Flatpaks are great for getting the most up to date version of a piece of software. Sometimes a Linux distribution’s software repositories can lag or the maintainer that is managing the software in the repository makes changes to the software settings that may not be what the upstream software creator intended. If the creator of the software has added their software as a flatpak then you are assured of getting the software as intended.
However, flatpaks are a sandboxed piece of software and as such it may not rely on host system configurations for it’s settings.
An example of this is the email client Evolution. It’s a great piece of software and it is my daily driver email and RSS client. There is one setting for me that it does not have a GUI accessible menu to tweak though.
When an email is double clicked in the inbox the email is opened in a new window. If you hit delete for the email it then opens the next email in the inbox within that window. Not what I want - I want it to close the window and return me to the inbox. To change this we can make a change to the gsettings (*Gnome desktop settings) from the command line.
So, how do you do this with a flatpak? It’s pretty straightforward:
echo "( gsettings set org.gnome.evolution.mail browser-close-on-delete-or-junk true )" | flatpak run --command=sh org.gnome.Evolution
We are echoing the gsettings command line we want into the flatpak org.gnome.Evolution shell.
Fixed!
Thanks for reading.