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Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

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Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#51

Post by dathinab »

From a 2023 POV about desktop OS security running things sandboxed is a _strong must have_.

Even for well curated applications, through less so.

So I'm happy about the general direction here.

But last time I looked at flathub (and related topics), I was quite disappointed to a point that I would say they majorly failed this. Now that was quite a while ago. But just the fact that in a non well curated app store you could download applications which where not effectively sandboxed (e.g. used it only for copatibility not sandboxing) in a context which made it look for users like it's sandboxed without any huge red warning label or similar was quite shocking and made me second guess the security competence of the involved developers.

Now I hope things are much better by now and I guess I will spend some time to look into it again this weekend.

But the reason I write this here isn't because I want to dump on flathub but because I often feel that huge parts of the Linux community seem to be very out of touch when it comes to desktop OS security to a point it makes me worry for the future of desktop Linux.

(It's also not just security e.g. some design decisions and defaults of systemd make sense for many Linux use case, but not desktop systems. The Unix permission model doesn't match well to the desktop OS security concerns of today either etc. etc.)

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#52

Post by gnulinux »

What are people's opinions on Flatpak vs AppImage? I use both (AppImage a lot more so than Flatpak) and I'm not well educated in their differences. I shall research it, but I'm wondering if anyone has some insight to share. Some apps I use (MuseScore) publish their own official .AppImage linux executables which work flawlessly for me, so I cannot abandon AppImage completely. Is it worth it to use both? Is it better to switch to one for everything, along with distro package manager? Thoughts?

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#53

Post by Havoc »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #45
blendergeek wrote: post #33

I owned a Librem 5 phone and used it as my daily driver for a few months. During this time I exclusively used Flatpaks for my apps that I installed. After installing about 15-20 apps, the 32 GB of internal storage were completely full and my phone stopped working. I had no clue how huge Flatpak apps are. Even worse, I could not find out which apps to delete. All the space was taken up by excess "runtimes" I don't kno…

Could this be solved by smarter layering? I've read that Flatpaks are just container images under the hood and I'm sure many of those share the same base layers.

Docker does that, but I had understood flatpak to be closer to a VM. i.e. not layered in the same way

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#54

Post by chungy »

kirbyfan64sos wrote: post #26
ar_lan wrote: post #5

What advantages does Flatpak offer over Nix? The only benefit(s) I see are: 1. Sandboxed applications (via containers?) - so applications you have don't technically have access to your home directories by default. That's sort of nice - but how many applications really warrant this overhead? 2. Possibly easier to write/package? That said, in Nix you pretty much just need to package once. I've not used Flatpak - can so…

I actively use both Nix and Flatpak, and my perspective is that they're tuned for different purposes: - Flatpak doesn't require apps to be rebuilt when the runtime changes, whereas Nix would require a rebuild. This is, of course, an intentional selling point for Nix: you don't have to worry about keeping track of ABIs and the like. This is, however, less fun when you have to update a large amount of applications for…

> Flatpak doesn't require apps to be rebuilt when the runtime changes, whereas Nix would require a rebuild. This is, of course, an intentional selling point for Nix

I doubt it's intentional. Guix has solved the problem---update the runtime without rebuilding the app---while being fairly similar to Nix's concepts in general.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#55

Post by kirbyfan64sos »

blendergeek wrote: post #33

I owned a Librem 5 phone and used it as my daily driver for a few months. During this time I exclusively used Flatpaks for my apps that I installed. After installing about 15-20 apps, the 32 GB of internal storage were completely full and my phone stopped working. I had no clue how huge Flatpak apps are. Even worse, I could not find out which apps to delete. All the space was taken up by excess "runtimes" I don't kno…

There should certainly be more tooling around finding these things out, but one thing worth noting is that you can `flatpak uninstall --unused` to remove old, unused runtimes (the runtime environments for apps).

