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For me, it's the unrenameable, unmoveable, non-hidden snap directory in my home directory's root that doesn't even follow the naming convention of the other directories in there.
~~> plus sudden updates that nuke active applications.~~
~~This is not what's supposed to happen. If an app installed through flatpak is active while it's receiving an update, then the update is not supposed to affect the running application until it's closed/restarted.~~
Edit: Somehow I didn't realize the concern was raised against Snap and not Flatpak.
Snap is not all bad if you're on a Ubuntu based distro, I just don't like the way it's pushed and that it comes from Ubuntu mostly. Startup time is a major issue for me also, but all in all it works.
I'm still sitting on the fence, heavily prefer flatpak but when Ubuntu is going to package nvidia drivers in a snap it's a thing I'm up for trying.
My understanding is that if I'm on Ubuntu and the snap uses the same underlying Ubuntu version as my distro it should be fast but I haven't seen it.
Immutable OSes are difficult to use for coding or other tasks that include installing many terminal utilities and for that reason, I don't recommend them and certainly don't want them to be the future of Linux distros. And if I'm going to create a container running a different distro to install and run the apps I want to use, then I may as well use that distro on my host.
You just move to user directory installation of most tools via brew on Linux. It's not difficult. The Bazzite distro handles all this incredibly well via brew, flatpaks, and distrobox.
@shrewdcat They waste memory by including libraries with every binary rather than using system libraries thus removing the memory efficiency of shared libraries.
i had a hard time getting used to them but now i love them in mint i can switch between the package version and flatpak version and usually the fp one is more updated
See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they're indispensable when you don't want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there's the deb packages.
That's not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don't actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren't included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it's not as bad as that.
No you weren't. That would be ridiculous. The deb dependencies are most of your Linux install. Maybe counting just the new dependencies being installed alongside a typical deb install, but that's still not an apples to apples comparison to 100% of all the flatpak dependencies, even ones shared with other flatpaks, and even that's still very rarely over 1GB.
That's certainly a concern for some, but I'm using like 30 GB for all the things I've installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that's on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don't think that's a bad trade.
And not many consider the environmental impact of this either. Sure storage might be cheap (not in my country but I digress) but more space still requires more storage and across thousands of computers and then millions of computers that's not an insignificant increase. We should be increasing technological efficiency not what were doing at the moment which seems to be just throwing more power and resources at the problems.
Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn't cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who's to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
I agree that flatpak should just invoke flatpak uninstall --unused right after uninstalling a flatpak. I don't get why it doesn't do this automatically. Granted, some distro package managers (used to) operate somewhat similarly in that they required the autoremove option.
I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn't remove these ones. So there's something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That's a wild guess, I don't know how it works.
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think of static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.
Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.
@ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] @shrewdcat There are three reasons I don't like flatpak, snap, and others of their ilk. 1) The waste of memory by the eliminating the functionality of shared libs, and where I see this most problematic is for people with older memory constrained hardware, 2) the way they distribute crap all over your file systems making a mess, and 3) they are completely unnecessary, instead of inventing a whole new package system just compile the damned binary static and then there is no need.
@shrewdcat @ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] The reason I see it as an issue is those with low end machines coming from Windows to Linux only to find it performs poorly, when using native libs on a tight memory machine it would have performed satisfactorily. I myself am not terribly affected, my workstation is an i7-9700k with 96G of RAM and I have servers with 256G of ram and 18 cores, so the overhead of some extra libs not the end of the world, but for someone on an old Dell laptop with 1-4GB and 2 cores, it is.
@anarchoilluminati [comrade/them] @ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] A lot of my defensiveness is not related to Linux per se' but to the waste that takes so much potential away from what we could do. The first computer I ever programmed had 512 bytes of core memory, you could only program it with machine code, there wasn't even an assembler. Still I was fascinated.
Then a friend bought a Compucolor II 8080 based machine, got board with it after a few months and lent it to me. I learned to program 8080 assembly on it.
Then I bought a Trs-80 model III with the intent of running a BBS on it. I had a whole of 48k of RAM and 320k of floppy disk to work with. I wanted to run a BBS on it, after spending another $300 for a RS-232 port (yes a UART and a few buffer chips set you back $300 to Tandy), I quickly discovered the operating system had no support. And because a lot of what I wanted to do would have been too slow in BASIC, I wrote a custom OS/language (It was like TRSDOS with Microsoft BASIC in structure, but had support for the RS-232 serial port, a lot of additional keywords, better disk I/O routines that would anticipate running out of buffer and spin up and seek the heads ahead of a read to reduce the latency of the floppy drives, format output to screen width, etc. When you're trying to do all of this on such a small machine, you learn to write efficient code. Then for the rest of your life you can't understand why it takes someone else a 5Ghz CPU and a TB of disk to do what you did on 2Mhz and 320k and it's frustrating.
There are merits to using flatpaks. With flatseal application, you can fine-tune the permissions given to a certain flatpak application. The best thing is restricting internet usage.
They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.
Is there no other way on your system to see what the default browser is? On Gnome you can see a few of your default applications in the settings. And what happens if you open an html file for example? Does it open in Zen? If yes then it appears that Zen is set as your default browser, what more is there to check?
I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.
To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.
Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".
One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.
Don't AppImages also have a similar requirement just with stuff that is already installed on many popular distros so many people just don't notice it? I think I read somewhere that running AppImages on systems that even slightly differ from the big popular distros is a pain since you still have to ship this stuff with them but it is more cumbersome than with flatpaks.
Those mystical average people would probably stay on Windows, if they don't care or cannot learn basics of other systems. Its really not hard to explain and understand, even for "average person" that there is an universal source for applications and there are packages designed and managed by your operating system. I think its important for people to learn basics and we should teach them, not dumb them down like on Windows. Soon people won't be able to eat themselves anymore...
A few reasons security people can have to hesitate on Flatpak:
In comparison to sticking with strictly vetted repos from the big distros like Debian, RHEL, etc., using Flathub and other sources means normalizing installing software that isn't so strongly vetted. Flathub does at least have a review process but it's by necessity fairly lax.
Bundling libraries with an application means you can still be vulnerable to an exploit in some library, even if your OS vendor has already rolled out the fix, because of using Flatpak software that still loads the vulnerable version. The freedesktop runtimes at least help limit the scope of this issue but don't eliminate it.
The sandboxing isn't as secure as many users might expect, which can further encourage installing untrusted software.
By a typical home user's perspective this probably seems like nothing; in terms of security you're still usually better off with Flatpak than installing random AUR packages, adding random PPA repos, using AppImage programs, installing a bunch of Steam games, blindly building an unfamiliar project you cloned from github, or running bash scripts you find online. But in many contexts none of that is acceptable.
Flatpaks together with "immutable" distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !
If it's a mostly self-contained app, like a game or a utility, then Flatpak is just fine. If a Flatpak needs to interact with other apps on the host or, worst case, another Flatpak it gets tricky or even impossible. From what I've seen though, AppImage and Snap are even worse at this.
Flatpak doesn't support dev device access no matter what I use flatseal and all the shabang, so bottles is useless to me for a lot of the wine applications I would like to "not emulate"
I'd take a well-maintained native package for my distro over a Flatpak, but sometimes, a Flatpak is just the the easiest way to get the latest version of an application working on Debian without too much tinkering - not always no tinkering, but better than nothing.
This is especially true of GIMP - Flatpak GIMP + Resynthesizer feels like the easiest way to experience GIMP these days. Same with OBS - although I have to weather the Flatpak directory structure, plugins otherwise feel easier to get working than the native package. The bundled runtimes are somewhat annoying, but I'm also not exactly hurting for storage at the moment - I could probaby do to put more of my 2 TB main SSD to use.
I usually just manage Flatpaks from the terminal, though I often have to refresh myself on application URLs. I somewhat wish one could set nicknames so they need not remember the full name.
Which ones? Everything in the arch main repos are compiled for your system, and most things in the AUR can either be built from source, or have -bin installs.
aleph one from the AUR refused to run properly, often crashing on startup so i just grabbed the flatpak the weirdest one was ghostwriter from the official repos, for some reason one day the preview window showed heavily corrupted output and tinkering with it on and off for a week did nothing, including a complete purge and reinstall of the program the flatpak was the only version of it that worked after that
Mostly because of detailed and easy permissions, and also because I have other distibutions on my other computers and want my programs to be consistent everywhere - same programs, same version.
My favorite part of the linux experience is the FREEDOM, but also being talked down to for not using my freedom correctly, I should only do things a specific way or I might as well just use windows.
Because using your freedom to promote options that restrict freedom means helping to remove your freedom. But hey, what do the Linux elders know? Clearly the new people into Linux are far smarter...
If we’re talking about enterprise-grade, five-nines reliability: I want the absolute simplest, bare-bones, stripped down, optimized infra I can get my hands on.
If we’re talking about my homelab or whatever else non-critical system: I’m gonna fuck around and play with whatever I feel like.
You are mixing different ideas of freedom. Software freedom is not the same as freedom of choice of software.
You don't need Linux to have choices of what software to use, you have that in most (all?) proprietary systems, in some you might even have more choices than in Linux.. even if it includes proprietary software.
This is analogous to how being a free person (not a slave) is not the same as having freedom to choose who to work for, even if some of them are slavers (ie. having freedom to choose your master).
Wait how do you install flatpaks? I add the remote (if necessary) and then install it from there. That is nothing like I have ever seen on Windows (though apparently there are package managers).
I mean, they added "bash scripts you find online", which are only a problem if you don't look them over or cannot understand them first... Their post is very much cemented in the paranoid camp of security.
Not that they're wrong. That's the big thing about security once you go deep enough: the computer has to work for someone, and being able to execute much at all opens up some avenues of abuse. Like securing a web based service. It has to work for someone, so of course everything is still vulnerable at some point. Usually when private keys or passwords are compromised if they're doing things remotely correctly, but they're still technically vulnerable at some point.
Flatpaks are pretty great for getting the latest software without having to have a cutting edge rolling release distro or installing special repos and making sure stuff doesn't break down the line.
I use Flatpaks for my software that I need the latest and greatest version of, and my distros native package for CLI apps and older software that I don't care about being super up to date.
My updater script handles all of it in one action anyways, so no biggie on that either.
Flatpaks are the best all-in-one solution when compared to Appimages or Snaps imo.
I don't like how so many distros ship with discover configured to install flatpaks by default. It's a huge newbie trap when you click "open file" and uh where are all my files?? You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn't work for some reason.
I'm starting to think that in terms of features and possiblities, nix might truly be the best third party package manager of all. But the downside is that especially when using it the way it's recommended, combined with home manager, it has the steepest learning curve. Also graphical apps can be problematic. There is a tool called nixgl that tries to solve this, but it's a wrapper, so when a nix application opens a child process that needs to use the native system drivers, that childprocess is also wrapped in nixgl and it breaks. I recently found a neat workaround on github to solve this in a better way, which is to create a driver package manually with home manager, and symlink it to /run/, which is also where the drivers are linked on NixOS. This is a gamechanger to me because with no driver problems anymore, you can install almost everything through nix on pretty much any distro, except maybe for some programs that need system level access to run. You can install graphical programs, cli programs, and even entire window managers with it. I'm using full NixOS at the moment, but i'm seriously debating moving back to void linux with nix on top. Currently messing with it in a vm to test my configs.
The parent comment mentions working on security for a paid OS, so looking at the perspective of something like the users of RHEL and SUSE: supply chain "paranoia" absolutely does matter a lot to enterprise users, many of which are bound by contract to specific security standards (especially when governments are involved). I noted that concerns at that level are rather meaningless to home users.
On a personal system, people generally do whatever they need to in order to get the software they want. Those things I listed are very common options for installing software outside of your distro's repos, and all of them offer less inherent vetting than Flathub while also tampering with your system more substantially. Though most of them at least use system libraries.
they added “bash scripts you find online”, which are only a problem if you don’t look them over or cannot understand them
I would honestly expect that the vast majority of people who see installation steps including curl [...] | sh (so common that even reputable projects like cargo/rust recommend it) simply run the command as-is without checking the downloaded script, and likewise do the same even if it's sudo sh. That can still be more or less fine if you trust the vendor/host, its SSL certificate, and your ability to type/copy the domain without error. Even if you look at the script, that might not get you far if it happens to be a self-extracting one unless you also check its payload.
I like them as an option, there are some programs like Bottles or specific game launchers that work under flatpak better than the versions available via native package manager (with Bottles in particular, you can use various built-in sandbox features via flatpak which makes things a bit more secure), but it's also a bit of a pain because it's an additional package manager you have to update separately now, or tweak if things go wrong.
Certainly a fan, and I don't understand the hate towards it.
Flatpaks are my preferred way of installing Linux apps, unless it is a system package, or something that genuinely requires extensive permissions like a VPN client, or something many other apps depend on like Wine.
The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:
Performance. Honestly, do you even care if your Pomodoro timer app takes up 1 more megabyte of RAM? Do you actually notice?
Bloat. Oh, yes, an app now takes 20 MB instead of 10 MB. Again, does anybody care?
Slower and larger updates. Could be an issue for someone on a metered traffic, or with very little time to do updates. Flatpaks update in the background, though, and you typically won't notice the difference unless you need something newest now (in which case you'll have to wait an extra minute)
Having to check permissions. This is a feature, not a bug. For common proponents of privacy and security, Linuxheads grew insanely comfortable granting literally every maintainer full access to their system. Flatpaks intentionally limit apps functionality to what is allowed, and if in some case defaults aren't good for your use case - just toggle a switch in Flatseal, c'mon, you don't need any expertise to change it.
What you gain for it? Everything.
Full control over app's permissions. Your mail client doesn't need full system permissions, and neither do your messengers. Hell, even your backup client only needs to access what it backs up.
All dependencies built in. You'll never have to face dependency hell, ever, no matter what. And you can be absolutely sure the app is fully featured and you won't have to look for missing nonessential dependencies.
Fully distro-agnostic. If something works on my EndeavourOS, it will work on my OpenSUSE Slowroll, and on my Debian 12. And it will be exactly the same thing, same version, same features. It's beautiful.
Stability. Flatpaks are sandboxed, so they don't affect your system and cannot harm it in any way. This is why immutable distros feature Flatpaks as the main application source. Using them with mutable distributions will also greatly enhance stability.
Alternatives?
AppImages don't need an installation, so they are nice to see what the program is about. But for other uses, they are garbage-tier. Somehow they manage both not to integrate with the system and not be sandboxed, you need manual intervention or additional tools to at least update them/add to application menu, and ultimately, they depend on one file somewhere. This is extremely unreliable and one should likely never use AppImages for anything but "use and delete".
Snaps...aside from all the controversy about Snap Store being proprietary and Ubuntu shoving snaps down people's throats, they were just never originally developed with desktop applications in mind. As a result, Snaps are commonly so much slower and bulkier that it actually starts getting very noticeable. Permissions are also way less detailed, meaning you can't set apps up with minimum permissions for your use case.
Flatpaks, appimages, snaps, etc: why download dependencies once when you can download them every time and bloat your system? Also, heaving to list installed flatpaks and run them is dumb too, why aren't they proper executables? "flatpak run com.thisIsDumb.fuckinEh" instead of just ./fuckinEh
No thanks. I'll stick to repos and manually compiling software before I seek out a flatpak or the like.
This shit is why hobbies and things should be gatekept. Just look at how shit PC design is these days. Now they're coming after the OS.
As I said, dependencies typically don't take that much space. We're not in the '80s, I can spare some megabytes to ensure my system runs smoothly and is managed well.
As per naming, I agree, but barely anyone uses command line to install Flatpaks, as they are primarily meant for desktop use. In GUI, Flatpaks are shown as any other package, and all it takes is to push "Install" button.
