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

101–110 of 427 posts

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

#101

Post by viraptor »

jchw wrote: post #47
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…

One big tricky thing is plugins, such as for OBS. ABI incompatibility and sandboxing can make it tricky and confusing for end users. Flatpak itself could theoretically provide answers here.

They'll have to do it at some point. There's just too many apps with plugins to ignore it. (Including basically all of audio production with their VSTs)

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

#102

Post by kelnos »

cld8483 wrote: post #72
JohnFen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, yes. Debian prioritizes stability over being on the cutting edge. If you always want the latest and greatest, Debian isn't the right distro for you.

Debian Sid makes a pretty good "rolling release" distro for home/hobby use at least, although I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for this.

Sid is unstable (by definition and design)b wouldn't recommend as a daily driver. Testing is a decent rolling release distro, though.

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

#103

Post by tombert »

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.

Maybe I'm speaking a bit too broadly; at least in regards to GUI apps, it's been a pretty nice "unifying force" for me when I ran Linux (which has admittedly hasn't been a few years now).

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

#104

Post by wizzwizz4 »

metadat wrote: post #64
XorNot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is this still true today? 15 years ago it was a different story, but nowadays I haven't noticed a difference in update cadence between the two. Edit: I just checked for the classic case of latest Python (3.11), and the answer for Debian is to build from source, which is annoying (not difficult to compile, but then future updates can't be pulled in via apt). Does Debian not have a vibrant PPA community to fill the gap…

> Does Debian not have a vibrant PPA community to fill the gaps like Ubuntu?

Yeah, it does: the Ubuntu PPA community. (See https://wiki.debian.org/CreatePackageFromPPA, and similar.)

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

#105

Post by Volundr »

bandrami wrote: post #100
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…

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.

Until openssl has another vulnerability.

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

#106

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

cld8483 wrote: post #72
JohnFen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, yes. Debian prioritizes stability over being on the cutting edge. If you always want the latest and greatest, Debian isn't the right distro for you.

Debian Sid makes a pretty good "rolling release" distro for home/hobby use at least, although I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for this.

But you will still be subjected to Debian crazy rules regarding applied patch sets.

Nowadays you can get a full featured, well integrated and properly working user land on Linux with next to zero customisation with systemd and Gnome. I really recommend using a distribution which stays as close to vanilla as possible.

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

#107

Post by JohnFen »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #106
cld8483 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian Sid makes a pretty good "rolling release" distro for home/hobby use at least, although I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for this.

But you will still be subjected to Debian crazy rules regarding applied patch sets. Nowadays you can get a full featured, well integrated and properly working user land on Linux with next to zero customisation with systemd and Gnome. I really recommend using a distribution which stays as close to vanilla as possible.

Sure, if you find Gnome to your tastes. I can (just barely) live with systemd, but I am very allergic to Gnome.

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

#108

Post by themodelplumber »

derefr wrote: post #49
themodelplumber wrote: post #32

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"?

This depends: Do you care about details, or not? If not, a hand wave in the direction of "everything's the same" will suffice and the discussion's over.

OTOH, if you think there are good, detailed reasons why XFCE is not KDE is not Gnome is not LXDE, then you can probably see why standards are helpful, insofar as they can be designed to be reachable without compromising unique leverage points.

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

#109

Post by jraph »

sureste wrote: post #45
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…

> 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; last versions of KDE 4 were rock solid. First versions of Plasma 5 were a bit lacking but rapidly became very stable and usable, and you could actually keep using KDE 4 in the meantime. I expect the Plasma 6 transition to be even smoother. I hope I'm not wrong.

But otherwise I agree, Cinnamon seems very good and I tend to recommend it and pick it for people who I install Linux for.

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

#110

Post by kitsunesoba »

harry8 wrote: post #78
cld8483 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is an African word which means "Afraid of Debian" Seriously though, just install Debian. It's not hard, the netinstaller may be text-mode but it walks you through the simple steps one by one just like Ubuntu's GUI installer. Anybody who's comfortable using Ubuntu in the first place should be able to get through the Debian installer just fine.

One reason is 3rd party software. Frequently there is a deb compatible with the last couple of ubu LTS releases. Seems like more frequently than Debian stable releases? There's always things you don't like, are not distro packaged, but have to install for reasons to get work done to get paid. Xilinx vivado being the first example for me that springs to mind but I'm sure there are others and I'm sure I don't know what…

Additionally if I recall correctly, Ubuntu is one of the few distros that's set up to handle secure boot correctly out of the box (with the other I know to do this being Fedora).

This is nice if you're dual booting Windows 11. It's also probably going to increase the Ubuntu's representation in desktop Linux by virtue of booting without any EFI setup tinkering, because a lot of people's patience ends exactly where things cease to work as expected.

Post reply on HN