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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

#281

Post by worksonmine »

themodelplumber wrote: post #260
worksonmine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but the problem and beauty of unix is the modularity and much of those features are out of the desktop environments hands. Control panel for what printer? Which settings? What version of the drivers?

At the lowest level you have the kernels (KDE and Gnome both run on Linux AND BSD) which may or may not have drivers built in. Then comes the distributions which are opinionated in the kernel versions, packages and patches they add.

Some of those packages are desktop environments or window managers and they are opinionated in how they run other packages and their lifecycle. Some full featured others are tiling. Some of them run on both Xorg and Wayland.

Last we have the actual packages, and they need to work in all these different environments, sizes and lately different protocols. They need to support different drivers, permissions and file system hierarchies. They do this by relying on each other, a package handling video focuses on supporting video and sound drivers so other packages can import that package.

KDE might have a very polished and up to date settings panel, checking for all drivers and their features. But in reality it works as intended on Ubuntu, but Debian is behind and doesn't want to patch the drivers because stability, on Arch there was a regression and most of the BSDs don't even support the driver. And one time Linus came along and didn't listen to the warnings and fucked it all with one line.

Nobody controls all of these pieces and they're so spread apart that what might seem as simple as a panel for printer settings quickly gets very complicated. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For those who want the one size fits all there are already options.

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

#282

Post by sph »

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.

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

#283

Post by mastazi »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #159
mastazi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly just inertia. Those are not servers (where you could easily migrate to another distro taking advantage of infra-as-code tools), they are a desktop and a HTPC. I have accumulated a lot of custom dotfiles, Ubuntu-specific utilities and scripts over time, not all of them would work in another distro unchanged. Removing Snap is not that hard, the "hardest" part is making sure that Firefox is installed from the M…

ZorinOS is Ubuntu but better.

thanks, this is new to me, checking it out!

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

#284

Post by gapan »

bandrami wrote: post #255
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…

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.

While I generally agree with you with respect to the mindset, it is actually possible to downgrade a flatpak [1]. It is rather involved, but possible. I have done it to downgrade cheese (the webcam app) since newer versions don't have the filters that older ones did, at least not for me.

[1]: https://itsfoss.com/downgrade-flatpak-packages/

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

#285

Post by teekert »

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.

I don't use NixOS, but from what I've read, you should just use NixOS.

All kidding aside, I installed NixOS (it installs like any other distro, it's just that after that you are completely lost), but it's a real paradigm shift.

I'm just hoping for Ubuntu Declarative Donkey at this point and hope someone addresses the learning curve and the specialist language and tools used. I'd hate to invest all this time and then all other distros finally respond and it was not really worth it after all. I mean it looks to me like one can just put a Yaml file at the heart of Ubuntu and make that work. At least as step 1. Why is there no response from the classic Linux vendors? There are atomic distro's yes (ie Fedora Silverblue), but no real NixOS-like product. I want my personal system to live in Git.

Maybe I should just use NixOS.

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

#286

Post by progval »

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…

> But flatpak has it sandboxed so the worst you could do is maybe steal my Spotify session token.

It has access to X11 https://github.com/flathub/com.spotify.Client/blob/0856c7641...>, so it could also be running a keylogger.

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

#287

Post by swexbe »

mikae1 wrote: post #258
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?

> 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

Seems a bit like going back to windows...

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

#288

Post by devwastaken »

Flatpak and snap have proven to be ineffective and security theatre. Sandboxing all user apps doesn't work, often the applications are created to not be sandboxed, and the existing sandbox configs are improper.

We don't need yet another store. What we need is a simple registry of applications that are installed with the scripts to uninstall. We already have this, it's a package manager.

For soft that doesn't need a package manager, we have .appimage.

Instead of making it more difficult to package apps for Linux, focus on having few methods that are robustly supported.

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

#289

Post by zozbot234 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #229
zozbot234 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really user-hostile, they just have limited development resources and making a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets would be way too much work. If you want to try things on your own, that's what unofficial extensions and tweaking tools are for.

Nah a bunch of clowns funded by private companies used their salaries to boost their egos to develop stupid anti-user centric desktop software starting after gnome 3 launched. Remove all options, treat everyone like an iPad baby and try to leverage the existing desktop to do a radical paradigm shift, when all people wanted was GNOME2+. This is actually different than KDE3->KDE4 transition, which while it was a total…

GNOME2+ is still around, that's what Mate is. GNOME 3 and later releases has great support for convergence, which is incredibly popular among users - while also being very easy to use via the keyboard, for a more traditional workflow. Ubuntu's Unity interface was built with similar goals, so this is quite far from a pure GNOME thing.

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

#290

Post by antonvs »

jehb wrote: post #181
AYoung010 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a strong argument to be made that modern web browsers are a good deal more complex than operating systems -- or at least most kernels.

It all depends on how you draw your Venn diagrams, I suppose. Is Chrome a massively complex browser, or is it some window dressing and bookmark syncing sitting on top of Chromium, that itself is really just a simple UI around the Blink rendering engine. GNU/Chrome, anybody?

ChromeOS makes those delineations pretty clear.
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