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

251–260 of 427 posts

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

#251

Post by megous »

afavour wrote: post #142
redeeman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i gotta say, if chrome stands out to you as a shining beacon of quality, i'd hate to hear about what software you consider bad

I know “Chrome bad” is a meme-level comment at this point but it’s a hugely impressive piece of software, basically an operating system unto itself at this point. Not to mention the V8 engine etc. Plenty to criticise about it from a product perspective but from an engineering one it is kind of a marvel.

Maybe engineers might be enamoured by it. Whatever.

On my GFs computer Chrome starts in about 7 minutes after fresh boot, no other programs running, yet. From a fricking Samsung SSD, 8GiB RAM. All it has to do is show some fake tabs and render a single page content.

Tell about its quality to my GF. She's used to it, but some of these days, I'll check the DNS logs, to see if it's really loading all the 1000 tabs (she keeps open at once), for 0 reason whatsoever, or if it's just that slow to start one page.

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

#252

Post by afavour »

megous wrote: post #251
afavour wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know “Chrome bad” is a meme-level comment at this point but it’s a hugely impressive piece of software, basically an operating system unto itself at this point. Not to mention the V8 engine etc. Plenty to criticise about it from a product perspective but from an engineering one it is kind of a marvel.

Maybe engineers might be enamoured by it. Whatever. On my GFs computer Chrome starts in about 7 minutes after fresh boot, no other programs running, yet. From a fricking Samsung SSD, 8GiB RAM. All it has to do is show some fake tabs and render a single page content. Tell about its quality to my GF. She's used to it, but some of these days, I'll check the DNS logs, to see if it's really loading all the 1000 tabs (she…

> On my GFs computer Chrome starts in about 7 minutes after fresh boot, no other programs running, yet.

There is something wrong with your GF’s computer. I have no idea what but a seven minute start time is absolutely atypical.

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

#253

Post by neurostimulant »

yazzku wrote: post #202
neurostimulant wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had issues with certain games crashing when run from Steam installed via Flatpak. It's not permission issues, but seems to be due to the Flatpak version bundled different system libraries. Have you encounter such issue on your end?

I have seen this, if I recall correctly, on an NVIDIA system. I suspect the Flatpak had trouble working with the (proprietary) driver.

I think it was MESA-related, but strangely only some games were having issues.

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

#254

Post by eviks »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #223
rom-antics wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I, on the other hand, want exactly that. I've never used a desktop file, and I want to control when and if I upgrade.

You can control when, if, and what, as a feature of a good package manager, no need to throw the baby of convenience with it

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

#255

Post by bandrami »

Gigachad wrote: post #123
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.

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…

Lagging isn't always a bad thing. Users of Debian Stable missed Heartbleed entirely.

But this gets to the mindset that bugs me about Flatpak, the magical thinking that regressions don't happen. It's why Alice can't downgrade a system flatpak because it might introduce a vulnerability she uses to attack Bob, but it's absolutely fine if she upgrades to introduce that vulnerability.

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

#256

Post by Athas »

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…

My impression is that Arch is not technically unusual among distributions, but is simply well-polished, documented, and very active (and has an easy way to install unvetted community packages). If this impression is correct, you still run the risk of unnoticed outdated software if the amount of volunteers drop, or a particularly critical one no longer has the time.

Which part of Arch's design prevents the issue described in the grandparent post? The issue is "distros lagging behind for years to provide a new package because they can't break all the things depending on the old version", which is solvable either with enough manpower or by sandboxing a la NixOS, where you can keep old versions around indefinitely for the things that need them. Does Arch use such sandboxing now?

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

#258

Post by mikae1 »

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?

> How are people keeping their AppImages updated?

The only software I run as an AppImage is BitWarden (from the official GitHub repo[1]. It prompts to update itself when there's a new version which works very well.

[1] https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/releases

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

#259

Post by bandrami »

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.

The SDK is different from the platform itself, but more or less. So I have three versions of Gnome, two of KDE, and three of Freedesktop.org, just based on the apps I run on Silverblue and what version they're at in Flathub. Since I asked specifically about SSL, that's shipped with FDO, meaning I potentially have three versions running right now. Also I have this annoying situation where an app a client uses is using a deprecated FDo runtime and nobody wants to pay to rebuild it.

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

#260

Post by themodelplumber »

worksonmine wrote: post #211
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…

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 o…

I see what you mean. I suppose these particular existing standards come from inner-views on technicals.

As opposed to, say, standards that are based on general user experience aspects. Does the control panel offer printer settings yet, for example.

Post reply on HN