Installation on Linux

This page will detail the required packages to setup a development environment on Linux.

Keep in mind though that distribution’s packages may get outdated, especially for distros like Debian and we recommend using Flatpak as a development environment to keep a consistent environment across any distro.

This is generally less of an issue if creating a generic GTK application, but GNOME’s Adwaita for example evolves pretty quickly and you want to have access to the newest widgets in your application.

That said I also recommend installing the tools for your distro as well to follow along as we will introduce flatpak integration much later in the series.

Flatpak

Install Flatpak
Install the GNOME SDK: flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Sdk//47
Install the Vala SDK: flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.vala//24.08

For Visual Studio Code users we also recommend installing the Flatpak Extension

Debian/Ubuntu

This also applies to distributions based on Ubuntu, such as Linux Mint, popOS!, ZorinOS and so on.

sudo apt-get install build-essential valac meson libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev

Fedora/RedHat

TODO