With the release of BambuStudio 1.8.4, BambuLab announced the availability as a FlatPak image thanks to a user’s work with the handle hadess. Now, it seems OrcaSlicer will also be available on FlatPak in the near future.
First, let’s explain what it means for the users to have those tools available on FlatPak. FlatPak is a software that facilitates the deployment and management of software applications on Linux. Without FlatPak, BambuStudio and OrcaSlicer are distributed on Linux as AppImage. Those are self-contained binaries that can be executed on a Linux distribution. Yet, it is the burden of the end-user to find those AppImages and check for updates when they are available. With the help of FlatPak, users can more easily install and keep their applications up-to-date.
Linux users are also used to having their applications installed from the distribution’s repositories, but tools like FlatPak allow the developers to distribute them once and have them installable on many distributions.
Regarding OrcaSlicer, it appears a user, with the handle powpingdone, approached SoftFever (the main developer of OrcaSlicer) 3 weeks ago asking for permission to distribute OrcaSlicer on FlatPak. After a bit of explaining, powpingdone’s request was “granted”, and a work-in-progress pull request was opened.
As per a comment from powpingdone, we should not be expecting the current version of OrcaSlicer (1.9) to be released on FlatPak but the next one, which should be 2.0. In any case, we greatly appreciate the effort, and we’ll make sure to publish a new article when the release on FlatPak is effective.