Flatpak Flatpak is the new framework for desktop applications on Linux Distributing applications on Linux is a pain: different distributions in multiple versions, each with their own versions of libraries and packaging formats. Flatpak is here to change all that. It allows the same app to be installed on different Linux distributions, including different versions. And it has been designed from the ground up with security in mind, so that apps are isolated from each other and from the host system. You can find many apps already available on https://flathub.org/ Add flathub for system and your user's home folder with: sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub \ https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub \ https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo Apps that require pulse audio (like steam, skype, etc) need PULSE_SERVER environment variable to be set. This is not set for most shells in slackware by default. One way I found to set this is: export `xprop -root -notype PULSE_SERVER | tr -d ' '` A cleaner approach is to run `start-pulseaudio-x11` and then `pax11publish -i` so the correct PULSE_SERVER variable is exported. Adding these two commands to your ~/.xsession would be useful. Some of the examples from http://flatpak.org/#users are relying on polkit helpers, that expect a user in the 'wheel' group to have privileges for, but default polkit admin rule for slackware is just the root user. So, if you run a command like: flatpak remote-add --from gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo flatpak remote-add --from gnome-apps \ https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps.flatpakrepo as a limited user, you will get a polkit prompt for root's password. This is because the default location for establishing these repos is in `/var/lib/flatpak` and requires admin privileges. You can optionally add the flag `--user` to flatpak commands, and it will instead manage the repos in `~/.local/share/flatpak`. There are examples of flatpak runtimes and applications on their wiki: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Examples They too have desktop launchers search by desktops like KDE and XFCE, it will require a logout, as /etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh will need to be sourced.