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KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

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Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It all depends on how you draw your Venn diagrams, I suppose. Is Chrome a massively complex browser, or is it some window dressing and bookmark syncing sitting on top of Chromium, that itself is really just a simple UI around the Blink rendering engine. GNU/Chrome, anybody?

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#182
post #150
post #34

I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software that I run on my Fedora Linux workstation. Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian all run without issues and they get consistent updates. I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Flatpak has been a key part of me becom…

> I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Commercial software would like a comprehensive and relatively stable API like what Windows famously provides. Flatpak's analog of the Windows API is the runtime. What level and duration of maintenance do Flatpak runtimes typically receive?

Red Hat offers a runtime that has a 10 year lifecycle for applications. Beyond that, I don't know of anything quite like that.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th...

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#183
post #9

I'm an Ubuntu user and the first thing I always do in a new system is removing the Ubuntu Store, completely removing snapd, and installing the Flathub Store.

I remove snap then do the following to make sure it doesn't come back:

cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref Package: snapd Pin: release a=* Pin-Priority: -10 EOF

One thing I don't do is use Flatpack, AppImage or any substitute for snap. If I wanted that functionality, I'd use snap.

I don't like apps installed via snaps (etc.) changing themselves almost seemingly stealthily.

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#184
post #34

I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software that I run on my Fedora Linux workstation. Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian all run without issues and they get consistent updates. I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Flatpak has been a key part of me becom…

I had issues with certain games crashing when run from Steam installed via Flatpak. It's not permission issues, but seems to be due to the Flatpak version bundled different system libraries. Have you encounter such issue on your end?

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#185
post #9

I'm an Ubuntu user and the first thing I always do in a new system is removing the Ubuntu Store, completely removing snapd, and installing the Flathub Store.

Honest question; why do you still use Ubuntu then? By now, Snap is such a fundamental part of Ubuntu that it begs the question whether Ubuntu is right for you if you want to avoid it. Why not use a derivative or upstream that makes different choices?

People used Ubuntu for years before they came out with snap. Why use something faddish and potentially unstable.

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I care? Ok Spotify has an old package with some vulnerabilities in it. But flatpak has it sandboxed so the worst you could do is maybe steal my Spotify session token. That's more a problem for Spotify than it is for me. They will go and fix their package and I will reset my sessions. Meanwhile we have distros lagging behind for years to provide a new package because they can't break all the things depending…

> Meanwhile we have distros lagging behind for years to provide a new package because they can't break all the things depending on the old version. I'm glad I left this category of problems behind me 5 years ago when I switched both, my personal and my work laptop to arch-linux/i3wm. These two machines have been running for 5 years, almost daily, with almost no issues, with the latest software packages. If the hardwa…

My only complaint about arch/i3 so far is that updating Firefox forces a restart of Firefox, and I've got FF windows scattered over a few workspaces so I need to sift them back to their places.

Come to think of it I can probably prune one of the windows...

ETA: and maybe one of the workspaces...

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#187
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. Like if you want to select a desktop and are kind of new to desktop environments, maybe aim for the (imaginary example here) DE-5 level of standards-adherence. DE-4 and lower might suck in various ways even though they could have cool new features. There are way too many benefits from the…

> I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. What's the difference? If everything works perfectly with everything else, and the standards adherence is so high that you can't tell the difference which apps are from which organization, then how is that not a "unified DE"?

Because I might want to developer a new DE/toolkit/whatever and having one checklist I can refer to would really help.

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#188
post #98
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu packages get updated on a much faster cadence then Debian in my experience.

Ubuntu is cut from Debian testing, not Debian stable. If you want to move upstream, you should be looking at testing, not stable. In my experience, the stability concerns are overblown, and it makes for a really nice rolling release system. I've had individual systems run for over a decade on a Debian testing install with rolling updates, and it's generally been far less of a headache than Ubuntu releases.

I ran Debian on some of my systems for a while and ran into issues with stable that end up not getting fixed for a long time. I agree if you want to run Debian, run testing.

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#189
post #109
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable. I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases t…

> KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable. IIRC KDE committed to never break users again like they did with the first releases of KDE 4. It's expect the first releases of Plasma 6 that the distros will actually ship to be stable, and to be mostly a Qt5 → Qt 6 upgrade. You should be able to run a stable version of Plasma (5 or 6) in any case during this period. KDE 3 to 4 was a disaster; las…

Sorry, but as an early adopter of Plasma 5 (granted, maybe a bit too early), it was terribly broken for a couple of months. I took refuge in Awesome until things stabilized.

Re: KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop

#190
post #9

I'm an Ubuntu user and the first thing I always do in a new system is removing the Ubuntu Store, completely removing snapd, and installing the Flathub Store.

Honest question; why do you still use Ubuntu then? By now, Snap is such a fundamental part of Ubuntu that it begs the question whether Ubuntu is right for you if you want to avoid it. Why not use a derivative or upstream that makes different choices?

zfs is a single `apt install` away.
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