Ardour7 in Flatpack: overcoming the sandboxing with Flatseal?

[oakwood]

Hello to all!

I am relatively new to Linux, coming from MacOSX.

I am playing with Ardour7, and I have installed it in Flatpak.

I know that Flatpak applications are supposed to be “sandboxed”, and people is against using Ardour in it.

However, I have found that it is possible to play with many (all?) the limitations of the sandboxing in Flatpak, using the FlatSeal application.
So I thought to give it a second chance.

Has anyone played with this?
Is there a reason, in principle, to avoid this route?

The first problem to address is of course the ability to “see” the plugins folder.
In FlatSeal I have noticed the (default) settings to “export the system PATH variables to the application”, and they include:

Code: Select all

LADSPA_PATH
VST3_PATH
LXVST_PATH

(see screenshot)

https://imgur.com/a/Big5hgD

However, the LV2_PATH is (crucially!) missing…

I have tryied to manually add this:

LV2_PATH=/usr/local/lib/lv2

or

LV2_PATH=/usr/lib/lv2

but after relaunch and rescan for plugins Ardour7 still cannot see the newly installed eq10q plugin.

Any ideas on how to deal with this?

Thanks in advance!

[sysrqer]

Bitwig has this issue when they recently introduced flatpaks. I couldn't get flatseal to work properly to show system installed plugins and I saw a few other people say the same thing. Not sure if it's a flatseal bug or an intended limitation.

[Audiojunkie]

As I understand things right now:

Flatpak DAWs can only use un-Flatpak-packaged plugins from paths they can see.

The best place to store un-Flatpak-packaged plugins is in your Home directory.

We need to encourage developers who package un-Flatpak-packaged plugins that have installers to change their install locations to the Home directory.

Possibly .VST, .VST3, etc