[GNC] Switching to/from Flatpak keeping Saved Reports

[Tommy Trussell]

A couple of months ago I upgraded GnuCash 3.8 on my Ubuntu LTS system to
the latest GnuCash using Flatpak. I wanted to keep my saved reports and I
didn't want to have to worry about losing them again if I switched from
Flatpak to a distribution version. Here's what I did to keep them (\ line
endings and whitespace added for clarity):

  # Close all running instances of GnuCash
  # Save any existing Flatpak report configurations
  mv \
     ~/.var/app/org.gnucash.GnuCash/data/gnucash \
     ~/.var/app/org.gnucash.GnuCash/data/gnucash.orig
  # Create the symlink
  ln -s \
     ~/.local/share/gnucash \
     ~/.var/app/org.gnucash.GnuCash/data/gnucash

The paths above seem to be correct for any Debian derived distribution, and
I believe may be the same for any linux distribution. (I hope someone
corrects me if I'm wrong.)

BACKGROUND:

I was putting off upgrading via Flatpak for a long time for two reasons:

1) My primary system running GnuCash didn't quite have the memory or
processor capacity to handle Flatpak applications. (It's impressive how
little RAM or CPU you need to run GnuCash. Or maybe it's impressive how
much of a cheapskate I am. Your pick.)

2) I have books for eight organizations at this point and I would hate to
lose my custom reports and launcher shortcuts.

I upgraded the primary system earlier this year, so that addressed item
one. Item two took a little digging amongst the FAQ entries.

I created a symlink as shown above and the saved reports have been working
perfectly. I expected to have "sandbox" permission issues with the Flatpak
but didn't. So why does the Flatpak have to use its own directory instead
of looking in the same place the distribution version uses...?)

I'm still not completely happy with my Gnome launcher shortcuts -- I'm able
to get the right-click launcher menu to open my different GnuCash books,
but they do NOT share the "favorite" GnuCash icon in the task bar as the
distribution application does. I figure I'm either missing some Gnome
launcher secret sauce, or maybe Gnome doesn't know how to handle Flatpak
instances.