If you want to enjoy your chad geeky Linux, you still can. Go for CachyOS, or anything more obscure, never to use Flatpaks again. At the same time, let others use what is good and convenient to them.
Do all laptops users have this option? Also you keep saying megabytes when it's never just a few megabytes. It downloads atleast a few gbs worth of data just for one gui app.
Please clarify, what option do you mean? Flatpaks are supported on any Linux system, it doesn't matter what distro or hardware. Or if you mean sparing some megabytes - typically yes as well. The smallest amount of memory I've seen on a laptop is 32gb, and typically it's no less than 250gb.
If it's not present in you distributions' app store, you can either enable it somewhere or download another app manager like Discover, GNOME Software, or pamac if you're on Arch.
If installation of some app incurs a few gbs of downloads, it is likely that your system updates packages alongside installing your app. Typical Flatpak app takes 10-150 megabytes.
I've been working on Linux for 15 years now and I perfectly remember the origin of many concepts. If you look at it through time, what would it be like: 1. We can build applications with external dependencies or a single binary, what should we choose? 2. The community is abandoning a single binary due to the increased weight of applications and memory consumption and libraries problems 3. Dependency hell is coming ... 4. Snap, flatpack, appimage and other strange solutions are inventing something, which are essentially a single binary, but with an overlay (if the developer has hands from the right place, which is often not the case) 5. Someone on lemmy says that he literally doesn't care if the application is built in a single binary, consumes extra memory and have libraries problems. Just close all permissions for that application...
Well, all I can say about this is just assemble a single binary for all applications, stop doing nonsense with a flatpack/snap/etc.
UPD: or if you really want to break all the conventions, just use nixos. You don't need snap/flatpack/etc.
I don't mind other solutions, as long as they have the key features Flatpak offers, namely: * Being open-source * Having app permission system * Having bundled dependencies * Integrating decently with the system
Times are changing, and memory constraints for most programs are generally not relevant anymore.
Old guy here too, used un*x before linux existed in the 90s. I still use a Debian based distro (MX) without systemd and no snap/flatpak/whatever. Just build/compile or install .deb and dependencies. Lastly unfortunately I had to install a flatpak to test "deskflow", the first time I installed one, I feel dirty now 🙁
The few things I don't like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):
Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss
Digital signing simply doesn't work, won't work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,
Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don't (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)
The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)
But besides those small things, it seem great to me.
Thanks for the input! Yes, there are still certain issues with Flatpaks (for me it was aforementioned VPNs which also don't work through Distrobox, and it would be quite odd anyway). But overall, they manage most apps well, just as you say.
Either it did something it shouldn't, or the system updated Nvidia drivers every time for no apparent reason. I have an Nvidia GPU, running proprietary drivers, and haven't ever witnessed anything of the kind.
Idk how, but one time I tried installing something as a flatpak and it took like 300+MB and a very long time. I figured something was wrong, found a way to install it normally and it took like 10MB and installed quickly. Idk what went wrong, but I'll never touch this garbage again
Edit: oh they're not for arch. Maybe they should have told me before the 300mb slog
If i got it right, flatpacks gather all of the dependencies of the package and bundles them with tha package. Maybe those extra 290mb were from dependencies that you already had installed but that flatpak wanted to install another copy.
Otherwise I'm agnostic on flatpaks - I've used a couple and they're ok? They just remind me of old windows games that dump all their libraries in a folder with them.
On a modern system the extra space and loss of optimisation is ok, but on older hardware or when you're really trying to push your system to run something it technically shouldn't, I can see it being an issue.
I've heard Flatpaks aren't great at CLI tools, is that true ?
As a Nix user, I'm glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
About the image: The joke's on you, I install my flatpaks via the terminal.
I've started using flatpaks more after starting using Bazzite and I liked them more than I expected. As a dev, I still need my work tools to be native, but most of my other needs are well covered by flatpaks.
Tip: Flatseal is a great config manager for flatpaks' permissions.
I replaced Firefox system package with Flatpak because I think browser is the most used and vulnerable thing in my system. And the size seemed reasonable.
I did not replace Thunderbird because its size is almost 10 times.
Installing them is not difficult. It's the same as any other flatpak.
The problem is when running them (actually, when running any flatpak, not just CLI tools) you need to type out the whole backwards domain thingy that flatpaks use as identifier, instead of having a proper typical and simple executable name like they would have if they were installed normally.
I end up adding either symlinks or aliases for all my flatpaks because of this reason. After doing that it's ok.. but it's just an extra step that's annoying and that the flatpak devs have no interest on fixing apparently.
one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
is garuda like endeavorOS or manjaro where it’s technically still an arch-based rolling release distro but the OS maintainers hold packages from upstream mainline arch?
i don’t hate that model, it’s more fun to use as an end user for sure, but i feel like it kind of defeats the point of arch’s entire ethos lmao.
sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.
i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.
arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM^ - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.
All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.
The google-chrome and chromium packages are already a binaries so my guess is you need ungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.
While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.
one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to
My understanding is that constantly triggering compiling like that shouldn't be happening in any typical arch + pacman situation. But it can happen in AUR. If it does, I think it's a special case where you should be squinting and figuring out what's going on and stopping the behavior; it's by no means philosophically endorsed as the usual case scenario for packages on arch.
There's certainly stuff about Arch that's Different(TM) but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.
saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.
not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.
Feyd did a pretty good job of outlining the AUR disclaimers in a different comment so I won't do that here. It's true that Arch won't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, but again it's nuts to claim that routine compiling is the usual case for all rolling distros and belies your claim that you're familiar with usual case experience. There's absolutely no routine experience where you're regularly compiling.
I've used debian and apt-get most of my life, I've used arch on a pinetab 2 for about 6 months, regularly playing with pacman and yay and someone who's never met me is saying I'm a fanboy for being familiar with linux package management. 🤷♂️
saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.
not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.
iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do
huh? Using package managers almost never involves compiling. It's there as a capability, but the point is to distribute pre-compiled packages and skip that step in the vast majority of cases.
Bro, TRUTH. I have preferences but when you gotta get something done, it doesn't matter how the app comes bundled. I'd run .exe's through Wine if I needed to.
never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.
whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???
Flatpaks mean you don't have to compile everything from scratch and solve dependency conflicts if you want a newer version of a program than what's available in your distro's repo, of if it's something that doesn't have a native version at all.
Honestly, i'm not entirely sure what Flatpaks are all about. Not sure I could explain them. But I use them. I've used apt. I've even used Pacman and Yay in Manjaro for a few years. Now, I also Flatpak (no longer on Manjaro, though. I no longer boot to a blank screen every 6 months or so! Very nice!)
Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
I have Steam installed for some games, and since this is a 32 bits application it would install a metric shit-don of 32 bit dependencies I do not use for anything else except Steam, so I use the Flatpak version.
Or Kdenlive for video editing. Kdenlive is the only KDE software I use but when installing it, it feels like due to dependencies I also get pretty much all of the KDE desktop’s applications I do not need nor use nor want on my machine. So Flatpak it is.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I'm not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don't want to mess around with it, because I don't know what part is unusable).
The unofficial OBS Studio Flatpak on Fedora Flatpaks is, seemingly, poorly packaged and broken, leading to users complaining upstream thinking they are...
The quoted image does not say so, they do not say the native packaging from your distribution is borderline unusable. That judgement was added by YOU. The devs just state the package on Archlinux is not officially supported, without making a judgement (at least in the quoted image).
As for the Fedora issue, that is a completely different thing. That is also Flatpak, so its not the package format itself the issue. Fedora did package the application in Flatpak their own way and presented it as the official product. That is a complete different issue! That has nothing to do with Archlinux packaging their own native format. Archlinux never said or presented it as the official package either and it does not look like the official Flatpak version.
So where does the developers say that anything that is not their official Flatpak package is "borderline unusable"?
I spent my time fighting AppImages until Canonical started to force Snap on me. I hated Snap so bad it forced me to switch distros. Now I appreciate Flatpak as a result and I don't find AppImages all that bad, either. Also, I haven't found myself in dependency-hell nor have I crashed my distro from unofficial Repos in well over a decade.
-It's a long way of saying It works for me and it's not Snap.
I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.
That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.
That just displays the command or is there a browser extension that runs it for you too? Most Windows apps certainly don't run by just clicking a button either.
I've never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.
My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.
I was just wondering the connection between flatpaks and the terminal because I’ve never heard of flatpaks before and Wikipedia says they’re a sandboxed package management system or something?
As someone who uses Flatpak you can still use the terminal to install, uninstall and do maintenance, not sure why people believe terminal is useless with Flatpak 😞
Flatpaks are containers, same as Snaps, I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps, but just my personal choice. I use Flatsweep and Flatseal apps to help administrate Flatpak apps, but use terminal as well 🙂
I've no real preference so long as my PC starts stuff. The reason I avoid flatpaks is because I have at some point acquired the habit of anything I install that's not an appimage I pretty much launch from the terminal and I remember trying flatpaks and them having names like package.package.nameofapp-somethingelse and I can't keep that in my head.
Nah, it's the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don't appreciate the added complexity for features they don't need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that's the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.
For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it's great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let's not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s
You answered your own question. Arch and Nix solve the same problem Flatpak solves, but by using better dependency management. Flatpak’s main proposition is built-in sandboxing and convenience, but if you’re on an “expert” oriented distro like Arch (btw), you probably don’t care as much about those “freebies.”
In that case flatpak is basically a hack for OS's with broken or improper dependency manangement systems. Either those OS's should fix their broken systems, or ppl should move to OS's that do it properly, as that's one of the most important functions of your OS anyway.
Also pretty much everywhere you're using flatpaks (or snaps or...), you are doing it on top of a Linux system that's still getting its core system updates via traditional dependency management. And flatpaks, despite trying not to, make assumptions about your kernel, your glibc version, architecture, ability to access parts of your filesystem or your devices, that can break things, and doesn't bother to track it.
And the closer you get you tracking that stuff (like Snap tries to), you hilariously just get back to where you started, with traditional dependency management that already exists and has existed for decades.
main selling points are isolation and having the latest version directly from developers without having to wait for your distro to package/update it.
both are debatable since they are not as good as promoted (isolation doesn't always work correctly and it's a mess to configure it once you use anything different than the more mainstream distros) or goes against the historical preference (using bundled everything instead of cooperating with your distro packages and trusting every individual over trusting your distro as a whole) but having the latest version on any distro without having to wait is a popular need so they gained traction quite fast. this might make little sense for rolling release distros (arch, nix) but it's helpful if you have a stable base (years old debian) but need the latest feature on an specific application or have to use very specific libraries that are not packaged on the main distro and would require complex upgrades
I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
I seem to have constant issues with AppImages. Every single one I have currently won't open. I get an error message relating to either qT or GTK. Tried searching for the error and get a bunch of old forum threads talking about either not being compatible with Wayland at all, or comments stating that the one specific AppImage in question must have been "packaged badly". Thankfully, nothing 'mission critical' for me is an AppImage currently, but it is quite upsetting that I have the most problems with the supposed "just works" app packaging/distribution option.
Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.
What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn't really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there's no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.
But there's no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.
Yeah that's why I'm a bit weary of switching to Wayland, so many apps still seem unsupported, or have issues, whereas on X11 everything for me just works. Plus, the two DE's I'd actually consider using either don't have Wayland support at all or have very early experimental support (Cinnamon and Xfce) so it'll still be a while for me before I am able to consider switching to Wayland, assuming everything else works.
I don't actually know if it is a Wayland issue - most of those forum posts are like 3 years old... And I have definitely used these same AppImages in the past on Wayland without issue. I think the AppImages are expecting some specific dependency to be installed on my system that is no longer installed due to updates. (which I thought was counter to the entire point of an AppImage? I thought it was supposed to be kinda like Flatpak where it has it's dependencies in the image? Maybe I just misunderstood AppImage...)
To give you some hope, my Distro switched to Wayland as default a little over a year ago (i think) and I have not been running into problems (outside this AppImage problem, if it is indeed a Wayland issue, which I cannot confirm or deny).
It destroys the beautiful and carefully cultivated ecosystem of distributed packages that has been the bedrock of Linux for decades. They're bloated, often not quite as sandboxed as claimed, have created packaging chaos, and assume availability of system services that may not be there.
Just go to the package manager, type in the name of the program, install.
That's easier than on windows: go to the browser, search for the program, avoid the ads, search for the download button, follow the install wizard, avoid the toolbar
The one "good" thing about containers is that you keep your DLL-like mess localized. Just one or a few related apps run in the container and if they want / need some weird library version, they can have it without breaking other things.
Yeah but that’s a huge benefit already. I am not savvy enough in the development side to know whether that’s a reward that justifies any of the frustrations people have. Personally I don’t really mind varying methods to do any one job, as long as it’s well-documented, easily managed, and does not create a higher load on the system in any respect.
I view the delays during launch and the extra time spent during updates as a "load on the system."
Also, it entirely depends on your deployment environment. I develop system images that go out on thousands of devices deployed in "Cybersecuity Sensitive" environments, meaning: we have to document what's on the system and justify when anything in the SBOM (list of every software package installed on the machine) is identified as having any applicable CVEs... soooo.... keeping old versions of software anywhere on the machine is a problem (significant additional documentation load) for those security audits. Don't argue with logic, these are our customers and they have established their own procedures, so if we want their money, we will provide them with the documentation they demand, and that documentation is simplest when EVERYTHING on the system has ALL the latest patches.
The most secure systems are those that don't do anything at all. You can't hack a brick.
Hey, like I said, great info for me to learn because I don’t know. I was only saying that I don’t mind because my situation is fine with it. Thanks for the info, it’s interesting. I’m sure for any situation there’s a better and worse solution and I’m sure that for any solution, there’s a situation that either likes or dislikes the approach.
Yeah, I agree. Canonical seems to think "snaps are for everyone" so, for both my personal and professional applications they have decided: "Canonical is not for me."
i mostly use them for proprietary stuff or for software that is incredible painful to package (mostly electron apps). i will probably never use them for anything that actually matters but i also use rolling release distros everywhere so latest release is never too far. for testing latest version of any software i prefer appimages since they are simpler and don't need a messy setup as flatpak, but i also won't use them pass the testing phase and i prefer packaging the software if possible.
snaps, on the other hand, will never go near any of my systems. not even by accident
The thing that grinds my gears is when I'm doing an apt update and then it goes off to check on the snaps and drags the process out a lot longer. It doesn't help that they're slower to load the apps too. Then there's the additional attack surfaces to accumulate more CVE reports (and more out of date library versions on your system begging for a security patch...) Mostly, I just purge snap support from Ubuntu these days - but for people who don't notice / mind such things, you do you - maybe they'll eventually improve the lightweight container system until the rest of us don't notice it either.
There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one over than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.
With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line
Ideally, all the essential terminal commands could be replicated in a user-friendly GUI-applicable manner. Don’t ever have to remove the terminal for those that enjoy it, but if we could have a magic world where even the failure states could be navigated with little to no prior knowledge required and it gets everyone away from Windows and Mac for good, I’m all for it.
Could things like this go in linuxmemes? Memes are fun but it would be nice to keep this a place for actual information. And no, this is not a comment on what it's saying, I'm just tired of so many memes.
I wouldn't say I have had a problem with snaps or flatpacks either. I uninstall all snaps first thing when I install recent Ubuntu versions, and I have never messed with flatpacks, so... no problems.
Fast storage is one of the cheapest components of modern PCs so I'm always surprised when Flatpak file size is brought up. It's not something I worry about very much.
And they are still, in my experience, slow to load, a cumbersome addition to the update process, and often un-necessary.
Don't get me wrong, if you're in a tight spot and can't make two significant software packages work in a distribution due to conflicting library version requirements... some kind of lightweight container solution is attractive, expedient, and better than just not supporting one of the packages. But, my impression is that a lot of stuff has been moved into flatpak / snap / etc. just because they can. I don't think it's the best, or even preferred, way to maintain software - for the desktop environment.
(Returns to checking on his Docker containers full of server apps on the R-Pi farm...)
It's a neat concept. The distro-agnostic aspect is definitely a plus for some people but I still prefer distro-specific installation methods. The only time I would seek out the Flatpak version of a particular software is when it's the only version available.
flatpaks are fine and useful, i just wish we didn't move into a scenario where applications that used to be easily available in distro repos start moving away from them and are only available through flatpaks. distro packages are just so much more efficient in every way. flatpaks are easier on maintainers and developers but that comes at a cost to the user. i have about a dozen or less flatpak apps installed and already i have to download at least 2 gigs of updates each week. i run debian
i agree with this but this isn’t the reality of the arch ecosystem. AUR is explicitly promoted on the wiki for a large amount of tasks the average user is going to do. it feels skeevy to acknowledge the problems with the AUR and then abscond arch’s responsibility for them, because the AUR is not like PPAs or anything. it is significantly more integrated into the ecosystem.
Thanks. In the past I have worked in Slackware, and even had Gentoo on my home system for a couple of years, but otherwise I've been fully saturated in Debian and its children - so that's my "comfort zone." I used to like KDE, but drifted away from it when I got a 4K screen notebook and KDE hadn't figured out resolution scaling yet, while Ubuntu/Unity had. I never quite warmed up to GNOME, but definitely have done my time with it. XFCE has matured enough for me to daily drive it without too much pain now, and I love the ways it can be de-featured (don't want a launcher bar? Don't run it, nothing else breaks.)
Server-side, I have been filling my Raspberry Pis with Docker containers for a while now... it's not completely alien, but I do kind of tend to "set it and forget it" when it comes to container deployments.
you (rhetorical you, not you) can recommend not using the AUR officially all you want. it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages. i’m kind of drunk rn but i’ll go find specific pages of the wiki that demonstrate what i’m talking about, i stg this isn’t nothing. the core system itself can entirely be managed with pacman, yes, but the average user is going to be doing a lot more than just that. there is a certain discord in the messaging of arch as a whole.
this is exactly my point. arch can either be a nuts and bolts distro or it can be made for normies. it can’t be both.
I like flatpak, but I can't download Flathub flatpak applications and (specially) Flathub flatpak runtimes from my phone. I hope Flathub learns from F-Droid
I'm happy to use Flatpaks but the annoyances I've had are like when one application says to use you'll need to point to the binary of another application that it depends on but very understandably doesn't package together, figuring that out to me can be annoying so I'll switch to a regular installation and it all just works together no fuss, no flatseal, no thinking about it really. Also some applications where it's really nice to launch from the terminal especially with arguments or just like the current working directory and with Flatpaks instead of just right off the bat it's application name and hit enter, Flatpak hope you remember the whole package name
As long as software is available in the Software Manager to be installed that way... I don't care what format it's in.
But don't make normies go to the terminal. It's inhumane, and really does not help the masses get away from big tech - which is a worthier goal than keeping your software terminal-only.
While I wouldn't want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.
The tradeoff is disk consumption but it's not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own.
FTFY: Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME 4.2.11.3 it can share the GNOME 4.2.11.3 runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own, but every app requires a different GNOME version anyway
Perhaps ironically, this is mocking a strawman. Flatpacks can be installed and managed using the terminal! Not only that but Linux-Distros have had graphical package managers for decades.
The primary reason that distros have embraced flatpack / snap / appimage is that they promise to lower the burden of managing software repositories. The primary reason that some users are mad is that these often don't provide a good experience:
they are often slower to install/start/run
they have trouble integrating with the rest of the system (ignoring gtk/qt themes for example)
they take a lot more space and bandwidth
Theoretically they are also more secure... But reality of that has also been questioned. Fine grained permissions are nice, but bundling libraries makes it hard to know what outdated libraries are running on the systems.
As far as I know, I've only installed Flatpaks using the terminal. The most annoying thing about them for me is having to type out the fully-qualified name of the software (e.g. org.mozilla.firefox instead of just firefox), which is a very terminal-specific issue, LOL!
Size and gnome/GTK dependencies are main reasons why I don't use Flatpaks (I have nothing against gnome though, it just pulls in too much and KDE is worse in this regards, which is why I use Sway and River)
Flatpak being securely sandboxed by default is both its biggest strength and its worst point of contention. The XDG is still scrambling to replicate the permission requests paradigm from Android on the Linux desktop.
Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.
The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.
Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I'm too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.
I'm a big fan of the idea of sandboxed apps. Flatpak is not great as it compromises sandboxing for compatibility (both with distros and apps) and also it's quite stagnant now. But there are no other options anyway, so I use it.
War with who? I'm posting this from Kubuntu and I'd happily agree with you that Snap should fuck off and die. (In particular, the backend being controlled by Canonical makes it objectively bad compared to Flatpak.) Even among people like me who tolerate Snap (for now...), I really don't think you're gonna find anybody who actually likes it, let alone enough to champion it.
Oh, hi! I also use Kubuntu, but I love Snaps! I use them for everything. I even tried to use a Snap-version of the kernel, but it completely destroyed my system so I had to reinstall... but other than that, they're great.
I "grew up" with Slackware, so I definitely understand the dependency issue.
I like flatpaks (and similar) for certain "atomic" pieces of software, like makemkv. For more "basic" software, like, say, KDE, I want it installed natively.
Just another tool in the toolbox. Use it or not, up to the user. I've even seen Slackware users who say they use Flatpak to ward off dependency rabbit holes.
Don't like it for one simple reason: no integration with the distribution. Flatpak is this sort universal solution that works, but doesn't necessarily work hand-in-hand with the distro, unlike package managers.
Asking this since I've always been told the former and that your bladder rupturing from not going to the toilet is a myth and the story of Tycho Brahe is too old to be reliable. But in recent years, I've seen articles about people drinking alcohol and passing out and their bladders bursting because the sensations got dulled (which still shouldn't affect the sphincters giving way due to the pressure before the bladder actually ruptures, since it's about the sphincters being not physically strong enough to hold back the pressure).
The existence of overflow incontinence would seem to contradict this story from 2020, for example. Alcohol dulls the urge to urinate, but overflow incontinence often happens in absence of this urge as well, and when the detrusor muscles (which squeeze the bladder) aren't working.
An incident occurred in China in which the bladder of a man who fell asleep after drinking a large amount of beer bursts. Prickly! Hajime Hajime boy, praise 10 Ten bottles! Bladder cleft! https://mp.weixin.qq.
With that said, your question would probably hold more water (pun intended), if you had asked regarding a urinary tract infection or similar infection forcefully blocking the urethra, making it almost impossible to piss even if you wanted or needed to.
I won't go into the fine details, but early 2009 was definitely not fun for me after a multi-systemic infection that started as a dental abscess.
No, luckily nothing down south ruptured, but its never good when someone is pissing brown, I couldn't hardly even piss for a few days after I started antibiotics.
It won't compile, as cloned. It's more than just the directory structure which is completely silly. It's not surprising it didn't work, given it's messy state. I had to modify it a bit, so it could easily be something I did.
Anyone have Vial working? It's a popular keyboard so I expect someone has solved this problem. If no one responds, I'll take it on in a week or so so we can all enjoy ou R75 on linux with Vial.
The problem seems to be lack of ability to give the board a magic serial number. The vial app looks for a specific string in the serial number ("vial:") to identify a vial capable keyboard. My R75 won't accept a serial number, no matter what I do.
Apparently, this is a limitation of some cheap USB controllers (always answer 0 to all serial requests). I don't know if that's true but ChatGPT tells me it's so.
udevadm info -a -n /dev/hidraw$(ls /dev/hidraw* | tail -1 | tr -dc '0-9') | grep -i serial 2 ✘ ATTRS{serial}=="00000000000000000000000000000000" ATTRS{serial}=="0000:09:00.0"
Apparently, the magic number can be coded into the UID, also. I'm working on that, too, with no success so far. Apparently, USB controllers don't stand in for UID in any case.
I'm struggling with this. If anyone has some ideas or clear direction, I would consider it a favor. If I can manage to make it work, I'll publish the firmware for everyone.
Even if someone got the mossbed firmware to work, that would be helpful to know. I have been banging on it for three days with no luck. This is the most expensive, cheap keyboard I've ever purchased. lol!
The Saxophone Colossus Reflects on a Titan of Rhythm. In this rare and intimate moment, legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins shares his memories and de...
Can you really hear the difference between Yanagisawa’s cheapest and most expensive saxophones? In this video, we put the entry-level Yanagisawa AWO1 up agai...
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This question came about over a discussion my brother and I had about whether dogs should be on leashes when outside. We both agreed that yes, they should, for several reasons, but that's not the point.
Let's use a hypothetical to better illustrate the question. Imagine that there's a perfume - vanilla, for example - that doesn't bother you at all (you don't like nor dislike it), but that is very upsetting to some people, and can even cause some adverse reactions (allergies or something). In this hypothetical, based on the negative effects, you agree that vanilla perfumes should be banned. Currently, however, they are allowed.
You're walking down the street, and randomly smell someone passing you by and they're wearing a vanilla perfume.
Would that upset you? Why, or why not?
My answer is yes, without a doubt. Even though the smell itself doesn't bother me, the fact someone would wear that perfume and not only potentially upset others, but put them in danger, is upsetting.
My brother, however, would say no! He couldn't explain his reasoning to me.
I know this is a little convoluted, but I hope I got my question across.
My response might be sligtly convoluted, but I'll try to keep it simple. It relates to allergies.
For me, I am extremely allergic to oysters, and largely also allergic to shellfish. I'm so badly allergic to oysters that I cannot be in the same room as someone else eating them, the smell alone makes me gag, my eyes water, and makes my bronchial tubes swell where I can't even breathe.
I however am luckily not allergic to peanuts. Regardless, I totally understand how potentially deadly a peanut allergy can be to those with the allergy, and if I'm in a public place around strangers, I tend to assume that anyone around me might have a peanut allergy.
Last year, I was in line at a gas station, and the woman in front of me waiting to pay had bought boiled peanuts. And she was fucking shelling and eating the peanuts while waiting in line, the bitch couldn't even wait to pay for them, with cash, and exit the store first.
I called her out on it, and even pretended that I did have a peanut allergy, and what she was doing was not only nasty, but also a danger to others handling her peanut juice covered money.
She proved to be a Karen and not give a fuck, but I did speak my mind, on behalf of people that could possibly fucking die over her nastiness and carelessness.
Even though the woman proved to be a Karen, the cashiers working the store that day totally understood why I was upset. If only they had or enacted a policy of don't consume any products in the store...
As far as the dog on the leash thing, we're about 99% in favor of that, only exception being when we take our dog out to our city park, where we adopted him from as abandoned.
Brownie knows every inch of the park and I feel it would be wrong to not let him roam free occasionally when there's not many people or other animals around. Those sort of days are few and far between though, so 99% of the time he's on the leash.
If it's an off leash park it's fine. If it's on lead have them on lead. It isn't about your dog it's about everyone else's dogs. Dogs on leash are significantly more reactive when another dog runs up to them, so it's important to have control of the dog, lest one of the dogs gets badly hurt.
Our park is mostly a water park for kids at the front, with a couple pavilions, and a boat ramp and senior citizen center in the back. So yes, it's not an official dog park, but unofficial its accepted as one by pretty much everyone.
We keep him on the leash when there's lots of people or other dogs around, but on days when the park is practically empty, we let him roam free and burn his calories.
He was abandoned for like 5 months out at the park before we decided to adopt him, so most regular park visitors already know him. Police officers approve, they even helped us adopt him.
He's a medium size dog, and mostly chill, just sometimes playful. He's never hurt anyone.
Of course that's not true for all dogs though, hence why we're very careful regarding what sort of days we might let him roam around off the leash.
I don't even have half an idea what all foods do or don't contain gluten, but I am still almost equally inclined to call out people just plain out being nasty, especially in a public space where they're about to exchange paper cash.
Like shit, I totally respect paper cash, but FFS, try to make sure your hands are clean when handling or exchanging money. And definitely don't be literally eating food with your bare hands right at the register before even paying for it.
There was a certain type of perfume that seemed popular back in the 90s, that would make me instantly gag and almost puke within seconds. I have no clue how anyone found that as any sort of pleasant smell.
To me I thought it smelled like a woman with a nasty yeast infection, trying to cover it up with potpourri. But it wasn't even the women's health causing it, literal potpourri smell alone causes me the same gag reflex, the stuff just smells nasty to me and I can't be in the same room as that smell for long.
So yes, there are reasons to be offended by particular scents, even if others somehow find them pleasant.
Once again posting something for reference as I couldn't find it online
Symptoms
No issues after logging in. After suspending (sleep) and resuming, screen takes 25 - 30 seconds to turn on. Display settings in Plasma take a long time to load, sometimes don't show automatic rotation option. Turning on screen after turning off (even without sleep) takes a long time. No suspicious logs in Kernel and Journald (even after comparing post-fix). Switching kernel makes no difference. Logging out and back in temporarily fixes screen rotation and screen waking until next suspend. Everything works in X11 session apart from screen rotation (appears unsupported). Running monitor-sensor hangs when running after suspend systemctl stop iio-sensor-proxy fixes slowdown issues
Workaround
Downgrading to iio-sensor-proxy 3.6-1 following Arch Linux package downgrade instructions. In my case with a cached package ```<> sudo pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/iio-sensor-proxy-3.6-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
and optionally adding it to IgnorePkg
```<>
IgnorePkg = iio-sensor-proxy # Issues in Wayland after suspend
System info
OS: Arch Linux x64 Host: Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga Kernel: 6.12.35-1-lts DE: Plasma 6.4.2 iio-sensor-proxy (broken version): 3.7-1 Last full system upgrade: 2025-07-06
Expect a steep learning curve even if you know Linux inside out. Don't assume things work the way they did on Arch (or most other distros). If your hardware doesn't work well, or you otherwise need some proprietary stuff, check out gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix. Good luck!
Guix channel for packages that can't be included upstream. Please do NOT promote or refer to this repository on any official Guix communication channels.
Yep. Totally using nonguix. I'm trying out Guix for the reproducibility and system management, not (just) for the FOSS software.
From my initial research, I thought that Guix was only going to allow 100% FOSS software. But I've learned that's not the case. It's actually pretty easy to add additional channels in order to install non-FOSS software. The third-party channels integrate nicely!
I've not used Guix but I don't think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch--- so be prepared for that. My ventures into debian, suse and fedora were made quite annoying by having to work around the many missing packages. Including user-facing applications, dependencies and background programs. I never quite got down with distrobox, maybe that's the cure.
this chart on wikipedia gives the impression that Debian has more packages but that's not the way it feels when you are looking for something. Maybe they have a lot of dot matrix printer libraries from 1992 or something which bring the number up.
Arch includes a lot of not-at-all-free packages (which it is impossible to distinguish in pacman or other tool as far as I can find), orphaned, new packages that haven't yet made it into other repos, and packages where no attempt has been made to submit them to other repos.
On arch I have virtually never had to go outside the repos for packages. It's very hard to give up once you are used to it. (Even though it's better to use properly libre/free stuff and other benefits of a more curated approach like security, stability and quality.)
The thing about Guix (and Nix) is that there doesnt need to be a package in the repos. You can either make your system automatically compile from source (which is how many AUR packages work) or use something like distrobox, bottles, flatpak to run extra software
You also need to source ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh in order to get the desktop icons to show up in the GNOME app launcher. (Using guix home for that!)
Need to work on getting distrobox setup next. I was able to guix install distrobox, but it requires some extra configuration apparently.