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#56

Post by rgoulter »

superkuh wrote: post #8
quaintdev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Nix

Nix is the ultimate expression of this abandonment of the concept of a desktop distro. It doesn't even try to have system libraries. Nix gives up re: future shock. The entire OS is just containers. I'm sure it works fine if you only ever use popular software but as someone that's constantly compiling and adding little .c programs from the 'net to my bin/ having to manually create and specify the entire "system" libra…

> Nix is the ultimate expression of this abandonment of the concept of a desktop distro.

NixOS deliberately avoids having global/implicit 'system' libraries / configured state, and instead demands declarative expression of the system configuration. -- The libraries the system uses don't adhere to a global FHS structure.

Nix similarly eschews use of global/implicit libraries. Building each package requires its dependencies be declared.

However, it's incorrect to say this is "just containers". I don't see how you get "abandonment of concept of desktop distro" from "doesn't have implicit system libraries". -- NixOS allowing the whole system configuration starting from a single file is convenient, and something people might otherwise use a tool like Ansible for.

That said, NixOS obviously has many use cases which have significantly higher friction compared to more typical systems. (And a steep learning curve to overcome that friction). -- e.g. on Arch or Ubuntu, the system configuration is global and malleable.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#57

Post by [deleted] »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #45
blendergeek wrote: post #33

I owned a Librem 5 phone and used it as my daily driver for a few months. During this time I exclusively used Flatpaks for my apps that I installed. After installing about 15-20 apps, the 32 GB of internal storage were completely full and my phone stopped working. I had no clue how huge Flatpak apps are. Even worse, I could not find out which apps to delete. All the space was taken up by excess "runtimes" I don't kno…

Could this be solved by smarter layering? I've read that Flatpaks are just container images under the hood and I'm sure many of those share the same base layers.

[deleted]

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#58

Post by FengLengshun »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #14
ar_lan wrote: post #5

What advantages does Flatpak offer over Nix? The only benefit(s) I see are: 1. Sandboxed applications (via containers?) - so applications you have don't technically have access to your home directories by default. That's sort of nice - but how many applications really warrant this overhead? 2. Possibly easier to write/package? That said, in Nix you pretty much just need to package once. I've not used Flatpak - can so…

What advantages has Nix over Flatpak? Seems to be just yet another esoteric solution for installing software? Why should one prefer it over other solutions? How well does Nix integrate packages into the system? Flatpak is integrating apps into the desktop environments. Probably just following standards, but is Nix doing this too? Are Nix-Installations portable? I use Flatpak to have the same installation on different…

From my testing it seems to integrate well enough. Mind, I'm still only dipping my toes to Nix on Vanilla OS for now, but I could install `git` and I could run `git` directly without `flatpak run` and the likes.

Optional dependencies seems to be an issue, though, as I needed to figure out what on my own I need to get thumbnails on Dolphin working correctly, but I might still be missing something that I'm supposed to do in this case.

As for portability, it seems doable with home-manager: https://julianhofer.eu/blog/01-silverblue-nix/#home-manager (itsfoss also have a pretty good NixOS guide that will cover home-manager as well).

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#59

Post by brucethemoose2 »

sirius87 wrote: post #38
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #22

Flatpak is great for self contained apps, but it seems problematic when it has to reach outside the sandbox. I ran into this in VSCode and with CUDA video processing filters, but I'm sure there are more examples. And thats what distro packages are for, I guess.

Try using Flatseal [1] which is a Flatpak app that helps manage permissions for other Flatpak apps. You can see exactly what permissions are enabled in each app's sandbox and expand/override everything from env vars to filesystem locations you want to enable access to. [1] https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal

Yeah, but "install this thing to manually tweak that thing to get those things to work" is so linux, and is exactly what Flatpak is trying to avoid.

On the other hand, its a security issue, so I supposed some opt in friction is prudent.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#60

Post by lifty »

superkuh wrote: post #8
quaintdev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Nix

Nix is the ultimate expression of this abandonment of the concept of a desktop distro. It doesn't even try to have system libraries. Nix gives up re: future shock. The entire OS is just containers. I'm sure it works fine if you only ever use popular software but as someone that's constantly compiling and adding little .c programs from the 'net to my bin/ having to manually create and specify the entire "system" libra…

You are confusing it. Nix does not use containers.
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