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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

#231

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

serf wrote: post #171
bandrami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many different versions of OpenSSL are running on my laptop right now? Who can say? That's the beauty of flatpak: if you sweep the problems of software management under a big enough rug, they go away and never bother you again.

>How many different versions of OpenSSL are running on my laptop right now? Who can say? but that's a problem, too. i'd rather all things on a system be bottleneck-forced into using the latest version of security libraries that my system is actively updating; yes, this causes issues, but not issues like "There was a huge vulnerability found in X version Y, does it affect me?". in other words, i'd rather have system b…

Why don't you just turny our computer off then? It can't be exploited if it isn't actually running.

Which is to say most people use a computer to run software, so if the software doesn't run the security is pointless anyway.

Sure, if only some software breaks and you can wait for fixes that's a tradeoff, but given that in package maintainer land those fixes could be months or years away...

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

#232

Post by tkuraku »

I think flatpaks are awesome. Especially for commercial software. I do think they are missing an important feature that snap has what snap referes to as classic confinement. For example vscode as a flatpak can't really interact with your normal system libraries/exectuables/etc. That being said I do hope that Flatpaks succeed and becomes the easy go-to option for commercial software to support linux distributions.

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

#233

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rom-antics wrote: post #212
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If there had been an adopted standard for embedding icons in ELF, and if common Linux launchers had just been a menuized view of a folder structure, this would never have been a problem.

But Linux Desktop has a nasty habit of adopting over engineered solutions instead of simple ones, especially if any other desktop OS is doing it that way.

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

#234

Post by pkulak »

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?

Plus, it relies on system libraries like glibc. You can’t even use it on distros like Void and Alpine.

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

#236

Post by wrycoder »

wrycoder wrote: post #230
tmtvl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly does systemd turn Linux into Windows? Does it... Prevent dynamic linking? Offer strong backwards compatibility? Add support for a very wide range of hardware? Put advertisements in the start menu? Cause unexpected reboots for updates? Send telemetry to the OS manufacturer? Force users to get an online account unless they know the secret way to bypass the prompt? Or is there a differentiator between Window…

This has been re-hashed many times. What you should look at is the difference between Debian and Devuan. Or between Debian and OpenBSD, to understand what the systemd project is doing, and how it’s doing it. There are many of us that prefer Linux as it was before systemd.

Edit: I said “attempt”. Linux doesn’t have those extreme stupidities you mentioned, and probably never will.

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

#237

Post by rashkov »

Rotareti wrote: post #177
Gigachad wrote: post #123

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…

Been running this same setup for eight or nine years now, extremely pleased with it

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

#238

Post by lern_too_spel »

yamtaddle wrote: post #56
jdoss wrote: 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…

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…

AppImage has no sandboxing. A properly packaged (unfortunately, still a big qualifier) Flatpak is safer to run.

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

#239

Post by gavmor »

jdoss wrote: 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…

Obsidian without git plugin is pretty much a non-starter for me. What's the point in a folder full of markdown files that can't be checked into git? Only works out of the box for the AppImage, for now. I can't remember why. I suppose I am missing out on 0-click updates of some kind.

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

#240

Post by IncRnd »

klooney wrote: post #119
bandrami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many different versions of OpenSSL are running on my laptop right now? Who can say? That's the beauty of flatpak: if you sweep the problems of software management under a big enough rug, they go away and never bother you again.

Flatpak has a concept of shared base layers, so if you update frequently you might notice 'org.gnome.Sdk' or whatever getting updated. This is a way to handle lots of the most popular shared dependencies. Besides, sufficiently quality minded projects always wind up vendoring all of their dependencies anyway. There's a reason Chrome has their own fork of everything down to the compiler.

> Besides, sufficiently quality minded projects always wind up vendoring all of their dependencies anyway. There's a reason Chrome has their own fork of everything down to the compiler.

It's not about quality. It's about reproducibility of the exact versions of all dependencies. It's about communications with repos not being subverted to load malicious packages. It's build security not app quality, though app quality is a part.

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