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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

#211

Post by worksonmine »

themodelplumber wrote: post #32
Liquix wrote: post #27

Opinions 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…

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…

The FHS[1] and XDG[2] sets the standards for the file system, and EWMH[3] communication between windows and window managers. They are all simple enough that implementing a subset doesn't make much sense. Many desktop environments tend to only list support for stuff that usually are a common problem like screen-sharing or driver support.

I'm using a very minimal system without a lot of the easy to implement features on purpose, but absolutely can not live without some of the more difficult ones. So for me the adherence would be cherry-picked parts from 3, 4 and 5 and impossible to place on a chart. I don't think it would be a good fit for the modular unix philosophy.

[1] https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

[2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

[3] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/

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

#212

Post by rom-antics »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #205
rom-antics wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to like AppImage, but it just didn't seem integrated well enough. Flatpak gives you: - Installation (no manually moving files from ~/Downloads) - Launcher integration (no writing .desktop files by hand) - Auto updating As far as I saw, AppImage didn't have any of that. Though it was a while ago (and maybe some of this was my distro's fault). Has any of this improved lately?

An AppImage is just a regular binary. Basically if you have a directory containing a binary plus other files it needs (libraries, assets, etc), AppImage packages the whole dir up into a single binary. That's it. Running the AppImage is the same as extracting the dir and running the binary inside it.

Right, it's just a binary. And if I'm installing an app, say Audacity, I would never go to GitHub and download the raw binary, because then I'd have to write the desktop file by hand, and also the app would never get updated when new versions are released. Instead I use a package manager or Flatpak.

How are people keeping their AppImages updated?

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

#213

Post by 99112000 »

andreareina wrote: post #186
Rotareti wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I'm almost sure this is an excerpt straight from https://youtu.be/7Nj9ZjwOdFQ

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

#214

Post by twojacobtwo »

andreareina wrote: post #186
Rotareti wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Would it be possible to create a script to save the desktop and screen position for each firefox window on close and restore them to the recorded desktops and positions on open? I haven't used i3 much (or arch at all), but I'm fairly certain I did something similar using Xubuntu some years back.

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

#215

Post by creatonez »

apatheticonion wrote: post #157

I'm very in favour of improving the state of application distribution on Linux. Targeting an abstraction like Flatpack seems like a no-brainer if there are no regressions in experience to the end user. I am not sure if this is the case, but in theory I love the idea that the app sandboxing can allow the Flatpak engine to be a source that can prompt users for permissions access (e.g. "app would like to access your loc…

Flatpak used to have a lot of issues with sandboxing, but in recent years the situation has gotten better because of two things:

1. A strong push to help package maintainers fix sandboxing mistakes, expose the APIs that need to be exposed and lock down the APIs that are not needed. It used to be pretty bad but it's pretty rare to see sandboxing problems nowadays.

2. You can now use a tool called Flatseal, or in KDE a new builtin settings interface in Plasma 5.27, to modify sandboxing settings for applications in an intuitive way. If you're trying to use an IDE and just want to expose every permission to it, you can easily do that now.

3. Unrelated to Flatpak, Wayland is now getting a lot of the video capture and screen recording APIs that are needed.

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

#216

Post by Dalewyn »

tombert wrote: post #10
heywhatupboys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>relevant xkcd comic on standards inserted here

I agree that it is "yet another standard", but I gotta say that Flatpak is pretty sweet, and does actually do a good job of making "one package manager to rule them all". I think part of the problem with a lot of "selling stuff on Linux" has been mucking around with different dependencies for the thousand different versions of Linux. Historically, this has led to a couple solutions: either a) Just officially support…

>b) just don't release a Linux version.

I am reminded of that one game dev who dropped Linux support because 99% of their bug reports were coming from 1% of their total playerbase (read: the Linux crowd).

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

#217

Post by Conan_Kudo »

AYoung010 wrote: post #167
flangola7 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also... https://kinoite.fedoraproject.org/

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

#218

Post by Dalewyn »

phatfish wrote: post #135
Darmody wrote: post #38

Meanwhile Ubuntu is making sure that none of its flavours has flatpak installed by default. Smells like that old MS attitude to me.

Ubuntu is Microsoft's "favorite" distro, they do seem rather made for each other. The Azure dev tools on Linux i have tried are all Snap only, or a tar file and maybe an rpm/deb. At the moment they seem to avoid Flatpak like the plague.

I would argue Microsoft's choice of Ubuntu is one based upon practicality and social inertia.

As far as I'm aware, Ubuntu is still the biggest player in the consumer Linux market not counting Android. Given the need to balance upkeep costs with range of support, I can see why Microsoft chose just Ubuntu and threw the rest to the wind.

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

#220

Post by syrrim »

rom-antics wrote: post #199
yamtaddle wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I tried all three of the semi-popular formats like this, AppImage was the only one that didn't feel fundamentally wrong (though what I gather was the closest thing to an official repository for them looked sketchy as hell—somehow they copied the exact CSS vibe as a content-scraped StackOverflow spam site). But that was a couple years ago. I know Snaps still suck, but haven't messed with Flatpacks since then, so…

I wanted to like AppImage, but it just didn't seem integrated well enough. Flatpak gives you: - Installation (no manually moving files from ~/Downloads) - Launcher integration (no writing .desktop files by hand) - Auto updating As far as I saw, AppImage didn't have any of that. Though it was a while ago (and maybe some of this was my distro's fault). Has any of this improved lately?

AppImage now has solutions for all three issues. They all rely on a central daemon, which implies they will only work ootb with support from the distribution. The same is true of snap and flatpack as far as I'm aware, so this isn't strictly a deficiency of the format.
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