Ryan Hughes
418a48bef6
Slack only publishes an x86_64 Linux build, so the AUR recipe produces an aarch64 package full of x86_64 binaries that cannot start. Run Slack's application code on the AArch64 build of the Electron release it ships with, replace the three native addons Slack requires at boot with JavaScript equivalents, and drop the x86_64 addons it can do without.
1.9 KiB
Slack on ARM
Slack publishes Linux builds for x86_64 only, and the AUR slack-desktop recipe repackages that .deb. This package runs the same application code on the AArch64 build of the Electron release Slack ships with, so yay -S slack-desktop on an ARM Omarchy install resolves to a working package.
Electron version
_electronver must equal the Electron version inside Slack's .deb (usr/lib/slack/version). prepare() refuses to build when they differ and prints the version to set. A Slack release that moves to a new Electron therefore fails its sync PR build until _electronver and the Electron checksum are updated; the upstream watch only tracks Slack's version.
Native modules
Slack's app carries eight x86_64 Node addons. None can load on AArch64, so they are removed, and the build fails on any other foreign binary so a new native module is reviewed before it ships.
Three are required while Slack boots on Linux and are replaced by JavaScript:
file-handler-infoandelectron-native-authare MIT-licensed and their Linux builds compile no-op implementations (impl_none.cc,addon_none.cc). The replacements return the same results.@tinyspeck/slack-desktop-utilsis closed source. Its replacement throwsMethod not implementedfrom every native call, which is the error Slack's own wrapper uses for methods a platform lacks. Slack catches it, so these Linux features are unavailable: double-press and combo global shortcuts, the huddle screen-share border overlay, audio device detail lookups, clipboard set-and-paste, and haptics.
@tinyspeck/native-keymap already catches a missing addon and returns defaults, so keyboard layout detection reports unknown. The other four addons are Windows/macOS helpers that Slack does not use on Linux.
Validation
Installed and used on an aarch64 Omarchy machine (N1x). Features listed above as unavailable were not expected to work and were not checked.