Running WeChat, QQ, Tencent Meeting, and DingTalk on Debian with Flatpak

2 min
Notes

For software development, I had to return to my trusty Debian GNU/Linux with KDE. The Linux desktop ecosystem has become capable enough for me to try using it as my daily driver, so I installed several Chinese apps I rely on.

Flatpak

I chose Flatpak because I wanted a package manager. I also wanted the extra isolation of its sandbox after seeing reports that some apps read files users had accessed. For convenience, I recommend installing Flatseal too.

Install Flatpak and its KDE Discover integration:

sudo apt install flatpak
sudo apt install plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

WeChat and QQ

I had no installation problems with these two. They worked normally, although some features were missing.

If you want to migrate chat history or other data from Windows, you may need to copy the old files from the Flatpak data directory under ~/.var. Sign in once, find the app’s data directory by looking for recognizable files such as database files, and copy the old data into it.

One other issue: copying a file from NTFS to Btrfs can fail if its filename is extremely long. I once hit this with a file whose name was basically a 500-word AI prompt.

Tencent Meeting and DingTalk

Tencent Meeting and DingTalk ignored my 150% display scaling and appeared very small. I fixed this by setting the following environment variable for both apps in Flatseal:

QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1

After closing and restarting the apps, the scaling looked right.

Input methods

On Debian 13, I did not need much extra input-method setup. I selected Fcitx5 in KDE and chose the keyboard shortcut and input methods I wanted.

In the Sid setup I was using, im-config was no longer the right tool for these apps. Some app versions still needed environment variables to use Fcitx5:

  • Set XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx in the global environment if needed.
  • Tencent Meeting specifically needed QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx.