directory

I’m using an Intel Arc 580B GPU, no problem with the distro install of dt, works with the intel GPU. I’ve turned all permissions on in Flatseal.

Any suggestions?

7

so far as I’m aware, openCL with the flatpak only works with nVidia drivers. This is an upstream issue.

8

Thanks. I guess the Flatpak is a no-go for me at this time.

1 Like
9

Why don’t you go with the official AppImage, instead?

10

Hi,

I just downloaded the latest, and it launched ok with Open CL support. Haven’t done any processing yet.

It seems to be working off my home directory darktable config files, which surprised me.

Once I finish a project I’m working on, I’ll give the AppImage a thorough try, and make the switch if all is well.

When I set up this computer back in January, I tried the AppImage and had an issue with the lens-fun database recognizing a camera/ lens combo that had always shown up. So I moved on to layering the Fedora distro version into my Aurora os. Although I’ve had no issues, the developer advises to not layer software if it can be avoided.

11

While I can’t answer for @Marcsitkin, there are several reasons why one might prefer the flatpak to the appimage:

  1. If the distro supports flakpak, then it just runs. AppImages run most places, but not everywhere
  2. Flatpak gives you desktop integration, appimage can, but doesn’t always
  3. Automatic updates for the flatpak
  4. More up-to-date dependencies
  5. Sandboxing is nice for some.
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