Document steps for migrating from distro-provided GNOME Boxes to GNOME Boxes Flatpak
Some of the comments on these issues recommend using the GNOME Boxes Flatpak, rather than the copy of GNOME Boxes that is provided by the distro. I'm open to doing that, but I notice that the GNOME Boxes Flatpak doesn't know anything about boxes which were created in the distro's copy of GNOME Boxes.
I spent some time trying to migrate my existing boxes from the distro's copy of GNOME Boxes to the Flatpak copy of GNOME Boxes, but I still can't quite get it right.
For whatever it's worth, here are the steps I tried after installing the Flatpak. (I may have introduced a typo while transposing these commands to this issue, but this was the gist of it, anyway.)
$ rm -rf ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/config/{gnome-boxes,libvirt} ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/data/gnome-boxes
$ cp -a ~/.config/gnome-boxes ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/config/gnome-boxes
$ cp -a ~/.config/libvirt ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/config/libvirt
$ cp -a ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/data/gnome-boxes
$ cd ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes
$ grep -rl "\/home\/john\/.local\/share\/gnome-boxes" | xargs sed -i "s/\/home\/john\/.local\/share\/gnome-boxes/\/home\/john\/.var\/app\/org.gnome.Boxes\/data\/gnome-boxes/g"
$ grep -rl "\/home\/john\/.config\/gnome-boxes" | xargs sed -i "s/\/home\/john\/.config\/gnome-boxes/\/home\/john\/.var\/app\/org.gnome.Boxes\/config\/gnome-boxes/g"
In other words: Copy all of the needed files over to the Flatpak and update configuration files accordingly.
However, this has not worked. I'm getting an error about Boxes being unable to access the virtualization backend.
I'd like to request that the Boxes team document how to migrate from the distro-provided copy of Boxes to the Flatpak copy of Boxes. I'd be happy to help out, documenting the solution in the GitLab wiki or somewhere else, if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong.