this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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That's a good point.
That's true.
I think my issue with the Flatpak sandbox is I understand how it works and what its limitations are (and I'm mostly fine with them), but the average user doesn't. I was reluctant to try Flatpak before understanding how it worked, but now that I know how it works, I think it's fantastic! But it's also a work-in-progress. What we have now is good, but I think it could be better. Not entirely sure how it gets better though.
I'm still not really sure where I stand on Fedora Atomic. Lack of H.264 decoding by default is a damaging choice. They should just include openH264 in the base image, reproducibility be damned. Give it 5 more years and maybe this will be revisited...
Nova + Zink + NVK will solve some of the problem with NVIDIA (maybe even very soon), but not hardware decoding currently, which is a big one.
Gamescope doesn't work great in a Toolbox. It works fine in Flatpak, but Bottles doesn't let me use Gamescope options. I think Lutris does, but I haven't tried it out yet.
And how am I supposed to install fonts without layering them on?? I've been copying them to
~/.local/share/fontsmanually.I think the idea is cool. But I think a few more parts of the ecosystem need to be in place first. I'll keep using it for now.
I maintain a list of recommended Flatpak apps.
I had a damn Librewolf crash some time ago, the RPM is broken, switched back to Firefox... so I lost about 3 hours of overhaul of that list as it is currently very messy.
But if it is fixed, feel free to submit apps to be included, to have a "goodness enumerating" list of apps, rather than a huge mess of random apps.
They dont include that? I thought they would...
I use Fedora kinoite-main from uBlue which is very close to upstream but fixes many issues for me.
UBlue focussing on their very opinionated variants is a bit annoying, because it is now pretty hard to find a guide how to install kinoite-main. I just have a bookmark of their archived website.
If this is actually an issue I would like to tackle that. I am currently doing a Change Proposal to make the default rpm-ostree permissions reasonably secure.
So this is an issue with reproducability? I dont think so? Cisco builds the binaries for Fedora and it gets installed. The packages are not from their repos, but the typical sync issues would not occur on Atomic.
Yeah for sure, I think for Intel and AMD too, hardware h264 for example. AV1 in OBS will be awesome though.
But thats why I use uBlues base images, it is Fedora and I say I use Fedora and participate in their community, but their base images have a ton of stuff I dont agree with (toolbox, missing random packages, too simplistic installer...)
I'm very familiar with you, haha. You keep popping up wherever I go these days. You're everywhere. Maybe not quite as omnipresent as Neal Gompa.
I can think of a few Flatpaks that could fit on that list.
It's the same old story with codecs. Fedora would love to support as many codecs as possible, but H.264 is patent-encumbered so they can't. They had hardware decoding support through Mesa a few years ago but then they...changed it.
Fedora Atomic wants to include the OpenH264 enablement package for Firefox inside the Fedora Flatpak eventually which will solve most of the problem as that is where people are playing H.264 most often.
My understanding is OpenH264 is provided in binary-only format to Fedora because otherwise the royalty-free license cannot apply (i.e. Fedora can't build it from source). Fedora only ships free software. OpenH264 is free software. But it's binary-only. So they need to trust Cisco has built the binary correctly. I assume the reason they don't include it by default is because the only way to trust it's built from the same sources is to reproduce the build. Otherwise, I really don't see the issue.
OpenH264 is not a part of the base system so you need to layer it on. OpenH264 doesn't have support for High 10 Profile video which is fairly common off the web and is generally inferior to x264, I've found, but at least it's something.
And the reason I mention "5 years" is because by then, most of the patents on H.264 will have expired. With the exception of the new ones from just a few years ago that no one really uses. Maybe Fedora can enable x264 in their ffmpeg build then and we can stop talking about it. I am so sick of talking about H.264.
Call it a personal challenge or whatever but I'm sticking to Fedora Silverblue for the foreseeable future. uBlue is almost certainly a better experience for most people.
That's not true if you're using Flathub packages. Flathub ships userspace Mesa drivers which enable hardware decoding for Intel and AMD GPUs even with H.264 and H.265.
uBlue does solve the two big issues with Fedora, which is codecs and proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Any other issues are tiny in comparison. I will say I prefer Toolbox to Distrobox, despite using Distrobox first. I certainly understand that's an unpopular opinion and not one a lot of people share. It's probably the same reason you use KDE and I use GNOME (most of the time).
I've always hated the Fedora installer. Does uBlue do something different?
Funny, I use that name not so long. Currently hyperfocused on Fedora Discuss, Lemmy and Github.
Although I should really change my stuff to some Forgejo instance and just mirror to Github.
I thought a lot about tech resiliance in the last days, I am from germany and the people here are stupid. They literally elect people that will make a neofascist surveillance hell reality.
I wonder how Tor, Tails and others handle their code stuff. Apart from selfhosting their services of course. Like resiliance, I think decentralized code repos are crucial.
I really like how uBlue just used the official Fedora OCI images (that they produce but dont even use) and used all the container tooling to create this awesome project.
But relying on Github is insane, it is owned by Microsoft and they dont give a damn about freedom. It is pretty scary, 90% of my Android apps are also on Github.
I want to build my own variant, KDE and minimal only, maybe GNOME if contributors join. But no more, all the freedom is great but it is huge maintenance.
I thought Ciscos trick could fix that? They are a huge company, pay the max amount of money already and can just share the software with their license to anyone.
Not sure if that is the best way. Flatpak has runtime extensions, and rpmfusion could build one for the entire ffmpeg and more. This could just be added from an external repo and installed along.
Or they include openh264 in their runtime.
Fedora Flatpaks got quite a boost recently and even have some KDE apps not on Flathub.
Well... rpmfusion could do that? And act like a "3rd party auditor" ?
Interestesting, never heard that. I use Celluloid Flatpak which is pretty great (I wish Haruna would get their basics together like customizable UI, working subtitles, working queue etc).
So the only reason to have ffmpeg is nice terminal stuff, Dolphin extensions or just video previews in Dolphin. Nautilus supports that via a Flatpak right? Thats cool.
Fuck patents. I am happy that we now have AV1 and dont really know why VP9 is not more used? It is a pain!
I have a command text file with the exact command I need to reproduce my install. One for Fedora Kinoite, one for Kinoite-main.
It is just a few packages and I really only need the things I mentioned.
I also dont like Aurora or others that much, they have too much stuff added.
True, Flatpak is cool. Dolphin is also available as one, I need to test if it works with Flatpak ark and all that, udisks2, mounting stuff, MTP, maybe SMB.
Interesting, why? I need to try it again.
Do you know btw how to upgrade a F39 distrobox to F40? Distrobox has some "assemble" function to rebuild it with a config file. But traditional dnf system-upgrade doesnt work.
Why? Curious.
No uBlue uses Anaconda too, which is a whole set of stuff. They are testing the new UI (a component of Anaconda) for workstation exclusively.
uBlue pioneered in making Anaconda work for installing OCI rpm-ostree btw
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+ESCso 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 (
firefoxandfirefox-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-ostreeis going away to be replaced bydnfagain.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 --allworks 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/binbut in/usr/bininstead. 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/$USERif 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
rpmfor 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.nameThat 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...