Btw, here's the guix home configuration file I used to add the contents of flatpak.sh into my ~/.profile, in order to update the XDG_DATA_HOME env var.
Neat. Although, I wanted to go through the installation ~~pain~~ experience. Eventually, I'm hoping to run Guix on a server. I'm starting with my laptop first.
– Hardware must be well supported in fully-libre-land - I was trying to install on a Mac Mini and had to go nonguix pretty much right away. That kind of spoiled the whole effort.
– Profound meditation and enlightenment on the essence of Scheme is a must. I had one of those 'no, this is where you don't want a closing brace' moments and my zen was blown out of the water.
I would have soldiered on, but personally I like Arch first and foremost because I can (and do) have a local repo by rsyncing a rotation of mirrors couple of times a week. Just in case the Internet dies one day, you know. I realised Guix was not really suitable for the apocalypse use case, so after that brace episode I decided to stick with what my spine already knows.
After all that is said – I really hope you fare better 😁
Hardware must be well supported in fully-libre-land ... had to go nonguix pretty much right away.
Yep, same here. I started with nonguix. I didn't realize it was easy to add additional channels.
Profound meditation and enlightenment on the essence of Scheme is a must. I had one of those ‘no, this is where you don’t want a closing brace’ moments and my zen was blown out of the water.
Aaaah. I juuuust had this happen to me. Took me a bit to balance the parens again! 😂 Although, so far Scheme seems nicer than Nixlang. I've also had curiosity to learn a functional language, so Guix gives me a reason to learn about functional programming.
personally I like Arch first and foremost because I can (and do) have a local repo by rsyncing a rotation of mirrors couple of times a week.
Are these mirrors for prebuilt packages? If not, you should be able to pull from other channels, create your own channel and include all your packages while building them locally.
Sure, but then I'd be downloading every single source 'package' and compiling for both x86 and ARM - not exactly feasible. Keeping just the sources might be an option though. The point is to have the whole repo, not just the packages I use, so that in the SHTF scenario I can help others install Arch and any software they may need on their machines. Muhahaha, Arch will prevail 👻
I've also wanted to try out Guix for a while.. part of the reason I'm leaving a comment is just so I can recheck these posts later 😛
But when I do I for sure will start out from nonguix because I'm quite confident that my hardware won't be supported (I even have a recently purchased Wifi 7 card that relies on ath12k module that I'm quite sure won't be in the official Guix repo.. maybe I'd even need to compile it myself..)
I see in the nonguix readme that there's a way to generate an iso that includes already a nonguix kernel, so I'll have a look at that.
It even looks like you can create a writeable image to run from a USB thumbdrive, which looks very interesting, I gotta try that!
I've been burnt by Arch before which is what has got me into exploring other distros. I might ultimately end up again in Arch like you, who knows, but it looks like the way Guix works is well suited for hosting your own repo too.. I think I've seen before someone hosting their own Guix repo in github, including also a bunch of configuration for their system, which got me curious.
Guix channel for packages that can't be included upstream. Please do NOT promote or refer to this repository on any official Guix communication channels.
I love it especially because of the guix shell and guix shell container for dev environment isolation. It is a whole different ecosystem from the ground up though so it's not an easy ride. But those two features make it worth it for me. Also it's GNU distro which imo is a plus.
guix shell and guix shell container for dev environment isolation
Yeah! This is one of the features I'm most interested in. I haven't gotten to using this feature yet, but I was curious about it.
Let's say I'm working on a project that requires Go, Node, maybe some C library, and GNU Make. Seems like I would be able to use guix shell for this, right? Great.
Now if a friend wanted to work on the project, could I share my guix shell configuration with him? (Assuming he's also a Guix user.)
I'm currently using distrobox.ini plus distrobox assemble for this kind of workflow, but of course this isn't totally reproducible.
Let's say I'm working on a project that requires Go, Node, maybe some C library, and GNU Make. Seems like I would be able to use guix shell for this, right? Great.
Iirc guix shell is for one off package or programs you want to test, say you want to quickly format a drive to exfat or so, when you exit the sub-shell, the installed packages are discarded
guix shell containers would work best for your scenario but I have little experience with them
yes, you would share with him guix manifest which is a file that specifies which packages should be present. What is important to note are inferiors which is a mechanism to version lock the packages.
thats it 😀 Now you need to pin package versions to guix versions via inferior so that you can share the manifest and be sure you have exact same stuff on the other machine. Otherwise the specified packages get updated everytime you update your system. I learned that the hard way by having to wait for latex to download everytime I updated my system.
You need to edit your /etc/config.scm or where ever you store your system config. Import the right modules/services, add your user to cgroup, add iptables-service-type to your services, add rootless-podman-service-type and configure it.
(use-service-modules containers networking …)
(use-modules (gnu system accounts)) ;for 'subid-range'
(operating-system
;; …
(users (cons (user-account
(name "alice")
(comment "Bob's sister")
(group "users")
;; Adding the account to the "cgroup" group
;; makes it possible to run podman commands.
(supplementary-groups '("cgroup" "wheel"
"audio" "video")))
%base-user-accounts))
(services
(append (list (service iptables-service-type)
(service rootless-podman-service-type
(rootless-podman-configuration
(subgids
(list (subid-range (name "alice"))))
(subuids
(list (subid-range (name "alice")))))))
%base-services)))
Then of course you run guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm.
Now you can do a simple guix install distrobox. If you install distrobox first, you don't end up using rootless podman and you run into more problems that way. (You have to use distrobox --root.)
After that command, everything should work like normal. Enjoy. 🍻
distrobox create --image docker.io/library/archlinux:latest --name arch-dev
distrobox enter arch-dev
Btw, here's how you configure HiDPI for GNOME. Unfortunately, my laptop has a hydeepeeay display, so it's not fully compatible with Linux. (It's 3840x2160, so at least 2x scaling is possible, hypothetically.)
Commands from the Arch Wiki, but also adds cursor scaling:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides "[{'Gdk/WindowScalingFactor', <2>}, {'Gtk/CursorThemeSize', <48>}]"
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2
The default GNOME configuration is some how missing that. I didn't have to do that in Arch, but I do in Guix. IDK. Anyway, if you don't run those commands certain apps will be tiny, including a tiny mouse cursor.
I want to love Guix (both the package manager and the distro). I want to love Scheme. But I can never find any good tutorials for Scheme and using it with Guix. The GNU documentation is more of a reference than a tutorial. I use Emacs on the daily, and I just can't get into Scheme.
As per title, I am curious. How does your mind / your thoughts work? I only ever experienced my own thoughts, so I'm curious how it works for other people.
I for one feel like my thoughts sometimes are like me talking to myself silently. Sometimes I can even let out a random short sound, which I've come to start disguising by laughing kinda quietly or coughing or whatever. Like it was part of something, and not like an inner monologue almost leaking out.
Ask yourself questions and your subconscious will retain them on voicemail. Eventually the call will be returned and you will have the "correct" response, either declaratively or more subtly as intuition
Speaking to reporters in Delhi on Friday, Rijiju emphasised that his views were personal. “I do not want to react to China’s statement,” he said, adding that he was speaking as a follower.
It grows until it consumes so many nutrients that the other living cells don't get enough. The host literally starves even if he eats plentifully.
The same applies for the US: The billionaires are not only hoarding wealth, but by doing so they're crippling the economy for workers and everybody besides themselves.
Since they are closed source, we can't know. We can find out that messages are being sent at certain moments, but not what data is being contained in the messages, communications carrying this sort of data are always encrypted (for obvious reasons).
For legal reasons they often include some vague allusion in the terms of service about collecting information.. but they are never very clear on what data exactly they take when and how, so it's left up to interpretation.
Beyond raw horsepower, 7-Zip quietly tightens its handling of several legacy formats. Support for ZIP, CcPIO, and FAT archives has been refined, smoothing edge-case extractions that previously required third-party tools.
Over the years there was a few .zip archives that 7z could not handle for whatever reason. For these cases I had to use another application, but don't know the reason. And my bad to not keeping copies of these files for future testing.
I'm very concerned that people who choose to go to France will just find themselves in the exact same situation along with the rest of us not too long from now. I'd advise looking for a country with a lower fascism approval rating...
We do have lots of cheese, though, if it's any consolation.
Posting here too as I've not had any responses in the more relevant communities.
Hi there, I've got these really odd issue where certain windows will cause random lines like the one in the screenshot appear on my screen. They will often flicker a bit and will dissapear if I hover my mouse over them. The lines will display what is beneath the window itself. These occour quite frequently and are frankly getting quite annoying to deal with.
Is this a known issue with KDE right now? It does not happen while using Gnome on the same machine + screen. If it matters I am running CachyOS+KDE 6.4.1+AMD.
If there is anythign I can do to fix this then I'd greatly appriciate some pointers!
I had the same issue, it was caused by fractional scaling for me. In System Settings > Display & Monitor, I had the scale at 115% and would constantly see those transparent horizontal lines. Some KDE apps were particularly bad with this, notably Kate, Kwrite and Konsole. Not really a fix, but for me changing the scaling to 120% "fixed" it. So I suggest you play around with the scaling.
I bought a Lenovo laptop, one from the the bargain bin, 11th gen Intel and 8gb soldered RAM
Even if I reinstalled Windows to make sure all the bloatware was removed, it was almost unusable. At boot I was left with only 800mb free memory, and "Lenovo vantage" kept reappearing automatically like malware. (It's a useless electron app that wastes half a gig of ram to show you on screen when you press caps lock, check driver updates and try to upsell you on extended warranty)
At idle the machine was as loud as a jet, with crystal disk mark always complaining "the nvme drive is over 65°C!!" (I'm guessing from the constant swapping)
Battery life was a disaster, 2 hours at idle with no foreground apps open
I thought that it was the CPU too slow for my use and the RAM not enough, so I was planning to spend some hundreds of euro to buy a new laptop with at least 16gb of RAM.
Then I installed cachyos and because I'm masochist I chose hyprland at the "easy" install screen that asks you which of the 19 available DE you prefer.
After a week of suffering trying to understand all the text configuration files for everything (it was a shock, everything needs the terminal) I'm now getting used to it and... It's like I got a brand new laptop??!?
Memory: clean boot now obviously is reversed situation. I don't have only 800mb of free RAM, the whole system uses only 800mb
Temperatures: by default cachyos is set to show the CPU temperature on waybar, and it's always around 40-45° C. The fan is way quieter. At idle they can even stop, before they were like a hair dryer even after a clean boot
Battery life: astounding. I can't believe that I can use it for a whole afternoon. Accidentally fell asleep and when I came back after two hours it lost only 10% (on idle, screen turn off automatically)
Gaming performance: tried only with casual games but with something like tinytopia I get 60fps on ultra when on windows it was choppy on high
I think this is a bit of a hyperbole... Hyprland uses about 1.6 GB of RAM on cold boot, not 800 MB. Also, Win11 uses 3.5 GB on cold boot, not 7 GB (although it escalates quickly). Additionally, there was no reason to use CachyOS/Hyprland as your first (?) Linux. Mint would do just fine, with its 1.3 GB ram usage (and down to 950 MB if you disable a couple of services via its gui). It's just that I'm having hard time believing that you stuck through with Linux when "everything requires a terminal". Something tells me that you're already a seasoned Linux user, and that you're overstating the situation for clicks. Not cool, if that's the case.
I have the L 14 GEN two so it’s probably the same processor and I don’t know if my eight GB is salted or not but I was able to upgrade to 16 GB anyway I noticed that in Lennox I get significantly better battery life. It probably goes from 2 to 3 hours to 4 to 5 maybe.
Almost every laptop I've owned in the past 15 years has been this way. Just an old machine people wanted to discard because of viruses or crap performance. They'd give their "junk" to me and go buy a new laptop. After swapping it to linux with a few tweaks here and there, I swear that "junk" would outperform the new one they dropped all the money on.
I've used Linux as my primary OS for many years, but I keep a copy of Windows on my current laptop for gaming. I know the gaming story on Linux is pretty good now, but having to hibernate and reboot is enough of a barrier to launching a game that it helps me stay more productive.
At home, my laptop sits on a stand with great airflow, but when trying to play The Witcher 3 on a desk while traveling, it overheated and throttled to the point it wasn't playable. On Linux, the thinkpad_acpi driver allows setting the fan level to "disengaged", which sounds like "off" but actually means unregulated and results in a considerably higher speed and cooling performance than the usual maximum. Some research led to the conclusion that while manual fan control is possible with certain apps on Windows, there is no way to exceed the maximum automatic speed.
It only took a couple minutes to set up Lutris and Proton to run the game, and as expected the mild abuse of my laptop's fan does make it playable. What I didn't expect is considerably faster load times, but I got those too.
Just a handy tip if you haven't already your laptop might sound like it's about to take off because it hasn't been cleaned in a while. Just search up a tutorial on YouTube for your laptop and be amazed at how much dust you will find clogging up your fan.
Also yeah that terminal thing is just arch and hyprland you really through yourself in the deep end there (I personally havnt used arch before). Linux mint on the other hand is super easy to use and the terminal is only there if you chose to use it.
In the end I'm learning how everything works "behind the scenes" with a shock therapy (disclaimer: while I didn't use Linux as my personal desktop, I have a decade of experience with Linux servers, otherwise this migration would have been impossible to understand for me)
I was expecting for example an easy toggle for dark mode instead needs to set several constants on the terminal (for GTK, for qt, and so on)
Everything needs one hour of searching but I'm documenting everything for future reference in a markdown file
And I had to set home as a git repository because otherwise a literal comma in a wrong spot would crash everything and I wouldn't be able to revert it
For example I wanted to show the WiFi status on the taskbar (default doesn't show) and I forgot a comma in the JSON configuration file. The taskbar (waybar) didn't even start next time and I was presented with a completely empty wallpaper lol
Oracle Corp. said it has signed a single cloud deal worth $30 billion in annual revenue — more than the current size of its entire cloud infrastructure business.
NOTE TO READERS: This interview contains strong language and views that may be upsetting to some. The information presented here reflects verified, first-hand
I absolutely do not agree. Will things get worse? Yes, no sugar-coating it. But every fraction of a degree matters, and defeatism gets us nowhere. There’s still plenty to be done. So either get on board with helping, or stay out of the way, rather than trying to drag the rest of us down.
This is a clip from our show SYSTEM UPDATE, now airing every weeknight at 7pm ET on Rumble. You can watch the full episode for FREE here: rumble.com/v6vontt-system-upda…
Main Topic: The video discusses Peter Thiel's interview where he hesitates when asked if the human race should continue, and Glenn's reaction to Thiel's views on transhumanism, AI, and the potential dangers of unchecked billionaire influence.
Key Points:
Thiel's Hesitation: The video starts by referencing Peter Thiel's interview where he seemed uncertain about whether humanity should continue.
Transhumanism and AI: The discussion explores the transhumanist philosophy prevalent in Silicon Valley, focusing on merging humans with technology and AI, as exemplified by Mark Zuckerberg's vision of brain implants.
Autism and Conformity: Glenn discusses Thiel's perspective on autism, suggesting that it can provide a detachment from societal norms, fostering innovation.
Billionaire Culture: A significant portion of the video critiques the culture of Silicon Valley billionaires, arguing that their wealth and power, combined with constant flattery, can lead to detachment from reality, dangerous levels of self-confidence, and utopian/dystopian visions for society.
Essentialism vs. Nihilism: The video touches on the philosophical implications of transhumanism, contrasting it with essentialist views of humanity and raising concerns about the potential destruction of what it means to be human.
Lack of Debate: Glenn expresses concern about the lack of societal debate and safeguards surrounding the rapid advancement of AI, driven by billionaires with unchecked power.
Highlights:
Glenn's concern about billionaires' ability to reshape society without proper debate due to their wealth and perceived brilliance.
