[Suggestion] A Flatpak Support

Hi Bisq team,

First of all, thank you for building such an important tool for decentralized Bitcoin trading. I wanted to suggest a feature that would greatly improve accessibility for a growing segment of Linux users: native Flatpak support.

I’m currently running Bazzite, an immutable Linux distribution based on Fedora Atomic. By design, immutable distros like Bazzite, Silverblue, and uBlue variants do not allow traditional RPM/DEB package installation on the host system. The entire OS layer is read-only, and the recommended (and often only practical) way to install desktop applications is through Flatpak.

Right now, installing Bisq on Bazzite requires workarounds such as using rpm-ostree to layer packages (which defeats the purpose of an immutable system and can break updates) or running it inside a Distrobox container — neither of which is a great experience for end users.

Publishing Bisq on Flathub or providing an official Flatpak manifest would:

  • Make installation seamless on Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite, and any other immutable distro
  • Improve sandboxing and security by default
  • Reach a wider and fast-growing audience of Linux users adopting immutable desktops
  • Simplify updates through Flatpak’s built-in update mechanism

Immutable Linux distros are gaining significant traction, and Flatpak is the standard distribution method for desktop apps in that ecosystem. Having Bisq available as a Flatpak would be a meaningful step toward making decentralized trading accessible to everyone on Linux.

Thanks for considering this suggestion!

hi, interesting request

bisq1 is currently only receiving maintenance support as the dev team is working on completing the musig trade protocol for bisq2, so I am fairly sure they won’t be dedicating resources to release alternative distributions for bisq1, but I guess you can build it from source? the file build.md in the /docs/ folder of the github repo tells you how to do that

for bisq2, it may be an interesting idea to evaluate releasing also appimage and flatpak, I guess the devs will have to reach an agreement on that after the actual application is production ready