Hello, any progress on this?
I think the obsidian team could set up a copr repo, which would automatically build obsidian on fedora’s servers on-demand.
Thanks!
+1 for a RPM
Still looking, maybe a CI/CD pipleline that publishes to copr
Use case or problem
I have continuously used Obsidian for the past 3+ years on my main Arch Linux machine. The nice thing is that Arch Linux provides an official package in their repositories (extras/obsidian: Arch Linux - obsidian 1.13.4-2 (x86_64) ) so updates were always handles by my system package manager.
Recently, I switched to Fedora and noticed that Obsidian is not packaged for it. The only ways to install are using the AppImage or Flatpak. I personally do not like using Flatpaks and AppImages work fine but the installation has the following issues:
- Updates must be manually installed every time there is a release, buy downloading the new release,
chmod +xing the file, and placing it under a directory in$PATH, e.g.~/.local/bin. - The AppImage does not provide a
.desktopfile and the application icon, so Obsidian is not shown in the application launcher. AppImages also cannot communicate the application icon to the distribution, so the application doesn’t get an icon in the taskbar.
These issues can be remedied with some Linux-fu (manually writing a .desktop file and placing the Obsidian icon.png under ~/.local/share/icons). However, it is an objective fact that most of the users don’t want to bother having to do that since this is an objectively bad UX.
To address this, I personally went ahead and created a package (which I am willing to personally maintain) for Fedora at Terra (my PR: add: obsidian by UtkarshVerma · Pull Request #15067 · terrapkg/packages · GitHub ). It simply fetches the official releases from the obsidian-releases: GitHub - obsidianmd/obsidian-releases: Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian. · GitHub ) repository and repackages the files without modifications for Fedora.
This solution was good and enables users to install/update Obsidian just like other packages on Fedora. However, when looking at Obsidian’s terms of service ( Terms of Service - Obsidian ), I noticed that redistribution is prohibited. This also inhibits the community from addressing this issue.
Proposed solution
The ideal solution would be for Obsidian to provide official packages for major Linux distributions (e.g. maybe a Copr repository for Fedora). I must concede here that maintaining packages for all distros would be a huge (and impractical) undertaking.
Another solution would be to explicitly give permission to certain individuals/organisations to redistribute Obsidian under the some strict conditions. For example, these could be:
- Mandatory license attribution
- The package MUST not modify the official tarball files
At least for Fedora, I would like to volunteer to bridge this gap.
Current workaround (optional)
Related feature requests (optional)
RPM install would is desirable. I do not like having AppImages or FlatPaks on my workstations or servers.