The discussion of Thiel's autism and how it might influence his unconventional thinking.
The comparison of mind-altering drugs to autism as a means of achieving transcendent thought.
The critique of Mark Zuckerberg's vision of brain implants and the potential implications for humanity.
About Channel:
Independent, Unencumbered Analysis and Investigative Reporting, Captive to No Dogma or Faction.
Der Technologie-Unternehmer Elon Musk hat die Gründung einer eigenen Partei verkündet. "Heute wird die Amerika-Partei gebildet, um euch eure Freiheit zurückzugeben", schrieb Musk auf seinem Onlinedienst X.
Nennen wir so. Ist etwas kürzer und niedlicher als der typisch deutsche Begriff Reichshauptpersoneneinwasserungssportanlagenzentrum oder wie auch immer
"Bäder" gibts auch in Norddeutschland, das ist auch nicht länger als Badi (wobei Schwimmbäder vermutlich häufiger ist). Badi ist aber definitiv niedlicher!
I have a small lemon tree that was bought from a local grower and came with the extra bonus of an Asian Citrus Psysllid infestation. The tree is dead now and I'd love to get a new tree, but want to make sure I've done everything I could to prevent a new tree from getting infested by any Psysllid still in the area.
Is there anything I can do to treat my soil or surrounding plants to make sure those little buggers aren't going to keep coming back? I'm in California where the sale of IMIDACLOPRID products is banned, which was previously the primary treatment for this.
Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean’s top predator likes to make friends.
Zachary Miller Read our editorial on mass deportations here, and the ongoing struggle against it here. On Saturday (06/21), landscaper Narciso Barranco was beaten and arrested by federal agents whi…
Hi there, I've got these really odd issue where certain windows will cause random lines like the one in the screenshot appear on my screen. They will often flicker a bit and will dissapear if I hover my mouse over them. The lines will display what is beneath the window itself. These occour quite frequently and are frankly getting quite annoying to deal with.
Is this a known issue with KDE right now? It does not happen while using Gnome on the same machine + screen. If it matters I am running CachyOS.
If there is anythign I can do to fix this then I'd greatly appriciate some pointers!
increase virtual memory reserved for Binder buffers from 1MiB to 8MiB due to Android 16 having a very large Binder transaction scaling up based on the number of apps and profiles which can go beyond the total size limit and break fully booting the OS, which occurred for a tiny number of our Alpha testers (if you were one of the tiny number of Alpha channel testers running into this, you can sideload this release to resolve the issue)
fix issues with display of the end session button to avoid it being wrongly displayed for Owner or not displayed for secondary users (we may remove this part of the upstream end session UI or make it optional since the functionality is also in the power menu)
update Pixel USB HAL to Android 16 (this was omitted in the initial port due to needing special handling for our USB-C port and pogo pins control feature)
always use UTC as the time zone for build date properties
kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision
ICEBlock is making incredibly false privacy claims for marketing. They falsely claim it provides complete anonymity when it doesn't. They're ignoring both data kept by Apple and data available to the server but not stored. They're also spreading misinformation about Android:
Their claims about push notifications on Android compared to iOS are completely false. Both Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) function in a similar way with similar privacy. However, Android does not force using FCM and apps can use other push systems.
iOS forces uses Apple services including getting apps through Apple where they have a record of which apps each person and account has installed and using their push notification service. Both FCM and APNs have tokens. Android doesn't allow apps to access device IDs. Push tokens aren't device IDs.
Apple and Google can identify devices/users based on push tokens obtained by law enforcement from services. Unlike Google, Apple only recently began requiring warrants:
Apple and Google can identify devices/users based on push tokens obtained by law enforcement from services. Unlike Google, Apple only recently began requiring warrants:
https://www.reuters.
pastebin archive (mildly unsatisfactory recreation, for example uses the wrong character for the headlights instead of perhaps 日): web.archive.org/web/2023061201…
have given up looking for older versions to archive but ~~if anyone knows how to search usenet communities that might be where the forum OOP got this from lives~~ actually i’m pretty sure 4-ch.net/dqn/index.html is the forum as it perfectly matches the description—all posts are timestamped 1993-09
People are starting to get weirdly mad about this so I will destroy the magic and just so that no, this post was not actually made in 1993, it comes from a forum where a big gimmick is that it is perpetually the September of 1993. The post is from like, 2012 or something.
A consulting firm involved in the scandal-plagued Gaza Humanitarian Foundation entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to develop the initiative and modelled a plan to "relocate" Palestinians from Gaza as part of its work, a Financial Times inves…
The US mercenary firm overseeing a controversial Gaza aid programme is the creation of a bespectacled Chicago private equity baron and a CIA spy with old ties to a Donald Trump ally who participated in one of the Middle East's nastiest diplomatic rif…
I used to work at a place outside the city that only had one bus after work and it was kinda spotty and unreliable. However, there was an online API provided by the bus company that told me where the bus is.
So I wrote a Python script and a Linux alert that would give me a notification when the bus was within range, with enough time to get to the stop on time.
I found a webpage that uses it and found out that it requires no authentication. So I just copied the url and sent a request every 5 seconds just like the webpage did. It gave a csv of busses, their routes and gps locations.
It depends on the transit service, and how much their IT people suck. I'm pretty sure there have been multiple attempts to make standardized APIs for this sort of thing, but you shouldn't necessarily expect them to be widely used except maybe in Europe.
Do a web search for "[transit service name] API" and start from there.
Edit: My local transit service apparently publishes a GTFS feed, which may be more widespread than I assumed, but I'm honestly kinda surprised they didn't try to roll their own or something stupid like that.
The latest attack on him is journalistically unconscionable, and so is the editors’ reaction to legitimate criticism. In a story played by its editors on its home page and boosted by its reporter as…
BlackRock Inc. halted its search for investors to back a multibillion-dollar Ukraine recovery fund earlier this year after Donald Trump’s election victory saw the US sour on the eastern European country, people familiar with the discussions said.
Twenty years ago this week, my book, IBM and the Holocaust, exposed—backed up by a tower of documentation— that IBM knowingly organized all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even ext…
The European Union said it will stick to its timeline for rolling out its AI legislation, ignoring calls by tech companies to delay the bloc's AI rules.
No. Because your first mistake was calling it "naughty". When it's perfectly valid, acceptable and shouldn't be seen as out of the ordinary or somehow 'bad'. 😜
I know bsky is not everyone's jam. But I promise wafrn will do the best to protect you from stupid shit they do. The main wafrn instance has blocked jd vance as example ;D
Exciting! I've made an effort to let go of Insta for both privacy and hatred of Zuck's policies, which left me stuck on Tumblr to look at any fanart/fandom content. Hopefully this could replace people's need for Tumblr in a few years, especially since they also do a shit job of caring about their users.
Edit: Knowing the context of the name is hilarious, wish I was there for the Tumblr exodus. I will be sure to spread to other platforms about this wonderful service.
Well, tumblr died out in 2017 because they said "NO PORN!!!"
And all the blogs died.
It's like Dr Cox said: "If you take all the porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left. www.bringbacktheporn.com and nobody would visit because it doesn't have porn."
So. Does WAFRN have porn? And also.....why are these things ALWAYS named with weird hard to pronounce names? Come see my new website Drufyflezak!
i was big in the david karp era fandom tumblr and loved it during gleek tumblr and spn tumblr days (i still have an account but don't use it as much) so i'm definitely going to look at this (as someone that also uses bsky, i like the idea that it's integrated with atproto too. i trust that it's trans and queer friendly too? :^
Fantastic idea! I miss Tumblr terribly ever since the Great Porn Ban of 2018, even though I never even reblogged or followed 'adult' blogs. I just wanted to reblog holsum and funny fanart, but fuck giving into puritan corpo censorship.
What's the moderation policy on genocide denial and the like? I hate having to ask this, but having heard too many people deny the Holodomor on here, I feel it necessary to make the inquiry.
For that matter, more generally, are you prepared, in terms of moderation structure, for the massive amount of legitimately disturbing material that's going to pass through the site and will need to be removed if the site grows beyond a few hundred users? I would hate to join and then see this crash because of (completely understandable) moderator/admin burnout at the depravity and speed of mankind's worst elements.
its a fedi platform, shit will happen but we have blocked the worst of the wrost on fedi. And we also check registrations for vpns. Registration with vpn is not allowed for safety
This guy's videos are what got me to get on Tumblr. Though I just end up using it to scream into the void because nobody ever comments or reblogs with added content.
Is registration on the wafrn website backlogged? I submitted a registration bout 12 hours ago, and the registration page said to wait a few hours for review. Got nothin in my email just yet. Not that I'm antsy, and there's no rush; just hoping to know when I should follow up to log in :u
I didn't get any email confirmation about my submitted registration, I realize. I refrained to keep from spamming, but... Should I actually submit another? 🤐 Edit: think I saw the fdroid app & submitted my registration form there, mentioning in case it's relevant
Thank you for this! I'm not sure how I would've found out about Wafrn otherwise, lol
For me, Tumblr was an online culture different from the ADHD of other journaling/blogging platforms like Instagram or Twitter. You could find conversations in tags, gifs didn't lag my browser to hell, fan content was proliferous there, webpages could be personalized to the lengths you might've gone to in MySpace. It was the place to find fandoms and fandom content, even for the most obscure series. There were no ads. And I felt like gifs/texts of porn and kinks were made more accessible when searched for by tags.
There was no algorithm - discovery of new blogs was just subscribing to tags & maybe following who your followed-people followed, the way the fediverse kinda is.
I felt like the presentation was good to relish each post of content with less distraction, and the pagination + scroll browsing was just enough to keep me addicted.
I see the tumblr culture is already present, congrats! Although I never personally used tumblr, my understanding is that more than features or functionality it was very much the culture that its users cultivated that made that site special.
Millions of people using Windows 10 are facing a tough choice. Microsoft plans to stop offering security updates for the system, leaving countless computers
Ok is what is the "META" answer to grandma's laptop is going to get borked. Put this USB stick in her laptop and press next a bunch of times and she can keep using it. You have 5 lines of text to explain this solution.
I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that's working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don't want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they're comfortable.
It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.
Ok, what I am hearing is Nixos but with an installer like this
Rufus ISO to usb stick stick usb stick into computer press magical button to boot usb <-- this should be the most difficult part of the process Screen appears, least amount of text possible Ask only the important questions, on a single screen
then one last big scary page "this will erase everything on your computer"
Check "I understand" then press"ERASE BUTTON" (or cancel and reboots)
then it reboots and everything your average grandmother needs right there a google button an office button and that's pretty much it
Cool, so we need two things, The most streamlined installer possible. "Grandma's Universal Nix.Conf"
The installer should be written using 4th grade simple english, no jargon
In the top right corner there should be a language selector.
There should be only one page of questions.
The installer should work completely offline.
The installer should detect all peripherals and modify the nix file accordingly.
The second page should only be tge warning about erasing everything
The installer should detect if a nixos installation already exist. If it does, then offer the user to repair the bootloader
Optionally, the installer coukd detect a windows installation. Check the amount of free space left on the drive.
In this case instead of a wipe, offer to shrink the windows partition and install nixos in the liberated space. Install a bootloader setup for dual boot. Auto mount the ntfs partition and place a shortcut to the c:\user folder on the desktop.
I think we can be even simpler than that. Don't ask any questions. Simply generate the hardware-configuration.nix and have a single configuration.nix that is unchanged:
Some easy-to-use and simple DE. I'm thinking something like lxqt or xfce, maybe Pantheon - but that would be more familiar to Mac users than Windows. KDE seems way too complicated to just have it in configuration.nix without touching it, and it can sometimes break on updates.
Chromium (with pre-installed ublock origin)
Libreoffice
Some flatpak store (so that people can install apps without touching configuration.nix)
Make a simple "update" app that just pops up once in a couple weeks or so, prompts you to click a button and then runs npins update and nixos-rebuild boot, and finally annoys you until you reboot (it should also update to the next stable channel when that becomes available, and make that a big deal so that a user understands it might change some of their workflows)
Set up the bootloader so that if a generation "fails" (some script in the autostart of the DE doesn't set a flag somewhere) on the next boot it boots a previous generation, kinda like Android's A/B slot system but better. I don't think systemd-boot allows this sort of thing, but I think it's possible with a GRUB script
Maybe add a shortcut to open tmate and copy the URL to clipboard, so that you can send it someone in the know and they can help you troubleshoot
Finally, use impermanence to make sure everything outside /home, /nix, and wherever flatpak are stored, is wiped on every reboot and recreated from the generation, so that "reboot it" is a viable troubleshooting strategy.
Installed should be downloaded by going to grandmasnixos.com On the front page, a single click starts to download a single file, that contains everything It is a tailored rufus executable with the ISO that contains everything to make it to first desktop boot When download ends, no internet connection will be required to make it to grandmasnixos desktop
When the file is clicked and a usb stick has been inserted beforehand, the grandmasnixos ISO is preselected, rufus autochooses the usb stick
User only needs to press "start"
The motherboard version is checked against a lookup table, and the user is told
Reboot computer a press $KEY_TO_USB_BOOT and choose to boot the usb key
Installation is a single screen that says "This will erase everything on this computer, to continue, click the checkbox below" [ ] I understand this will erase everything on my computer buttons below [ ERASE AND INSTALL GRANDMASNIXOS ] or [ CANCEL AND REBOOT] (first button only clickable if the checkbox is checked)
(there is an "Options and settings" button somewhere, it does not have to be clicked to continue)
No further user interaction until it boots into a working desktop
There is no password by default, the desktop auto-logs in, no remote access is possible until a password is set, sudo works passwordless
There should be no updating unless enabled, no telemetry, no call home of any kind, the system should be able to work offline and forever without an internet access and never nag the user.
The desktop environment should be something occasional win10 using grandma will not get lost in
Taskbar at bottom Desktop that you can dump files onto and start stuff by clicking those files systray on the right Large font start menu Start menu includes a single settings panels that does everything a user needs (passwords, wifi, power management, update, timezone, language, locale, host and domain name, remote desktop etc..)
taskbar should have pinned the most important apps file browser, browser, calculator, notepad, word-like and maybe a mail client maybe a zoom? client or something equivalent but open source and usable ?
If updating is turned on, it should be very conservative, updates hand curated by grandmasnixos, basically never uses software that hasn't been proven rock solid for at least 6 months. Rolling back any update should be one-click-trivial
On first boot there could be an "out of box experience" screen that allows setting up
wifi password region/timezone/locale/language power settings host and domain name password enable updates enable remote desktop and services open easy user guide
So total, from download to desktop it should be 8 clicks total counting press F9 during boot as a "click"
There should be no updating unless enabled <...> and never nag the user.
I disagree, at that point you might as well continue using Win10. Security updates are the #1 reason to do this. Most computer use nowadays is networked (actually in a browser), and it's super important we keep that updated.
If updating is turned on, it should be very conservative, updates hand curated by grandmasnixos, basically never uses software that hasn’t been proven rock solid for at least 6 months
Eh, this sounds like a lot of work. Probably just use the stable channels, and only manually test when switching to a new stable channel.
Rolling back any update should be one-click-trivial
Agreed, should also be very obvious (like a label on the desktop that says "Issues after update?" and gives you a button to roll back and reboot)
The desktop environment should be something occasional win10 using grandma will not get lost in
This is the main question IMHO. I've not used any DEs for a while, so don't really know which one would fit this best while also being simple and robust.
Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.
Yes, I find it baffling that this does not yet exist. I was installing debian the other day and the incessant one-question-at-a-time installation with long delays between the question was aggravating. In particular since none of these questions really needed to be answered at the time.
Proxmox does it better, but still with annoying questions and limitation like having a mandatory static IP address and making your enter an email address notification. This is all actually optional stuff and it could all be dealt with after the install is completed.
