Note: This article is now obsolete, see my updated article about Blender and Flatpak.

For a while now, I've been wanting to play with XDG App.

And regularly, I was reading people on IRC saying that someone should make an XDG App bundle for Blender.

So I figured I'd have a go at building the latest Blender release 2.77.

This being my first XDG App, and Blender being such a big project, I must admit it wasn't the easiest packaging-related thing I've ever done.

But thanks to Alexander's help on IRC, and after much testing from Alexandre, I now have something that actually seems to work.

If you want to give it a try, follow these steps:

$ wget https://sdk.gnome.org/keys/gnome-sdk.gpg
$ xdg-app --user remote-add --gpg-import=./gnome-sdk.gpg gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/repo/
$ xdg-app --user install gnome org.freedesktop.Platform 1.4
$ xdg-app --user remote-add --no-gpg-verify bochecha https://www.daitauha.fr/static/xdg-app/repo-apps
$ xdg-app --user install bochecha org.blender.app

At this point, you should be able to run Blender from the XDG App bundle:

$ xdg-app run org.blender.app

It should also work if you try running it from the GNOME Shell application picker.

Since that's my first XDG App, it is very possible that I missed a few things, so do let me know how it works for you and if something is missing.