this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Looks like we frequent the same circles, then.
But hey, Germany was responsible for the Sovereign Tech Fund, which has made a big difference for GNOME and accessibility with the Newton stack. So it's not all bad. Not that I live there.
That's the main reason I don't use uBlue. The idea of booting my entire operating system from a container created on Github's infrastructure is just...it scares me. Even though much of the free software I rely on is hosted on Github. And yes, most of my Android apps are also from Github.
That's a nice idea. I wonder if Sourcehut does container registries...I know people praise their CI.
I know Tor uses Gitlab. Seirdy has an article series on "Resilient Git".
Yes, however it only covers their implementation (which is lacking) and it only covers binaries they create.
I'm thinking about Fedora including the build in their own repositories. It would be really nice if H.264 decoding was just default and you didn't need to do anything.
See the following thread for all of the research I did: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h-264-support-in-fedora-workstation-by-default/114521
Michael Cantazaro had a really helpful and enlightening response: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h-264-support-in-fedora-workstation-by-default/114521/5
So do I. But keep in mind there are two Celluloid Flatpaks you can install; one is from Fedora Flatpaks which disables H.264/H.265/VC-1 decoding and the other is from Flathub with all features enabled.
GNOME Software tends to select Fedora Flatpaks first. So users can end up really confused; see: https://github.com/flathub/io.github.celluloid_player.Celluloid/issues/140
File previews are supported via the Sushi extension, which is available as a Flatpak. Obviously, it doesn't work on H.264/H.265/VC-1 media because it's a Fedora Flatpak.
I really need ffmpeg because it's a crucial part of my workflow because I convert so much media. But that's fine; I just use it in a Toolbox.
But Nautilus works really well as a Flatpak. It even seems faster than non-Flatpak Nautilus and I have no idea why.
KDE made a big push to make all of their programs available as Flatpaks. And Snaps. Which I think is great. But you end up in a weird situation where the Krita Flatpak is not officially supported by Krita because no one at Krita works on maintaining the Flatpak. Rather, they support only AppImage officially, probably because it's easier to maintain their insane patchset than with Flatpak. Not having any experience with distribution systems aside from Flatpak, I really don't know what niceties Snap or AppImage provides.
Nothing much has changed since last you commented on that Toolbox thread I was reading :)
I think Toolbox is the right way to solve the problem. It's using a real programming language (Go) instead of bash, it supports a small set of important container images, and those container images are only provided from quay.io, Red Hat's own infrastructure, instead of Docker Hub.
But it lacks some features intentionally (and some just because they haven't gotten around to it). Like
distrobox export
. Annoying to manually patch in but not hard. I use Toolbox for Signal and Steam because I don't want to use Unverified Flatpaks.I don't think upgrading Distroboxes or Toolboxes is supported. They're meant to be destroyed and re-created. Really inconvenient, but I guess the proper way of maintaining toolboxes/distroboxes is through Containerfiles.
So I don't use Fedora containers. Or Ubuntu containers. Or Debian containers.
I use Arch because it's a rolling release and you just keep updating it. No upgrade problems so far...aside from all the errors I ignore (everything seems to work fine). Also, I really like the Arch userland and it has Signal Desktop in the official repositories.
It really makes me feel at home on Fedora.
I think GNOME provides a more coherent and consistent experience for users. I'm okay with not having features like a system tray, desktop icons, or window buttons I never use. I really love GNOME. It's changed the way I use computers and has made everything aside from KDE feel like a completely inferior experience in comparison.
But I use KDE for my multi-monitor system because frankly, GNOME is an awful experience if you have more than one monitor with different resolutions. KDE kind of sucks too, but it's not completely broken. KDE is practical by solving problems we have now, like letting XWayland applications scale themselves. Because even if it's a total hack that works inconsistently, it works very well for most of the software I use. I find parts of KDE overwhelming (especially the System Settings) but hey, it works.
I like both KDE and GNOME and think each has their own strengths. It's nice to see KDE adopt one of GNOME's killer features (partially), the Overview. It'd be nice to see GNOME adopt a KDE feature like
CTRL+META+ESC
so I can kill windows graphically even on Wayland.But god GNOME is annoying when it comes to protocol standardization. At least they're finally implementing DRM Leasing for VR users (not me).
Huh. I thought I was supposed to be sticking up for GNOME. Alright, I use GNOME everywhere else and it's still my favorite desktop by far. They focus on a great experience with what works great now. There are very few hacks in GNOME land. I just think they need to catch up to KDE with Wayland and other areas like the multi-monitor stuff.