Most consumer hardware on earth does already (Android phones). The problem is those drivers are usually proprietary bullshit that's very difficult to integrate with anything but OEMs kernel fork & Android version. Unfortunately I don't really foresee that changing in the near future, hopefully if Linux becomes more mainstream, Linux phones become too and then we get some progress.
And for laptops/desktops, I think the situation is pretty good already as well. Many mainstream OEMs have an option with Linux pre-installed now, and the drivers there are mostly FOSS. I'm hoping that the problematic part vendors e.g. NVidia and Broadcom step up and provide sources for their drivers - otherwise they will continue to be a buggy mess that most people hate.
Nvidia recently started NVK for Turing and newer and even more recently it was made conformant going back to Maxwell, but that still doesn't give me a lot of hope for everything between Maxwell 1 (so basically just the GTX 750/750Ti for desktop Maxwell 1 cards) and Turing after driver version 580.
Also, Nouveau works for Maxwell 1 and earlier but ymmv with that stack, and it's still not like Mesa RADV and AMDGPU for Radeon cards going back to GCN1.
I've got only one machine left running Windows 10 at home: a desktop PC I use exclusively for gaming. I increasingly look forward to purging Windows from it and installing Bazzite when the EOL date comes around.
Bit confused, what would they even do with a report of downvote? Doesn’t make sense.
Plus don’t even understand why someone cares so much about downvoting that they would message you and report it. The upvote/ downvote means seriously nothing. It’s “thin air”.
Put down your device and it has no impact on your live. Continue using Lemmy and it will have no impact on how you use Lemmy.
I mean, I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate he's primarily Turkish and got Swedish as a freebee somehow...
What was his official business in Sweden that allowed him entry and to operate within the country? Why was he "allowed" to loiter and fuck around I guess is my question
All of these things can be helped by using a tracking app that projects all your balances and recalculates every time you put in more information or you simulate various choices you're about to pull the trigger on. You will get instant feedback and see how it screws up your bills money and hopefully learn to heat that feeling so its not such an active effort to stick to the plan ans go with the flow
Question is in the title: What is the supposed workflow for vanilla Gnome for keyboard users?
Is there any video/design documents which explain, how the workflow is supposed to be?
Assume, I have a full screen web browser on workspace 1. Now I want to have a terminal... I hit the super-key, type terminal, hit enter ... and then I have a terminal which does not start maximized on workspace 1, so I can either maximize the terminal and switch between the applications, arrange them side by side... or I can navigate to workspace 2, start the terminal there (the terminal will not start maximized again on an empty workspace 2) ... and switch between the two workspaces (AFAIK there are no hotkeys specified by default to navigate directly to a workspace)...
What I simply do not understand: Does the vanilla Gnome workflow expect you to use mouse and keyboard? Like hit super, use mouse to go to next workspace, type terminal, click to maximize terminal (or use super-up)?
It just seems like a lot of work/clicks/keys to achieve something simple. And to my understanding Gnome expects you to use basically every application with a full screen window anyway, so why does it not open a new application on the next free workspace full screen by default?
There's hotkeys for workspace navigation, I use them all the time: Super+Alt+Left/Right will navigate to the next/previous workspace (Super+PageDown/Up also works). If you go in Settings -> Keyboard shortcuts -> Navigation you'll find more, notably to move windows between workspaces.
As for the fullscreen by default, there's extensions for that I guess, though personally it doesn't bother me since after the window is maximized once it should restore its maximized state the next time it's opened. With Super+Arrow keys to position the window, I personally barely use the mouse for window management.
one thing gnome is really good at is multitouch touchpad gestures. when on a laptop, and you don't have to move a lat to get to the mouse, it's very quick.
Window management is one of those areas I'm fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we've relied on the window metaphor as the...
If you have apps in your dock you can also use "Super + 1-9" to start those apps. For example i have the browser on the first position and the terminal on the second so i switch between them with Super+1 and Super+2. It's also the same on Windows with apps in the task bar by the way. I am fine with it so far but I have thought about switching to a distro with a tiling window manager but the distro I currently use just doesn't support those and I don't want to leave right now.
I have a fairly vanilla Gnome and a WIP Sway for testing. Gnome is a much easier workflow, and the customization just takes a little reading (much less than Sway or similar, you just have to use the GUI not manpages and dotfiles).
Application launcher shortcuts by default are bound to Super+numbers according to the order of the bar in the overlay. So if your terminal was application 3 in that bar just hit Super+3 (I just bound the launch command to Super+Return in the custom shortcuts). Shift+Super+PageDown or Shift+alt+Super+right will shift an app to a workspace to the right. Super+Up will make it fullscreen. My workflow is changed mostly due to a lack of a PageUp/Down on my laptop.
If you assume that the workspaces don't need to be numbered, Super+Tab just to jump to another app is handy, or Super+PageUp/Down. I use touchpad swipe controls a lot, or my user defined controls.
But for a two application workflow as described, Super+3 (or whatever to launch terminal), Super+up (To fullscreen), and then switch between them with Super+Tab, no extra workspaces required. That's three shortcuts, four if you move terminal to another workspace.
Gnome likes you to sit back and think about if what you are doing is really necessary (gnomey? gnome-like?), its quirky like that, but there are loads of options for user defined stuff in the settings, so the classic i3 bindings are really easy to put in or whatever.
According to help.gnome.org/users/gnome-hel… you should be able to use Shift + Super + Page Up/Down to move application windows between workspaces, seems to work for me.
So for your example start Terminal, then maximize it (Super + Up Key), then move the application window to another workspace (Shift + Super + Page Up/Down).
I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It's keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right.
then I have a terminal which does not start maximized on workspace 1
I run devilspie in the background to catch windows of certain applications such as terminal and maximize them on the fly. For this reason, I must disable wayland.
Does the vanilla Gnome workflow expect you to use mouse and keyboard?
Yes, both, apparently.
It just seems like a lot of work/clicks/keys to achieve something simple.
Well, that's what you get for downplaying the role of icon grids.
If I have firefox in full screen then I can hit the super key and search for term, and open it. If I want to maximize the window, it's Super-up. If I want it to take up the right side of the screen, I use Super-right. Now I have the terminal on the right side of the screen, and the left screen has half of the full-screen firefox. If I want the windows side by side, then I can switch to firefox (S-Tab), get out of full screen (F11) and align the window to the left (S-left).
AFAIK there are no hotkeys specified by default to navigate directly to a workspace)…
alt-Super-right/left to switch space, and shift-alt-super-right/left to move the current window to the next workspace. So to go from fullscreen firefox in workspace 1 to fullscreen terminal in workspace 2, it's: S-alt-right, Then super, 'term', enter. Now terminal is open. You can maximize (S-up) or go fullscreen (F11)
Maybe it's a lot of keys, but gnome is pretty good about navigation/window management without a mouse
so why does it not open a new application on the next free workspace full screen by default?
Is that a default in other desktop environments? I usually stay in one work space and use S-tab and S-` to switch apps
... actually, now that I'm trying it, it is nice to have a terminal full screen in its own workspace
You can use a combination of shift, meta, pgup/pgdown and arrow keys to move between workspaces and to move applications between workspaces, and you can alt-tab to switch window focus within a workspace. window management and manipulation can be entirely keyboard-driven
edit: i just pulled out my laptop to find out how you do it. i only know from muscle memory.
super(windows) + pgup/pgdown to move between workspaces
shift + super + pgup/pgdown to move focused window between workspaces
Meta+arrow keys to manage windows: left or right to get a split, up to maximize.
Meta+pgup/pgdn to switch workspaces. Add shift to move the current window with you.
Those are the main ones I use all the time, but there's a full list (some that aren't bound by default) in the settings. I would probably remap pgup and pgdn to something closer to my fingers on a regular keyboard, but I use an ergo split 60% so I already have those keys on my home row.
Tbh GNOME feels best with a combo of mouse and keyboard, like Meta+mousewheel scrolling lets you switch workspaces very smoothly. And I think I had to map this myself, but I use right click drag + Meta to resize windows dynamically. But the above keys let me do 90% of what I want to with windows.
If you really want a fully keyboard-driven window management scheme you should probably check out a standalone window manager. I love sway personally.
The supposed gnome workflow is for keyboard users to go fuck themselves.
Don’t waste time learning the gnome way of doing things, it’s not gonna remain consistent long enough to let you reap any benefits from that knowledge.
Keyboard -> Keyboard shortcuts from Settings will show all the available keyboard shortcuts. You can also create your own custom keybindings
These seem like a lot of personal design complaints rather than actual issues with GNOME itself.
And to my understanding Gnome expects you to use basically every application with a full screen window anyway
You misunderstood, that's not what GNOME expects at all. Your app not maximizing on startup is because the app doesn't maximize on startup. GNOME doesn't have a setting to maximize all apps by default since that should be the app's responsibility.
If you want the auto-tiling window manager experience, you'll need to install an extension (Paperwm, tiling shell, Forge, Pop shell). Extensions are like applications, there's no shame in using them.
I just open apps with meta+search or meta+1 or other number of they are in the dock and then alt-tab between them. I used to use workspaces, but it didn't bring me much benefits. I never have such amount of apps open anyway.
I’m a teen from Turkey. I’m moving to the US at the end of this month with my mom to live with her fiancé, so we’re going on a K-1 visa. He lives in Los Angeles County. I’ve been following the news regularly and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous by what’s happening in the country these days… such a bad time to move there.
Axum
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.
The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.
SpaceNoodle
in reply to Axum • • •Libra00
in reply to SpaceNoodle • • •qt0x40490FDB
in reply to Libra00 • • •ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
in reply to Libra00 • • •SatyrSack
in reply to Libra00 • • •aksdb
in reply to SatyrSack • • •SpaceNoodle
in reply to Libra00 • • •HayadSont
in reply to SpaceNoodle • • •~~> plus sudden updates that nuke active applications.~~
~~This is not what's supposed to happen. If an app installed through flatpak is active while it's receiving an update, then the update is not supposed to affect the running application until it's closed/restarted.~~
Edit: Somehow I didn't realize the concern was raised against Snap and not Flatpak.
Joël de Bruijn
in reply to HayadSont • • •HayadSont
in reply to Joël de Bruijn • • •SpaceNoodle
in reply to HayadSont • • •HayadSont
in reply to SpaceNoodle • • •aksdb
in reply to HayadSont • • •First_Thunder
in reply to Libra00 • • •Caveman
in reply to Axum • • •Snap is not all bad if you're on a Ubuntu based distro, I just don't like the way it's pushed and that it comes from Ubuntu mostly. Startup time is a major issue for me also, but all in all it works.
I'm still sitting on the fence, heavily prefer flatpak but when Ubuntu is going to package nvidia drivers in a snap it's a thing I'm up for trying.
My understanding is that if I'm on Ubuntu and the snap uses the same underlying Ubuntu version as my distro it should be fast but I haven't seen it.
VitabytesDev
in reply to Axum • • •Axum
in reply to VitabytesDev • • •lordnikon
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Allero
in reply to lordnikon • • •Linux users will do anything not to use GUI
lighthearted
Nanook
in reply to shrewdcat • •katy ✨
in reply to shrewdcat • • •muzzle
in reply to katy ✨ • • •Snot Flickerman
in reply to muzzle • • •Nanook
in reply to Snot Flickerman • •Yozul
in reply to muzzle • • •Nanook
in reply to Yozul • •muzzle
in reply to Yozul • • •Yozul
in reply to muzzle • • •RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️
in reply to muzzle • • •MotoAsh
in reply to RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️ • • •Thorned_Rose
in reply to MotoAsh • • •muzzle
in reply to RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️ • • •comfy
in reply to muzzle • • •HayadSont
in reply to comfy • • •flatpak uninstall --unusedright after uninstalling a flatpak. I don't get why it doesn't do this automatically. Granted, some distro package managers (used to) operate somewhat similarly in that they required theautoremoveoption.comfy
in reply to HayadSont • • •flatpak uninstall --unusedand it didn't remove these ones. So there's something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That's a wild guess, I don't know how it works.comfy
in reply to katy ✨ • • •Carlos Solís
in reply to shrewdcat • • •NotProLemmy
in reply to Carlos Solís • • •like this
Carlos Solís likes this.
Luca
in reply to Carlos Solís • • •Looks like it does? Or at least could?
unix.stackexchange.com/questio…
I've never seen one so far though
trevor (he/they)
in reply to Carlos Solís • • •I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think of static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
like this
Carlos Solís likes this.
ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.
Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.
Nanook
in reply to ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] • •shrewdcat
in reply to ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] • • •Nanook
in reply to shrewdcat • •ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •anarchoilluminati [comrade/them]
in reply to ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] • • •Well, I heard that people who use flatpacks are libs. True?
Sorry, I just think it's funny that Linux users get so defensive about this stuff. You really felt insulted by this?
Nanook
in reply to anarchoilluminati [comrade/them] • •@anarchoilluminati [comrade/them] @ZWQbpkzl [none/use name] A lot of my defensiveness is not related to Linux per se' but to the waste that takes so much potential away from what we could do. The first computer I ever programmed had 512 bytes of core memory, you could only program it with machine code, there wasn't even an assembler. Still I was fascinated.
Then a friend bought a Compucolor II 8080 based machine, got board with it after a few months and lent it to me. I learned to program 8080 assembly on it.
Then I bought a Trs-80 model III with the intent of running a BBS on it. I had a whole of 48k of RAM and 320k of floppy disk to work with. I wanted to run a BBS on it, after spending another $300 for a RS-232 port (yes a UART and a few buffer chips set you back $300 to Tandy), I quickly discovered the operating system had no support. And because a lot of what I wanted to do would have been too slow in BASIC, I wrote a custom OS/language (It was like TRSDOS with Microsoft BASIC in structure, but had support for the RS-232 serial port, a lot of additional keywords, better disk I/O routines that would
anticipate running out of buffer and spin up and seek the heads ahead of a read to reduce the latency of the floppy drives, format output to screen width, etc. When you're trying to do all of this on such a small machine, you learn to write efficient code. Then for the rest of your life you can't understand why it takes someone else a 5Ghz CPU and a TB of disk to do what you did on 2Mhz and 320k and it's frustrating.
ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]
in reply to anarchoilluminati [comrade/them] • • •Horse {they/them}
in reply to shrewdcat • • •shrewdcat
in reply to Horse {they/them} • • •Ephera
in reply to Horse {they/them} • • •cmgvd3lw
in reply to shrewdcat • • •giacomo
Unknown parent • • •SpaceNoodle
Unknown parent • • •brianary
in reply to shrewdcat • • •paequ2
in reply to brianary • • •I used Flatpak Zoom for all my job interviews recently. Camera and mic worked flawlessly.
brianary
in reply to paequ2 • • •Allero
in reply to paequ2 • • •eta
in reply to brianary • • •Damage
in reply to eta • • •brianary
in reply to eta • • •eta
in reply to brianary • • •brianary
in reply to eta • • •eta
in reply to brianary • • •brianary
in reply to eta • • •D_Air1
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.
To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with
downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".
One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.
HayadSont
Unknown parent • • •Nanook
Unknown parent • •qt0x40490FDB
Unknown parent • • •Drunk & Root
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Mordikan
in reply to shrewdcat • • •eta
in reply to Mordikan • • •Mordikan
in reply to eta • • •thingsiplay
Unknown parent • • •atzanteol
in reply to shrewdcat • • •m532
in reply to atzanteol • • •Write name of program
Enter
☂️-
in reply to shrewdcat • • •zarenki
in reply to HayadSont • • •A few reasons security people can have to hesitate on Flatpak:
By a typical home user's perspective this probably seems like nothing; in terms of security you're still usually better off with Flatpak than installing random AUR packages, adding random PPA repos, using AppImage programs, installing a bunch of Steam games, blindly building an unfamiliar project you cloned from github, or running bash scripts you find online. But in many contexts none of that is acceptable.
the_wiz
in reply to shrewdcat • • •buwho
in reply to shrewdcat • • •BrianTheeBiscuiteer
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Uairhahs
in reply to BrianTheeBiscuiteer • • •data1701d (He/Him)
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I'd take a well-maintained native package for my distro over a Flatpak, but sometimes, a Flatpak is just the the easiest way to get the latest version of an application working on Debian without too much tinkering - not always no tinkering, but better than nothing.
