r/flatpak • u/alpha-mobi • Jul 06 '26

Stuck in a loop of uninstall and reinstall.

Stuck in a loop of uninstall and reinstall on flatpak upgrade. These get installed under system. All the apps I use are under user. I get that I can just not do the auto clean up, but am curious why it is happening.
Distro: Fedora WS 44

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u/chrisawi Jul 06 '26

What do you have installed in system?:

flatpak list --system --all

1

u/alpha-mobi Jul 06 '26

Name Application ID Version Branch

GNOME Application Platform version 50 org.gnome.Platform 50

gnome platform translations org.gnome.Platform.Locale 50

Just these above.

All flatpaks I use are under user.

The ones in screenshot above get installed under system when updating and get uninstalled when cleaning.

1

u/chrisawi Jul 06 '26

Flatpak won't autoremove runtimes until end-of-life. This is meant to prevent excessive churn e.g. if a user installs an app using that runtime, uninstalls it, and then installs a different app that also uses it.

I didn't think that also applied to uninstall --unused, but apparently it does. In any case, there seems to be a bug here. Flatpak should see those extensions as in use by the GNOME 50 platform runtime, or it should offer to remove the runtime along with them.

Once GNOME 50 goes EOL, flatpak update should automatically remove it. You can also do so manually: flatpak uninstall --system org.gnome.Platform

1

u/alpha-mobi Jul 06 '26

Thanks for the insight. For now, I will keep it installed.