Never heard of that, I hope accessibility on Wayland improves.
Neal Gompa mentioned that Flatpaks dont have the permission holes to allow screen readers? Thats crazy and may be possible to fix with a global override.
Same here. I think it would be nice to create 2 or so base images on an individual host like Codeberg, but I am completely new to all that container stuff.
There are so many alternatives. I even have access to a selfhosted Gitea instance which may also be fine.
At the surface, yes. But I wonder about the stuff in the background, like decentralized encrypted backups, maybe not traceable or something.
Interesting, will add that blog to my Feeds :D
For sure it needs to, to be a usable product.
I only see it as a platform which needs to be tweaked to be usable. Currently doing a bit of work, upstreaming some secureblue things (btw the admin blocked be because they... dont like annoying questions?).
Matrix is also horrible for Dev work. People dont use threads so they just spam stuff in a single chat and it just bad...
Also, these change processes are damn slow, but hey, thats fine I guess?
I want to start doing some videos, no idea why OBS just has h264 hardware? I mean it doesnt matter but why no VP9? AV1 will come in 30.1 you know when that is stable?
I would just invoke the ffmpeg from some Flatpak, freedesktop.org runtime may have it. Maybe with some flatpak-spawn it could even have access everywhere?
Do you know what flatpaks (that are not VLC) have ffmpeg as a binary included?
I need to add a better app to this guide since I dont use VLC anymore.
Interesting, I need to try full-Flatpak Kinoite in a VM. I think Flatpak Firefox is also faster, but I need to benchmark that again.
I did quite a big benchmark including Brave, Firefox Tarball (
firefox
andfirefox-bin
), Fedora Firefox, Librewolf, Torbrowser, MullvadBrowser.Need to do that again. I also compiled FF myself for some time to use it on secureblue with hardened malloc. Funny enough, Fedora FF allows to replace the memory allocator now that I opened an issue, but it is very questionable if hardened_malloc is more secure, and if LD_PRELOAD is a secure way to do that.
I agree on these points. Is it considerably faster? Because bash is slow as hell, I need to start learning some real language as my bash scripts start getting a pain. (Especially the Arkenfox (FF and TB) scripts need to get a big overhaul and I am still bery unhappy with them).
Well I hope you use an Ubuntu container because I bet these packages are also not "verified" on Arch ;)
I use 90% verified and just have the verified subset repo around to check if an app is. If it is, I get 2 installation repos.
But these both apps are also Electron apps and supposedly containers dont restrict user namespace creation, so they are the best way to run these apps. According to uBlue devs, Firefox too.
You could use Debian Testing which is rolling afaik.
Fedora rawhide is too unstable, OpenSUSE has some strange package issues (I use QGis and RStudio).
RStudio uses the system package manager to add dependencies, nice concept but annoying on atomic. There is this guy that just builds the entire R libraries as RPMs on COPR, he had to reduce the repos priorities because it prevented all the other projects from building their stuff.
Does Arch have Rstudio stuff? I really think they should just abandon that concept and build the libraries themselves, and install them to the app directory...
Same for QGis but that needs pip.
Ironic. But I really wonder what to use. Basically its
These damn package names. Or maybe dnf5 could solve this? I really like Fedora packages, they are often very good.
Also when it comes to deduplicating libraries, I dont need a separate distro in a container, I need a clone of my current system and just a few packages and their specific dependencies on top. Not sure how this could work, especially in RAM, there is a thread somewhere on Discuss.
Here's a recent article: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/
So do I.
I think GNOME is working on a portal for that. After the Newton stack is in a good state.
Codeberg is probably a good host for that.
Lol. How strange.
I don't much like Discord either. Issue tracker is the right place for this sort of discussion in my opinion. Or Sourcehut's mailing lists are fine too.
I guess that's kind of the point :)
I'm usually converting other people's media, so I don't have much experience with OBS. But as for VP9, the industry was gun-shy about it because MPEG-LA threatened to sue Google over patent infringement for it. Essentially the same sort of deal with Sisvel and AV1, except MPEG-LA never followed through on it. Hardware encoding for VP9 has apparently never taken off, but hardware decoding is all around.
There's: https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer
Honestly, as long as I don't notice it, it doesn't bother me. I only noticed Flatpak Nautilus' launch time because it was instant.
I think so. It at least seems more reliable. I got a bunch of weird bugs with Distrobox in the beginning but I guess I was pushing it pretty far.