This is especially true of GIMP - Flatpak GIMP + Resynthesizer feels like the easiest way to experience GIMP these days. Same with OBS - although I have to weather the Flatpak directory structure, plugins otherwise feel easier to get working than the native package. The bundled runtimes are somewhat annoying, but I'm also not exactly hurting for storage at the moment - I could probaby do to put more of my 2 TB main SSD to use.
I usually just manage Flatpaks from the terminal, though I often have to refresh myself on application URLs. I somewhat wish one could set nicknames so they need not remember the full name.
eta
in reply to zarenki • • •sovietknuckles [they/them]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •underscores
in reply to sovietknuckles [they/them] • • •Me pretty much only ever using arch Linux: "what the fuck is a flatpak"
I once had to install Firefox into wsl (Ubuntu) and I wanted the kms on the spot.
But maybe it's not that bad for newer people to get started with Linux.
Allero
in reply to sovietknuckles [they/them] • • •Dessalines
in reply to Allero • • •Horse {they/them}
in reply to Dessalines • • •Dessalines
in reply to Horse {they/them} • • •Horse {they/them}
in reply to Dessalines • • •the weirdest one was ghostwriter from the official repos, for some reason one day the preview window showed heavily corrupted output and tinkering with it on and off for a week did nothing, including a complete purge and reinstall of the program
the flatpak was the only version of it that worked after that
Allero
in reply to Dessalines • • •Nanook
in reply to shrewdcat • •chicken
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Default_Defect
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Jankatarch
in reply to Default_Defect • • •brax
in reply to Default_Defect • • •gravitas_deficiency
in reply to Default_Defect • • •It’s extremely context-dependent.
If we’re talking about enterprise-grade, five-nines reliability: I want the absolute simplest, bare-bones, stripped down, optimized infra I can get my hands on.
If we’re talking about my homelab or whatever else non-critical system: I’m gonna fuck around and play with whatever I feel like.
Ferk
in reply to Default_Defect • • •You are mixing different ideas of freedom.
Software freedom is not the same as freedom of choice of software.
You don't need Linux to have choices of what software to use, you have that in most (all?) proprietary systems, in some you might even have more choices than in Linux.. even if it includes proprietary software.
This is analogous to how being a free person (not a slave) is not the same as having freedom to choose who to work for, even if some of them are slavers (ie. having freedom to choose your master).
Ziglin (it/they)
Unknown parent • • •MotoAsh
in reply to eta • • •I mean, they added "bash scripts you find online", which are only a problem if you don't look them over or cannot understand them first... Their post is very much cemented in the paranoid camp of security.
Not that they're wrong. That's the big thing about security once you go deep enough: the computer has to work for someone, and being able to execute much at all opens up some avenues of abuse. Like securing a web based service. It has to work for someone, so of course everything is still vulnerable at some point. Usually when private keys or passwords are compromised if they're doing things remotely correctly, but they're still technically vulnerable at some point.
Lettuce eat lettuce
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Flatpaks are pretty great for getting the latest software without having to have a cutting edge rolling release distro or installing special repos and making sure stuff doesn't break down the line.
I use Flatpaks for my software that I need the latest and greatest version of, and my distros native package for CLI apps and older software that I don't care about being super up to date.
My updater script handles all of it in one action anyways, so no biggie on that either.
Flatpaks are the best all-in-one solution when compared to Appimages or Snaps imo.
m532
in reply to Lettuce eat lettuce • • •Oh, that explains why they're completely bloated & useless to me. Arch btw
The_Grinch [he/him]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn't work for some reason.
Ardens
in reply to shrewdcat • • •juipeltje
in reply to shrewdcat • • •zarenki
in reply to MotoAsh • • •The parent comment mentions working on security for a paid OS, so looking at the perspective of something like the users of RHEL and SUSE: supply chain "paranoia" absolutely does matter a lot to enterprise users, many of which are bound by contract to specific security standards (especially when governments are involved). I noted that concerns at that level are rather meaningless to home users.
On a personal system, people generally do whatever they need to in order to get the software they want. Those things I listed are very common options for installing software outside of your distro's repos, and all of them offer less inherent vetting than Flathub while also tampering with your system more substantially. Though most of them at least use system libraries.
I would honestly expect that the vast majority of people who see installation steps including
curl [...] | sh(so common that even reputable projects like cargo/rust recommend it) simply run the command as-is without checking the downloaded script, and likewise do the same even if it'ssudo sh. That can still be more or less fine if you trust the vendor/host, its SSL certificate, and your ability to type/copy the domain without error. Even if you look at the script, that might not get you far if it happens to be a self-extracting one unless you also check its payload.Installation - The Cargo Book
doc.rust-lang.orgKorhaka
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Commiunism
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Allero
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Certainly a fan, and I don't understand the hate towards it.
Flatpaks are my preferred way of installing Linux apps, unless it is a system package, or something that genuinely requires extensive permissions like a VPN client, or something many other apps depend on like Wine.
The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:
What you gain for it? Everything.
Alternatives?
AppImages don't need an installation, so they are nice to see what the program is about. But for other uses, they are garbage-tier. Somehow they manage both not to integrate with the system and not be sandboxed, you need manual intervention or additional tools to at least update them/add to application menu, and ultimately, they depend on one file somewhere. This is extremely unreliable and one should likely never use AppImages for anything but "use and delete".
Snaps...aside from all the controversy about Snap Store being proprietary and Ubuntu shoving snaps down people's throats, they were just never originally developed with desktop applications in mind. As a result, Snaps are commonly so much slower and bulkier that it actually starts getting very noticeable. Permissions are also way less detailed, meaning you can't set apps up with minimum permissions for your use case.
This all leaves us with one King:
And it is Flatpak.
brax
in reply to Allero • • •Flatpaks, appimages, snaps, etc: why download dependencies once when you can download them every time and bloat your system? Also, heaving to list installed flatpaks and run them is dumb too, why aren't they proper executables? "flatpak run com.thisIsDumb.fuckinEh" instead of just ./fuckinEh
No thanks. I'll stick to repos and manually compiling software before I seek out a flatpak or the like.
This shit is why hobbies and things should be gatekept. Just look at how shit PC design is these days. Now they're coming after the OS.
Allero
in reply to brax • • •As I said, dependencies typically don't take that much space. We're not in the '80s, I can spare some megabytes to ensure my system runs smoothly and is managed well.
As per naming, I agree, but barely anyone uses command line to install Flatpaks, as they are primarily meant for desktop use. In GUI, Flatpaks are shown as any other package, and all it takes is to push "Install" button.
If you want to enjoy your chad geeky Linux, you still can. Go for CachyOS, or anything more obscure, never to use Flatpaks again. At the same time, let others use what is good and convenient to them.
Eyck_of_denesle
in reply to Allero • • •Jakeroxs
in reply to Eyck_of_denesle • • •Allero
in reply to Eyck_of_denesle • • •Please clarify, what option do you mean? Flatpaks are supported on any Linux system, it doesn't matter what distro or hardware. Or if you mean sparing some megabytes - typically yes as well. The smallest amount of memory I've seen on a laptop is 32gb, and typically it's no less than 250gb.
If it's not present in you distributions' app store, you can either enable it somewhere or download another app manager like Discover, GNOME Software, or pamac if you're on Arch.
If installation of some app incurs a few gbs of downloads, it is likely that your system updates packages alongside installing your app. Typical Flatpak app takes 10-150 megabytes.
Eyck_of_denesle
in reply to Allero • • •Allero
in reply to Eyck_of_denesle • • •https://rekabu.ru/u/nitrolife
in reply to Allero • • •I've been working on Linux for 15 years now and I perfectly remember the origin of many concepts. If you look at it through time, what would it be like:
1. We can build applications with external dependencies or a single binary, what should we choose?
2. The community is abandoning a single binary due to the increased weight of applications and memory consumption and libraries problems
3. Dependency hell is coming
...
4. Snap, flatpack, appimage and other strange solutions are inventing something, which are essentially a single binary, but with an overlay (if the developer has hands from the right place, which is often not the case)
5. Someone on lemmy says that he literally doesn't care if the application is built in a single binary, consumes extra memory and have libraries problems. Just close all permissions for that application...
Well, all I can say about this is just assemble a single binary for all applications, stop doing nonsense with a flatpack/snap/etc.
UPD: or if you really want to break all the conventions, just use nixos. You don't need snap/flatpack/etc.
Allero
in reply to • • •I don't mind other solutions, as long as they have the key features Flatpak offers, namely:
* Being open-source
* Having app permission system
* Having bundled dependencies
* Integrating decently with the system
Times are changing, and memory constraints for most programs are generally not relevant anymore.
grinka
in reply to • • •Papamousse
in reply to • • •JustEnoughDucks
in reply to Allero • • •The few things I don't like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):
But besides those small things, it seem great to me.
Allero
in reply to JustEnoughDucks • • •Eyck_of_denesle
in reply to Allero • • •Allero
in reply to Eyck_of_denesle • • •It would take 1,01gb
Dependencies typically take 5-80 megabytes of space.
Eyck_of_denesle
in reply to Allero • • •Allero
in reply to Eyck_of_denesle • • •Huh?
Either it did something it shouldn't, or the system updated Nvidia drivers every time for no apparent reason. I have an Nvidia GPU, running proprietary drivers, and haven't ever witnessed anything of the kind.
frozenspinach
in reply to Allero • • •Allero
in reply to frozenspinach • • •Wow that's actually big difference, thanks for bringing it up!
Good news, though, is that you are free to install Gimp as a native package, and use Flatpaks for the rest.
j0rge
in reply to Allero • • •Install GNU Image Manipulation Program on Linux | Flathub
Flathubm532
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Idk how, but one time I tried installing something as a flatpak and it took like 300+MB and a very long time. I figured something was wrong, found a way to install it normally and it took like 10MB and installed quickly. Idk what went wrong, but I'll never touch this garbage again
Edit: oh they're not for arch. Maybe they should have told me before the 300mb slog
zeca
in reply to m532 • • •m532
in reply to zeca • • •HexesofVexes
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Honestly, I am a little scarred from snap.
Otherwise I'm agnostic on flatpaks - I've used a couple and they're ok? They just remind me of old windows games that dump all their libraries in a folder with them.
On a modern system the extra space and loss of optimisation is ok, but on older hardware or when you're really trying to push your system to run something it technically shouldn't, I can see it being an issue.
ter_maxima
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I've heard Flatpaks aren't great at CLI tools, is that true ?
As a Nix user, I'm glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
pineapple
in reply to ter_maxima • • •trevor (he/they)
in reply to ter_maxima • • •I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
BudgetBandit
in reply to shrewdcat • • •T Jedi
in reply to shrewdcat • • •About the image: The joke's on you, I install my flatpaks via the terminal.
I've started using flatpaks more after starting using Bazzite and I liked them more than I expected. As a dev, I still need my work tools to be native, but most of my other needs are well covered by flatpaks.
Tip: Flatseal is a great config manager for flatpaks' permissions.
like this
Andreas Gütter likes this.
Outwit1294
in reply to T Jedi • • •T Jedi
in reply to Outwit1294 • • •It is mostly trial and error. I use it mostly to set envvars.
As an example, I add the ~/.themes folder and the GTK_THEME to allow some apps to get the themes I downloaded.
Outwit1294
in reply to T Jedi • • •Oh, so flatpaks cannot automatically get system themes?
If it is trial and error, is it really useful for a normal user?
T Jedi
in reply to Outwit1294 • • •System themes, probably most of them work. But most of them don't bother watching the user themes or icons folder.
I don't think Flatseal is that useful for the majority of users, no. But it is a good tool to have in mind when the need arises.
Outwit1294
in reply to T Jedi • • •Why do you think it is not useful?
I replaced Firefox system package with Flatpak because I think browser is the most used and vulnerable thing in my system. And the size seemed reasonable.
I did not replace Thunderbird because its size is almost 10 times.
DanWolfstone
in reply to Outwit1294 • • •Outwit1294
in reply to DanWolfstone • • •pineapple
in reply to T Jedi • • •hallettj
in reply to T Jedi • • •Ferk
in reply to hallettj • • •Installing them is not difficult. It's the same as any other flatpak.
The problem is when running them (actually, when running any flatpak, not just CLI tools) you need to type out the whole backwards domain thingy that flatpaks use as identifier, instead of having a proper typical and simple executable name like they would have if they were installed normally.
I end up adding either symlinks or aliases for all my flatpaks because of this reason. After doing that it's ok.. but it's just an extra step that's annoying and that the flatpak devs have no interest on fixing apparently.
pineapple
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I am definitely a fan. A lot of people say that flatpaks are bad because of sandboxing but I haven't seemed to have any issues with it.
Although I do try to use dnf when a dnf package is available (I use fedora)
Bjarne
in reply to shrewdcat • • •iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.
EDIT: or doesn’t want to do
jwmgregory
in reply to Bjarne • • •one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
ahoneybun
in reply to jwmgregory • • •Jhex
in reply to jwmgregory • • •jwmgregory
in reply to Jhex • • •is garuda like endeavorOS or manjaro where it’s technically still an arch-based rolling release distro but the OS maintainers hold packages from upstream mainline arch?
i don’t hate that model, it’s more fun to use as an end user for sure, but i feel like it kind of defeats the point of arch’s entire ethos lmao.
Spectrism
in reply to jwmgregory • • •jwmgregory
in reply to Spectrism • • •sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.
i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.
arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM^ - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.
ayaya
in reply to jwmgregory • • •All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.
The
google-chromeandchromiumpackages are already a binaries so my guess is you needungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.
frozenspinach
in reply to jwmgregory • • •My understanding is that constantly triggering compiling like that shouldn't be happening in any typical arch + pacman situation. But it can happen in AUR. If it does, I think it's a special case where you should be squinting and figuring out what's going on and stopping the behavior; it's by no means philosophically endorsed as the usual case scenario for packages on arch.
There's certainly stuff about Arch that's Different(TM) but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.
jwmgregory
in reply to frozenspinach • • •saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.
not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.
frozenspinach
in reply to jwmgregory • • •Feyd did a pretty good job of outlining the AUR disclaimers in a different comment so I won't do that here. It's true that Arch won't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, but again it's nuts to claim that routine compiling is the usual case for all rolling distros and belies your claim that you're familiar with usual case experience. There's absolutely no routine experience where you're regularly compiling.
I've used debian and apt-get most of my life, I've used arch on a pinetab 2 for about 6 months, regularly playing with pacman and yay and someone who's never met me is saying I'm a fanboy for being familiar with linux package management. 🤷♂️
jwmgregory
in reply to frozenspinach • • •saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.
not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.
berno
in reply to Bjarne • • •frozenspinach
in reply to Bjarne • • •huh? Using package managers almost never involves compiling. It's there as a capability, but the point is to distribute pre-compiled packages and skip that step in the vast majority of cases.
Bluewing
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I have used rpms, AppImages, Flatpaks, and source. I have even used a snap or two when I had no other choice.
If you can't work with them all, can you even say you Linux Bro?
