Some words of wisdom if you want to move your flatpak stuff from ~/

[chris1776@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

Some words of wisdom if you want to move your flatpak stuff from ~/.var to some other location, like another harddisc due to space issues:

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/tips-and-tricks.html#adding-a-custom-installation

Due to that containerization and bwrap stuff you can't just move .var to another location and symlink it... like I tried, the lazy way.

You have to create a flatpak config and install/run stuff with --installation=extra.

Also make sure the mountpoint does not have "users" in the fstab, which in my case made the mount nosuid, flatpak/bwrap does not like that.

For Flatseal to work with custom installations, there are some extra steps involved:
https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal/blob/master/DOCUMENTATION.md#enable-custom-installations.

[chris1776@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

Since I use Flatpak only for gaming and this issue annoyed me quite a bit, I thought about moving all that gaming stuff into a chroot instead.

Why? Being on Gentoo, I had bad past experience in using multilib for the 32bit baggage, like: compile stuff twice, having a 32bit version of a library fail to compile and create issues for world updates.

That's why I resorted to Flatpak in the past, I don't like it, but it isolates all those issues from my base system.

Since I use FreeBSD jails on my little NAS servers, I thought maybe I should just use a chroot instead.

Well, off we go with a stage3 tarball in a 64bit multilib chroot, compile all that gaming stuff and so on. Ready to go I thought, but dear God Steam is also picky about permissions and container/bwrap stuff.

Excerpt from: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam#Chroot

"Systemd and chroot

When the host system is in systemd, raw chroot is not sufficient. Instead, unshare -m chroot has to be used. In fact the above wrapper script supports this case.

Explanation: With bare chroot, the Steam client does not run, complaining "Steam now requires user namespaces to be enabled." For this Steam tests if bwrap --bind / / true succeeds. (This requires bwrap is set setuid.) Internally bwrap calls pivot_root (2), of which conditions with "/" are not met under systemd. With unshare the namespace gets separated, and things work. "

- This also applies to elogind it seems.

In the end, this script worked better: https://gist.github.com/janAkali/7152382e7b0cd581d9cebb72ed07438e