I kind of hate Python but it's at least more pleasant than Bash. I've no experience with Go, but it's probably nice to write.
Ah, well, I use Arch for all my other computers so I feel like I'm already trusting Arch's devs for all my packages. What's one more?
I make an exception for Anki and MakeMKV.
I kind of hate Debian and Ubuntu's userpsace :) It's okay on servers.
It has it in the AUR, but not as an official package. In most cases the AUR is just as good anyway.
DNF5 will definitely shake things up. Because
rpm-ostree
is going away to be replaced bydnf
again.This has an empty ffmpeg folder but no binary. Same with bottles, guiscrcpy, celluloid, newsflash, interstellar, digikam, haruna, krdc, obs studio,
But searching for "ffmpeg" I found io.github.aandrew_me.ytdn
It has the ffmpeg binary included.
Many projects use libffmpeg.so dont know if that could be used too.
Honestly never had issues. I now use an Arch distrobox too, but I dont really need Distrobox anyways. The Arch repos are too small.
There is a COPR for RStudio-copr-manager and the entire CRAN module list as RPMs. Otherwise you have a hard time getting the R plugins you may need to your distro.
QGis needs some python integration which seems to be missing on Arch too.
With the COPR I know who to trust, unlike the AUR, even though I now also setup yay.
Everything nearly separated from my OS using the different distrobox homedirs which work flawlessly.
Also
distrobox upgrade --all
works awesome its just a wrapper but really valuable.I have no idea because I install everything from unverified. Should learn how to swap remotes, then I could swap all the verified apps and when removing the unverified can check what I still use.
But unverified Flatpaks may be way better than distro packages. At least it is very transparent on Github (yeah, sucks) unlike strange distro build systems.
What, GNU utils? What makes it special, apart from apt? They have nala so that is dealt with.
Yeah this will be crazy. dnf has a lot more commands for querying etc, that will be useful.
It also sounded like they would reinvent the wheel a bit? Dont know
That's strange. I downloaded it just now and converted a video. It's not in
/app/bin
but in/usr/bin
instead. I know for a fact it relies on the ffmpeg binary inside the code. You can even access it usingflatpak run --command=ffmpeg org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer
.Eh, I've never felt that way. Even on my Arch system, I only have 15 packages from the AUR and 2134 packages installed from the repositories. But it's probably smaller than you're used to if you're coming from Debian or Fedora.
That library is designed for development as far as I'm aware. I noped out very quickly when looking at the documentation for using ffmpeg libraries :) I think that's why VideoTrimmer relies on the binary instead of the library too.
I take a different view: I don't trust anybody, but I read the PKGBUILDs and understand them. They're often not complicated. I don't particularly like the AUR much anymore though for this reason.
I did try this for a while but I couldn't get used to it. And programs can bypass it anyway with
/home/$USER
if they're feeling vindictive, though I haven't run into any yet. It'd definitely be nice to have more complete isolation one day.100% yes. Be nice to have that in Toolbox one day.
I'm with you there. I can understand PKGBUILDs but everything else is just far too complex for me. Or unfamiliar. The docs for packaging Fedora RPMs is scary as hell.
To be honest, it's mostly
apt
. I really hateapt
. I am also not very familiar with how the system is configured. It's very different from Arch, anyway. I can just never feel at home on an Ubuntu system even in a container, but I do run it on servers.I've downgraded my "hate" to "it's fiiine".
I really have no idea what to expect. But if I never need to use
rpm
for querying or whatever again I'll be happy.Seems you can use all the libraries too as if they were binaries. Updated my Fedora post.
Currently testing how to run the freedesktop.org runtime with home permission, this would allow to not give any app permanent home permission.
But wait, you can run apps with different permissions temporarily, right?
Like
flatpak run --filesystem=home org.app.name
That is the best way but not scalable for most users. You need access control and trust. On COPR I add the repo of an individual and only get packages from them.
This is not about isolation, even though this should totally be done. Its just about preventing dotfile mess.
Scalable, you know. A system should stay vanilla in 20 years, in 40 years.
In the end it would be
I mean we are not there yet, but close.
Apt is an ugly mess and nala might be python bloat but it looks fancy and automates things. Now that it runs on Debian 12 I installed it everywhere.
Yeah or add curl instructions to projects like librewolf, to avoid needing "oh and on atomic distros you dont use 'dnf blabla' but download it directly".
Even though I like my COPR command...