AnIntenseMoist
in reply to Bluewing • • •Diplomjodler
in reply to Bluewing • • •Bluewing
in reply to Diplomjodler • • •berno
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Flatpaks suck
Ubuntu has turned to dogshit
jwmgregory
in reply to berno • • •i agree ubuntu is corpo drivel now but flatpaks are actually quite useful for some applications.
the sandboxing is nice to not have to setup manually for every little thing, and i say that as someone who avoids flatpaks generally.
sometimes you just wanna get things up and running, not everything needs to be a unix circlejerk.
eta
in reply to berno • • •relic4322
in reply to shrewdcat • • •never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.
whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???
squaresinger
in reply to relic4322 • • •folaht
in reply to relic4322 • • •zazous
in reply to shrewdcat • • •make
make install
0x0
in reply to zazous • • •&&?lemmyknow
in reply to shrewdcat • • •𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
I have Steam installed for some games, and since this is a 32 bits application it would install a metric shit-don of 32 bit dependencies I do not use for anything else except Steam, so I use the Flatpak version.
Or Kdenlive for video editing. Kdenlive is the only KDE software I use but when installing it, it feels like due to dependencies I also get pretty much all of the KDE desktop’s applications I do not need nor use nor want on my machine. So Flatpak it is.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
neonred
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •frostphunk
in reply to neonred • • •dropped_packet
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •This is the main benefit. However, i'm finding the software I use requires less dependencies and libraries these days.
I barely even use flatpaks anymore. Almost everything is in official repos. I couldn't tell you the last time I had a dependency conflict.
Limonene
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •Obin
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •That's my main use for flatpaks too. Add to that any and all closed source software, because you can't trust that without a sandbox around it.
Recently I've moved from using flatpak for electron apps and instead have a single flatpak ungoogled chromium instance I use for PWAs.
thingsiplay
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I'm not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don't want to mess around with it, because I don't know what part is unusable).
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to thingsiplay • • •Because the OBS developers say so.
And since I’m not on Ubuntu, I use the Flatpak version to get OBS as intended bey the OBS developers.
Exactly. Most distributions fail hard when it comes to packaging OBS correctly. The OBS devs even threatened to sue Fedora over this.
gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak…
Broken OBS Studio Flatpak presented as official package (#39) · Issues · Fedora / Special Interest Groups (SIGs) / Fedora Flatpak SIG / Fedora Flatpaks · GitLab
GitLabthingsiplay
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •The quoted image does not say so, they do not say the native packaging from your distribution is borderline unusable. That judgement was added by YOU. The devs just state the package on Archlinux is not officially supported, without making a judgement (at least in the quoted image).
As for the Fedora issue, that is a completely different thing. That is also Flatpak, so its not the package format itself the issue. Fedora did package the application in Flatpak their own way and presented it as the official product. That is a complete different issue! That has nothing to do with Archlinux packaging their own native format. Archlinux never said or presented it as the official package either and it does not look like the official Flatpak version.
So where does the developers say that anything that is not their official Flatpak package is "borderline unusable"?
shapis
in reply to shrewdcat • • •NauticalNoodle
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I spent my time fighting AppImages until Canonical started to force Snap on me. I hated Snap so bad it forced me to switch distros. Now I appreciate Flatpak as a result and I don't find AppImages all that bad, either. Also, I haven't found myself in dependency-hell nor have I crashed my distro from unofficial Repos in well over a decade.
-It's a long way of saying It works for me and it's not Snap.
db2
in reply to NauticalNoodle • • •Appimages are ok, bloated but ok. Unless a library inside is old and won't work.
Flatpak is annoying and I don't like it at all, so I don't use it. Easy solution.
Fuck snap though.
MangoCats
in reply to NauticalNoodle • • •Caveman
in reply to Ziglin (it/they) • • •Andrzej3K [none/use name]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •The_Walkening [none/use name]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.
That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.
Ziglin (it/they)
in reply to Caveman • • •Caveman
in reply to Ziglin (it/they) • • •ShinkanTrain
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Limonene
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I've never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.
My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.
buttnugget
in reply to Limonene • • •Aimeeloulm
in reply to buttnugget • • •As someone who uses Flatpak you can still use the terminal to install, uninstall and do maintenance, not sure why people believe terminal is useless with Flatpak 😞
Flatpaks are containers, same as Snaps, I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps, but just my personal choice. I use Flatsweep and Flatseal apps to help administrate Flatpak apps, but use terminal as well 🙂
like this
sunzu2 likes this.
BeardedGingerWonder
in reply to Aimeeloulm • • •Obin
in reply to Limonene • • •Nah, it's the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don't appreciate the added complexity for features they don't need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that's the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.
For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it's great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let's not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s
Blackadder - Love thy neighbour
YouTubeDessalines
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Can someone explain why flatpak isn't necessary for distros that have proper OS dependency management like Arch-based distros or Nix?
Seems like flatpak is solving a problem for OS's that don't have proper dependency management.
BlameTheAntifa
in reply to Dessalines • • •Dessalines
in reply to BlameTheAntifa • • •frozenspinach
in reply to Dessalines • • •Also pretty much everywhere you're using flatpaks (or snaps or...), you are doing it on top of a Linux system that's still getting its core system updates via traditional dependency management. And flatpaks, despite trying not to, make assumptions about your kernel, your glibc version, architecture, ability to access parts of your filesystem or your devices, that can break things, and doesn't bother to track it.
And the closer you get you tracking that stuff (like Snap tries to), you hilariously just get back to where you started, with traditional dependency management that already exists and has existed for decades.
BlameTheAntifa
in reply to Dessalines • • •machinya [it/its, fae/faer]
in reply to Dessalines • • •main selling points are isolation and having the latest version directly from developers without having to wait for your distro to package/update it.
both are debatable since they are not as good as promoted (isolation doesn't always work correctly and it's a mess to configure it once you use anything different than the more mainstream distros) or goes against the historical preference (using bundled everything instead of cooperating with your distro packages and trusting every individual over trusting your distro as a whole) but having the latest version on any distro without having to wait is a popular need so they gained traction quite fast. this might make little sense for rolling release distros (arch, nix) but it's helpful if you have a stable base (years old debian) but need the latest feature on an specific application or have to use very specific libraries that are not packaged on the main distro and would require complex upgrades
ipkpjersi
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
Crozekiel
in reply to ipkpjersi • • •Ferk
in reply to Crozekiel • • •Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.
What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn't really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there's no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.
But there's no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.
ipkpjersi
in reply to Crozekiel • • •Crozekiel
in reply to ipkpjersi • • •I don't actually know if it is a Wayland issue - most of those forum posts are like 3 years old... And I have definitely used these same AppImages in the past on Wayland without issue. I think the AppImages are expecting some specific dependency to be installed on my system that is no longer installed due to updates. (which I thought was counter to the entire point of an AppImage? I thought it was supposed to be kinda like Flatpak where it has it's dependencies in the image? Maybe I just misunderstood AppImage...)
To give you some hope, my Distro switched to Wayland as default a little over a year ago (i think) and I have not been running into problems (outside this AppImage problem, if it is indeed a Wayland issue, which I cannot confirm or deny).
kadaverin0
in reply to shrewdcat • • •frozenspinach
in reply to kadaverin0 • • •sunzu2
in reply to frozenspinach • • •All of this is true and precisely zero normies care about any of it.
The fact that I can put my ~~idiots~~ family on any modern distro and tell them to use the app store alone makes flatpaks king of the app management
m532
Unknown parent • • •Just go to the package manager, type in the name of the program, install.
That's easier than on windows: go to the browser, search for the program, avoid the ads, search for the download button, follow the install wizard, avoid the toolbar
AndrewZabar
in reply to shrewdcat • • •MangoCats
in reply to AndrewZabar • • •AndrewZabar
in reply to MangoCats • • •MangoCats
in reply to AndrewZabar • • •I view the delays during launch and the extra time spent during updates as a "load on the system."
Also, it entirely depends on your deployment environment. I develop system images that go out on thousands of devices deployed in "Cybersecuity Sensitive" environments, meaning: we have to document what's on the system and justify when anything in the SBOM (list of every software package installed on the machine) is identified as having any applicable CVEs... soooo.... keeping old versions of software anywhere on the machine is a problem (significant additional documentation load) for those security audits. Don't argue with logic, these are our customers and they have established their own procedures, so if we want their money, we will provide them with the documentation they demand, and that documentation is simplest when EVERYTHING on the system has ALL the latest patches.
The most secure systems are those that don't do anything at all. You can't hack a brick.
AndrewZabar
in reply to MangoCats • • •MangoCats
in reply to AndrewZabar • • •machinya [it/its, fae/faer]
in reply to shrewdcat • • •i mostly use them for proprietary stuff or for software that is incredible painful to package (mostly electron apps). i will probably never use them for anything that actually matters but i also use rolling release distros everywhere so latest release is never too far. for testing latest version of any software i prefer appimages since they are simpler and don't need a messy setup as flatpak, but i also won't use them pass the testing phase and i prefer packaging the software if possible.
snaps, on the other hand, will never go near any of my systems. not even by accident
MaysaMayako
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.
But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.
MangoCats
in reply to MaysaMayako • • •MaysaMayako
in reply to MangoCats • • •MystValkyrie
in reply to shrewdcat • • •There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one over than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.
With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.
otacon239
in reply to MystValkyrie • • •Ideally, all the essential terminal commands could be replicated in a user-friendly GUI-applicable manner. Don’t ever have to remove the terminal for those that enjoy it, but if we could have a magic world where even the failure states could be navigated with little to no prior knowledge required and it gets everyone away from Windows and Mac for good, I’m all for it.
captainlezbian
in reply to MystValkyrie • • •Lovable Sidekick
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Ziglin (it/they)
in reply to Caveman • • •ztwhixsemhwldvka
in reply to shrewdcat • • •geneva_convenience
in reply to ztwhixsemhwldvka • • •sudo_halt
in reply to ztwhixsemhwldvka • • •✋😕🤚
Absolute Dogshit
PillowD
in reply to shrewdcat • • •MangoCats
in reply to PillowD • • •wewbull
in reply to PillowD • • •17lifers
Unknown parent • • •spookedintownsville
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Toribor
in reply to spookedintownsville • • •Crabhands
in reply to shrewdcat • • •MangoCats
Unknown parent • • •And they are still, in my experience, slow to load, a cumbersome addition to the update process, and often un-necessary.
Don't get me wrong, if you're in a tight spot and can't make two significant software packages work in a distribution due to conflicting library version requirements... some kind of lightweight container solution is attractive, expedient, and better than just not supporting one of the packages. But, my impression is that a lot of stuff has been moved into flatpak / snap / etc. just because they can. I don't think it's the best, or even preferred, way to maintain software - for the desktop environment.
(Returns to checking on his Docker containers full of server apps on the R-Pi farm...)
MangoCats
Unknown parent • • •Not mocking: can you share any good guides to practical immutable systems?
What I observed of Ubuntu Core made a strong "not ready for prime time, and even if it was I don't want it" impression on me.
jabeez
in reply to shrewdcat • • •SpiceDealer
in reply to shrewdcat • • •beleza pura
in reply to shrewdcat • • •seralth
in reply to beleza pura • • •beastlykings
Unknown parent • • •I'm on silverblue, well, bluefin, specifically.
So far so happy 🤷♂️
jwmgregory
Unknown parent • • •MangoCats
Unknown parent • • •Thanks. In the past I have worked in Slackware, and even had Gentoo on my home system for a couple of years, but otherwise I've been fully saturated in Debian and its children - so that's my "comfort zone." I used to like KDE, but drifted away from it when I got a 4K screen notebook and KDE hadn't figured out resolution scaling yet, while Ubuntu/Unity had. I never quite warmed up to GNOME, but definitely have done my time with it. XFCE has matured enough for me to daily drive it without too much pain now, and I love the ways it can be de-featured (don't want a launcher bar? Don't run it, nothing else breaks.)
Server-side, I have been filling my Raspberry Pis with Docker containers for a while now... it's not completely alien, but I do kind of tend to "set it and forget it" when it comes to container deployments.
jwmgregory
Unknown parent • • •you (rhetorical you, not you) can recommend not using the AUR officially all you want. it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages. i’m kind of drunk rn but i’ll go find specific pages of the wiki that demonstrate what i’m talking about, i stg this isn’t nothing. the core system itself can entirely be managed with pacman, yes, but the average user is going to be doing a lot more than just that. there is a certain discord in the messaging of arch as a whole.
this is exactly my point. arch can either be a nuts and bolts distro or it can be made for normies. it can’t be both.
MotoAsh
in reply to zarenki • • •Fatur_New
in reply to shrewdcat • • •commander
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I'm happy to use Flatpaks but the annoyances I've had are like when one application says to use you'll need to point to the binary of another application that it depends on but very understandably doesn't package together, figuring that out to me can be annoying so I'll switch to a regular installation and it all just works together no fuss, no flatseal, no thinking about it really. Also some applications where it's really nice to launch from the terminal especially with arguments or just like the current working directory and with Flatpaks instead of just right off the bat it's application name and hit enter, Flatpak hope you remember the whole package name
org.wilson.spalding.runner.knife.ApplicationName ...
Ya alias but got to remember to do that. So far anything I'd ever want to run from terminal, no Flatpak
Paddy66
in reply to shrewdcat • • •As long as software is available in the Software Manager to be installed that way... I don't care what format it's in.
But don't make normies go to the terminal. It's inhumane, and really does not help the masses get away from big tech - which is a worthier goal than keeping your software terminal-only.
arc99
in reply to shrewdcat • • •While I wouldn't want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.
The tradeoff is disk consumption but it's not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own.
RheumatoidArthritis
in reply to arc99 • • •MoondropLight
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Perhaps ironically, this is mocking a strawman. Flatpacks can be installed and managed using the terminal! Not only that but Linux-Distros have had graphical package managers for decades.
The primary reason that distros have embraced flatpack / snap / appimage is that they promise to lower the burden of managing software repositories. The primary reason that some users are mad is that these often don't provide a good experience:
Theoretically they are also more secure... But reality of that has also been questioned. Fine grained permissions are nice, but bundling libraries makes it hard to know what outdated libraries are running on the systems.
grue
in reply to MoondropLight • • •org.mozilla.firefoxinstead of justfirefox), which is a very terminal-specific issue, LOL!nullpotential
in reply to shrewdcat • • •elo13
in reply to jwmgregory • • •You keep saying this but can you give any concrete examples? I don't recall coming across anything like this.
a Kendrick fan
in reply to shrewdcat • • •seralth
in reply to a Kendrick fan • • •rumba
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I need OBS on this new computer!
Let's install the flatpack!
V4l problems
Plugins Problems
Wayland Problems
I'm just going back to the .deb, thanks.
Carlos Solís
in reply to rumba • • •Captain Beyond
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.
The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.
Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I'm too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.
Developers: Let distros do their job
drewdevault.comscholar
in reply to Captain Beyond • • •Mahi
in reply to shrewdcat • • •muusemuuse
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Enter the calm and quiet room
Pass out torches and pitchforks, guns and knives
“Snaps exist”
War erupts.
grue
in reply to muusemuuse • • •War with who? I'm posting this from Kubuntu and I'd happily agree with you that Snap should fuck off and die. (In particular, the backend being controlled by Canonical makes it objectively bad compared to Flatpak.) Even among people like me who tolerate Snap (for now...), I really don't think you're gonna find anybody who actually likes it, let alone enough to champion it.
Can't start a war when there's a consensus!
Decker108
in reply to grue • • •limelight79
in reply to shrewdcat • • •I "grew up" with Slackware, so I definitely understand the dependency issue.
I like flatpaks (and similar) for certain "atomic" pieces of software, like makemkv. For more "basic" software, like, say, KDE, I want it installed natively.
Bilb!
in reply to shrewdcat • • •Bronstein_Tardigrade
in reply to shrewdcat • • •kaidezee
in reply to shrewdcat • • •like this
Carlos Solís likes this.