Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 427 posts

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

#351

Post by majewsky »

vasvir wrote: post #330
calvinmorrison wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has existed for a long time from freedesktop.org, XDG specs, window manager extended hints, and so on. And it's gotten better too - did you know KDE3 had it's own sound mixer daemon? It was called ArtsD. Now we have pulseaudio, or whatever, which is great and cross desktop DBUS made it everywhere as well - I believe initially KDE3 as well did not have DBUS but had something called, DCOP. so - yeah things have im…

and now pipewire...

Which is completely backwards-compatible with PulseAudio. Even in a Pipewire-only world, applications will for the most part be linked against libpulse like they used to, but the PulseAudio server socket is provided by Pipewire.

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

#352

Post by kuschku »

tmtvl wrote: post #189
jraph wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Plasma 5 was so broken for me, I've been on Budgie while waiting for KDE to return to its glory days.

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

#353

Post by bogwog »

_cenw wrote: post #305
bogwog wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Fedora Kinoite (KDE spin of Silverblue) to force me to go all in on Flatpaks, and now I love them. They make so much sense and work so well. I feel like the people who dislike them either never actually used them, or they’re just the type of person who hates change and will never be happy with new things.

Do you use an IDE, and if so, which? Last I checked Flathub shipped with VSCode and IntelliJ, despite both having major broken parts. The VSCode workaround back when I tried Silverblue was to run sshd inside toolbox and remote Flatpak VSCode into it. It was definitely not a frictionless experience. And IntelliJ having the terminal and debugging broken removes most of the useful parts of the IDE for me.

I use Sublime Text, but I’ve also used VSCode, as well as a lot of other similar editors. I haven’t had a reason to use IntelliJ, but I’m sure it would work the same way.

Using development tools as a flatpak is usually not a good idea for many reasons. That’s why Silverblue ships with Toolbox (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...).

Flatpaks are kind of like Android APKs, except unlike Android, there’s actually an operating system worth interacting with. An IDE on Android usually needs to include all of the tools it needs. A flatpak is the same, except that’s hard to get right for every development setup, so a toolbox just lets you do whatever you want with it. They’re podman containers with extra features to integrate with the host.

I have all of my development tools installed in a single toolbox, and have .desktop files for the GUI ones so that I can launch them from the KDE app menu as if they were regular apps. With this setup I can use e.g. clangd with the LSP plugin in Sublime Text, execute CMake, use the embedded terminal (Terminus), or the debugger plugin with lldb.

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

#354

Post by diffeomorphism »

POPOSYS wrote: post #302
jacooper wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are using Ubuntu Pro(free or not) Debian isn't really an alternative. Also I am not sure if Debian is as fast as Canonical in patching CVEs. I like Debian, but after (free)Ubuntu pro, it really became attractive for me as a small server operator, its even better than free RHEL.

Would you please like to explain why it is better? Thanks!

Ubuntu used to have security support for "main" only. All other software, e.g. in "universe" had patches trickle in from debian but no dedicated support. This is particularly problematic for long or extended LTS when debian has dropped the old stable release that would be pulling from.

"Ubuntu pro" is basically trying to fix this shortcoming compared to debian and to pay for a security team for universe. It is available as a subscription.

TLDR: If you use software from main it is completely irrelevant. If you use stuff from universe it is now as good as debian, if you pay (first 5 devices are free).

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

#355

Post by diffeomorphism »

seabrookmx wrote: post #190
mesebrec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought Ubuntu lost interest in that and is letting it die?

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/01/ubuntu-zfs-support-statu...

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

#356

Post by kaba0 »

sph wrote: post #282
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #274

> As we also open the ability for applications to be uploaded in binary form, which is essential for low-friction compatibility with popular language-specific build systems such as Electron/Node, Rust, Go, etc - we also reduce the ability for users to scrutinise the source in the Flathub build system that was used to build their application. ...and their solution is running an antivirus scanner rather than stepping b…

Is NixOS a cult? Every time someone posts about Linux packaging, there's a "you should just use NixOS" comment. Although it provides its own solution to the Linux packaging problem, it's a single solution that comes with a whole load of baggage with it. It is not the panacea its proponents wants us to believe it is.

It’s more like people trying to fly but the best they can do is glide off some hills. And then someone with a helicopter flies by them.

Package managers before nix simply didn’t solve the problem properly - they left behind garbage, couldn’t properly deal with multiple versions of the same package, etc. Easy way to check whether the package manager you have in mind is “sufficient” is to install the gnome group and the plasma group and remove them. How many orphan packages will you have as a result?

It is not a cult, people just like proper solutions to problems, and nix is unique in this regard.

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

#357

Post by majewsky »

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…

> Can OBS have unimpeded screen recording access? How does OBS compare in Flatpak compared to natively installed.

I'm livestreaming on a regular basis, and moved from OBS as compiled by Arch Linux to OBS Flatpak. Everything just works (esp. the browser source that uses an embedded Chromium, which I never got to work with the Arch packages). Most likely that particular Flatpak is very liberal in its sandboxing, because it was even able to write into $HOME/obs-recordings/ without any permission prompt. I don't care about the sandboxing part of Flatpak too much in this particular case, so I didn't dig further.

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

#358

Post by zitsarethecure »

input_sh wrote: post #22
tombert wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and I think it actually has a shot of being an equivalent to the Mac App Store. This I agree with, but not this: > and does actually do a good job of making "one package manager to rule them all". That's not its goal. There are no terminal apps in it, so everyone that wants to run custom packages from a terminal is still going to need something like apt/dnf/homebrew.

Is there an actual technical limitation or just because of the binary naming convention? I ask because some of the flatpak apps I have installed I almost always run via the command line by putting "/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin" in my path and aliasing to the long name, ie: "alias evince=org.gnome.Evince" and they seem to work fine.

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

#359

Post by calvinmorrison »

majewsky wrote: post #351
vasvir wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now pipewire...

Which is completely backwards-compatible with PulseAudio. Even in a Pipewire-only world, applications will for the most part be linked against libpulse like they used to, but the PulseAudio server socket is provided by Pipewire.

I mean, that's what they always say right? OSS replaced Alsa replaced arts replaced pulseaudio replaced pipewire or did I get that backwards?

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

#360

Post by bogwog »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #348
_cenw wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an IDE, and if so, which? Last I checked Flathub shipped with VSCode and IntelliJ, despite both having major broken parts. The VSCode workaround back when I tried Silverblue was to run sshd inside toolbox and remote Flatpak VSCode into it. It was definitely not a frictionless experience. And IntelliJ having the terminal and debugging broken removes most of the useful parts of the IDE for me.

Yeah, Flatpak has some kind of hangup about the idea that some tools need actually real full access to the system. Wireshark is similarly useless because you can't actually capture packets with it. It is really strange that both this and "it's totally ok for packages to set their own security defaults" are true in Flatpak land.

If Linux starts attracting commercial development and we see an influx of new apps, wouldn't you feel safe knowing that the ones you install as flatpaks aren't allowed to capture packets on your system?

Wireshark is a tool more in the realm of development/sysadminry, whereas flatpaks are designed for more traditional apps, like Discord or Firefox.

I wouldn't want my development tools to come from flatpaks even if they had full access to the system, because I wouldn't have control over dependencies. Traditional system package managers are a better fit for that, and on Silverblue you have Toolbox for that.

Post reply on HN