Flatpaks are awesome.
If you need to tweak them, Flatseal is a great tool.
KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
161–170 of 427 posts
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
One big tricky thing is plugins, such as for OBS. ABI incompatibility and sandboxing can make it tricky and confusing for end users. Flatpak itself could theoretically provide answers here.
Yep. The main way I notice that an app is using FlatPak is it becomes impossible for me to type Japanese in it because the person distributing it hasn't done the complicated stuff you have to do to make IME work with FlatPak.
I really hope Wayland helps here. It has an IME input API, so if that's sufficient, maybe it can displace out-of-band input buses on the application-side.
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not really user-hostile, they just have limited development resources and making a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets would be way too much work. If you want to try things on your own, that's what unofficial extensions and tweaking tools are for.
Can’t really blame them for not producing the slick configuration GUI for every option. But it is annoying that they always go for the slick configuration GUI, as if they were a for profit company with a bunch of full time devs. Meanwhile every other open source program, recognizing that it has limited developer time (and interest in boring grunt work), just sets up easier text-centric config first…
The text-centric config for GNOME is dconf/gsettings. But what people like to complain about is graphical configuration, which adds enough maintenance burden that it's only worth doing if it's going to be friendly enough for most novice users.
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it sounds like you got Debian to work -- you just couldn't get compiz to work, which sucks. What I mean is that I can't get Ubuntu to work at all. On my luckiest tries, I've managed to get the desktop to show, but everything is still highly unstable and I've never pushed on to trying to install software. I used to think it was driver issues, except I've had similar symptoms on three different machines. And before…
That’s interesting, do you have unusual hardware? As a fairly begrudging Ubuntu user (I put it on a laptop because I didn’t want to screw around with finding drivers, memories of trying to get wifi working on Arch with some dongles haunt me), I have to say I don’t really like it much overall but they’ve got the “getting to the desktop” experience down pretty well.
> do you have unusual hardware?
No. I do tend to use old hardware, but tried it on a mainstream new laptop one time. On that, I couldn't get the WiFi to work with it.
What baffles me is that on all of these machines, Debian works out of the box. In fact, Debian's never failed me on any of the many machines (including laptops) I've put it on.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, so I can't explain the difference. As I said, it's been a while and perhaps they've fixed issues, but I've moved on. My life is no poorer for it.
The only thing is that it means I can't recommend Ubuntu to people (not only because I wouldn't be able to support them if they have trouble, but what am I supposed to say? "I can't make it work, but use this!"?)
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
i gotta say, if chrome stands out to you as a shining beacon of quality, i'd hate to hear about what software you consider bad
I know “Chrome bad” is a meme-level comment at this point but it’s a hugely impressive piece of software, basically an operating system unto itself at this point. Not to mention the V8 engine etc. Plenty to criticise about it from a product perspective but from an engineering one it is kind of a marvel.
I think there's a strong argument to be made that modern web browsers are a good deal more complex than operating systems -- or at least most kernels.
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#166Can anyone comment on whether any of these new all-in-one distribution formats actually try to provide secure sandboxing that is designed to resist deliberate attacks from within, or is their sandboxing just docker-style best-effort sandboxing with a ton of holes that can't be relied upon for running untrusted executables securely?
Which attacks exactly?
The sandboxing features are documented: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#167Flathub could become the killer "app" for the Linux desktop. No need to juggle dependencies and third party repos. The software you need in an instant.
It's the closest thing to APKs for Linux. We need an Android for desktop: a signed base image with silo'd applications, application data, and granular permissions.
Boy, do I have something to show you: https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#168Opinions on Flatpaks/snaps notwithstanding, it's encouraging to see KDE and GNOME collaborating on projects like this. IMO desktop GNU/Linux has benefited greatly from moving away from offering LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon flavors and towards a more digestible subset (GNOME only, GNOME/KDE/XFCE, etc) of polished desktop environments. Pipe dream, but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talent…
> but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talented folks working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE. This would be terrible. Gnome and KDE have pretty conflicting ideologies. Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. KDE is all about user choice. If they'd collaborate it would end up something in the middle which would suit nobody.
> Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist.
The problem with this is that Mac, unlike Gnome, actually works. Gnome just has weird holes where old functionality was removed (like application menus!) and never replaced.
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#169Interesting that this announcement comes concurrently with the news that Ubuntu now expects all official derivatives to drop Flatpak support [0]. Looking forward, can someone tell me how these two policies will play nice together? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912760
Not very well. Canonical learned nothing from Unity's failure.
Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop
#170Opinions on Flatpaks/snaps notwithstanding, it's encouraging to see KDE and GNOME collaborating on projects like this. IMO desktop GNU/Linux has benefited greatly from moving away from offering LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon flavors and towards a more digestible subset (GNOME only, GNOME/KDE/XFCE, etc) of polished desktop environments. Pipe dream, but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talent…
> but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talented folks working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE. This would be terrible. Gnome and KDE have pretty conflicting ideologies. Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. KDE is all about user choice. If they'd collaborate it would end up something in the middle which would suit nobody.
Well, GNOME actually exceeds macOS minimalism… at least in macOS I have the ability to hide the top bar, several ways to launch apps, a systray, graphical configuration for most things, the ability to change keymappings, and so on. In GNOME, I need 3rd party tools for all of that.