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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

#381

Post by freedomben »

sprash wrote: post #88
freedomben wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP answers that question pretty throughly. Because pacman is niche and distro-specific and largely distro-controlled, and has no ability to incentivize developers who need to get paid for their work. This leads to Linux desktop having far fewer applications available to them compared to windows and mac.

If payment is your main incentive to work on software you should stay out of the FOSS space. Go write your iPhone/Android app or sell your stuff on Steam. Another little insignificant app store won't convince Adobe or AutoDesk to port their stuff to Linux.

What? That seems crazy to me. You would literally turn away people that want to add value to the FOSS foundational ecosystem, which in turn brings in contributors and donations to keep things going?

Also this seems to be a confusion about what FOSS is. FOSS "freedom" isn't about "free as in beer", it's about "free as in speech." The GPL even welcomes commercial software, provided they include the source. I'd be thrilled to see a category of "paid FOSS" in the store, and I'd buy quite a bit of it if prices are reasonable and the software is useful.

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

#382

Post by freedomben »

panick21_ wrote: post #378
Nasreddin_Hodja wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppImage still just works, just like tarball bundles without dependency on 3rd party infrastructure and overengineered solutions like snap and flatpak.

The talk I linked suggest this isn't the case.

I haven't watched the talk (yet), but I use a number of app images and they have always "just worked" and in remarkable fashion. My only complaint is that you sometimes have to write the .desktop yourself if you want it launchable through the UI, but that's a fairly trivial objection.

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

#383

Post by freedomben »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #269
ekianjo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This leads to Linux desktop having far fewer applications available to them compared to windows and mac.) There's far fewer applications because there's a very tiny market share compared to these two OSes. Not because of the lack of payment systems.

I mean, it's probably both.

Yes definitely, it's probably both. Both are in a feedback cycle as well. Less people means less attention. Less attention means less people. It's a hard cycle to break.

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

#384

Post by pxc »

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.

No, there's way too much and too deep open disagreement among Nixers for NixOS to be a cult. :)

More seriously, people who run NixOS are, generally and historically, people who have a lot of experience with package management and people who choose their Linux distro based on the tooling rather than based on defaults.

The Nix approach is conservative in some wonderful ways that are likely to appeal to longtime Linux users who appreciate the strengths of old-school system package managers as well as the defect of those systems, which makes Nix people want to cry out in response to container-based package management:

> You don't have to go that far! You can have all these benefits but keep fine-grained library sharing! The choice between static and dynamic linking is a false dichotomy!

because if you love what's great about traditional package management, that's really exciting.

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

#385

Post by yencabulator »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #345
littlestymaar wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But flatpak has it sandboxed With an open sandbox by default for many apps…

You are thinking of Snap probably. Some flatpaks have $HOME wide-open, but Flatpak itself has no mechanism to completely bypass the sandboxing, as evidenced by things like Wireshark being unable to actually capture packets and many IDEs being unable to actually call build tools.

> Some flatpaks have $HOME wide-open, but Flatpak itself has no mechanism to completely bypass the sandboxing

The first one is the second one.

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

#386

Post by pxc »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #346
sph wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Is NixOS a cult? I think it kinda is, but in a good way. It's the church of reproducible builds, which is a good cause.

There is reportedly a chapter of the Chaos Computer Club which has been jokingly nicknamed 'the church of NixOS'. ;)

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

#387

Post by pxc »

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.

Huh. I started using Plasma 5 on a bleeding edge rolling distro and it was just fine. Everything was a mix of KDE4 and KDE5 apps for a while, but they all worked with minor quirks at worst.

What were your issues? What was the distro?

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

#388

Post by phatfish »

johnny22 wrote: post #194
phatfish wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well to be fair flatpak isn't really meant for cli apps, and i would guess those are mostly cli apps.

Azure StorageExplorer is one i can recall of the top of my head. Although it's true a lot of dev tools will be CLI and not have too many dependencies (you would hope).

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

#389

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

yencabulator wrote: post #385
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking of Snap probably. Some flatpaks have $HOME wide-open, but Flatpak itself has no mechanism to completely bypass the sandboxing, as evidenced by things like Wireshark being unable to actually capture packets and many IDEs being unable to actually call build tools.

> Some flatpaks have $HOME wide-open, but Flatpak itself has no mechanism to completely bypass the sandboxing The first one is the second one.

We're obviously using extremely different definitions of the word "completely". Flatpak sandboxes more than just file system access.

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

#390

Post by PhilippGille »

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?

It's been several years since I created an AppImage, but I think these were already available back then:

Installation, launcher integration:

https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/run-appimages.html#inte... https://docs.appimage.org/reference/desktop-integration.html

https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/faq.html#question-how-c...

Updates:

https://docs.appimage.org/packaging-guide/optional/updates.h...

What was missing was convenient sandboxing. Firejail was recommended but with the responsibility entirely on the user to install and use it.

Flatpak doesn't limit access by default (or rather it does but apps can just ask more permissions at build time and it's not prevented by default IIRC) but offers the user some options for being more strict without needing extra tools.

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