The following installation methods are considered unsupported. Unsupported, in this context means, that we do not believe it will work, or will not provide a good experience. If you use any of these methods to install software on Kalpa, and experience issues, you are on your own. The Developers will close any bugs on systems using these unsupported methods as WONTFIX

OBS Package Installer (opi)

opi is a command-line tool used to search and install software from build.opensuse.org and other places as RPM packages into the base system. As Kalpa is an immutable and slimmed down desktop operating system modifying the base OS is generally considered bad practice. Also fetching packages via opi opposes many security risk as the user may end up installing broken packages, untested packages or, as it is also possible to install user provided packages, to get actual malware this way. Using opi is not recommended at all.

Packman

Packman is a 3rd party RPM repository traditionally used on Leap or Tumbleweed to provide additional proprietary multimedia codes. Kalpa's primary application source are flatpaks, which include the multimedia codecs in the runtimes. Packman is generally not required on Kalpa. Packman may be needed in a distrobox for certain multimedia applications and workloads that are not available via Flatpak.

Nix

Nix is the package manager used by NixOS. While it usually can be run on any Linux Distribution it was not tested by us and probably won't work well. Since Kalpa ships with distrobox you can use it to install multiple versions of packages alongside each other. Like dedicated development environments for certain things. Supporting another immutable friendly way of installing software would just increase the maintenance burden for only a subset of users.

Snapcraft

Snapcraft, short snap, is a Ubuntu centric containerisation and sandboxing software format by Canonical. Which requires AppAmor (with extra patches) for it's sandbox and security mechanisms to work. As Kalpa uses SELinux and not AppAmor, Tumbleweed not shipping AppAmor with these required extra patches as well as Kalpa not being a Ubuntu based distribution snaps are not supported. You may have some luck running snapcraft from a SystemD enabled distrobox but this is not guaranteed to work.

AppImage

This packaging format usually is known for it's portability, build software once and run it on any Linux Distribution. In reality this unfortunately is not true.

While AppImages do contain most of their dependencies in order to run they do not contain all of them. Therefore in order to support AppImages we would have had to include a bunch of additional libraries otherwise not needed. Also this would only make some AppImages work not even all of them. This would lead to users creating bug reports about XYZ AppImage not working and us to include even more unnecessary dependencies and so far and so forth. Most prominent are X11 related libraries. Kalpa is a Wayland centric Distribution. Carrying around legacy stuff is nothing we'd like to do. In addition to this already very undesirable situation we would also have to support old AppImages making use of even older libraries which would require us to actively open up security vulnerability by adding such dependencies. Therefore we do not support this in the first place.

If your workflow rely on AppImages you can still run them on Kalpa but we recommend doing so in a distrobox container for your own convenient. This way you can add additional dependencies with ease to make your AppImages work and also not putting your main computing environment at risk. You may also even add a KDE service menu for right click AppImages via Dolphin and run them via said AppImage container right from the file browser.