this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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I'm using Bluefin, and it's really cool, but sometimes I wish I could scrap the immutability because installing certain apps is excruciating.
Yes, I know how to use distroboxes and rpm-ostree, but certain applications straight up won't work if you can't write to certain directories.
I hope they can solve this problem, although I'm not sure how.
I think immutability is the point of this particular distribution. There are definitely some kinks but conceptually I really like what they've done.
I'm curious, what apps are you having issues with specifically?
For sure, immutability is a point of the distro, but I have other reasons for using it. Namely, hardware-enablement and nice dev experience additions.
There's definitely value in immutability, but sometimes I wish I could temporarily disable it so I can do what I need to, while easily retaining those changes on updates.
The main program that I'm unable to install is
espanso. It's an open source text-expansion program that has become invaluable to me and the way that I type.I can build it from source, create an RPM for it, and even try layering it with
rpm-ostree, but even then, I have the problem of missing libraries, likewxGTK*. Sure, I can technically manually acquire those libs and useldconfigto configure them in a writable directory, but at that point, you're basically suffering through a dependency nightmare that isn't worth maintaining.For stuff like that, I really wish that I could just scrap the immutability and simply install some more system-level packages like that more easily.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that the reason I can't simply layer the
wxGTK*libs and the RPM manually:espansorequires slightly different versions of the libs, and if I could simply symlink the newer versions that are available in the Silverblue repositories to the slightly older versions thatespansorequires, I could probably get it to work.bluefin co-maintainer here. espanso is a hard one, we have an open issue on getting it to work because it'd be something awesome to include. We might end up needing to package it but haven't had a chance to look deeper into the issue.
You are an absolute king for this! I assumed it was too niche to have it included, but if you're willing to consider bundling
espansoin the Bluefin image, I can look into trying to solve for this.Yeah it's 2024, this stuff should just be built into the OS! I'm at kubecon so don't have time to look into it now but it'd be an awesome thing to have, we'd love the help!
Didn't know about espanso but I've actually searched for something like this a while back but found nothing. So thanks for mentioning it, definitely gonna give it a try.
Why doesn't it work exported from a distrobox ?
I forget, to be honest. That was the first thing I tried but I did that weeks ago and have given up since then.
I want to say that it might have been the fact that I'd have to install and enable a GUI environment in the container, which would be, at best, odd, but at worst, buggy, since
espansowould be interacting with the GUI in the container environment, rather than my host.It's not that bad. I run Davinci resolve in a Distrobox.
Edit: and when I say it's not that bad it's basically flawless
Fair enough. I have some other GUI applications in a distrobox container.
I should have clarified that this program, in particular, does more than merely display content: it has to interact with my Wayland session to inject key strokes, which doesn't seem to work from a distrobox container from what I've seen.
Ah yes. I'm on X11 due to Nvidia and some remote applications for the foreseeable future.
I'm on Bazzite (similar to Bluefin) and I installed espanso via Nix. It was just one command to install it and one setcap to grant it permissions. The good thing about using Nix instead of Distrobox or Flatpak is that you don't run into annoying sandbox limitations, since these binaries live on your real filesystem and can access all system resources.
The key thing to make it work is that the setcap command needs to be run against the actual nix store executable and not the symlink in your home folder. Also, this is also why a Distrobox export of this would never work, because you'd be setcapping only the symlink which is useless.
That's a brilliant idea! I don't know why using Nix didn't occur to me.
What did you do to configure Nix on Bazzite (
ujust nix, or something similar)? I'm willing to rebase just to try it, if necessary.Yeah originally I used ujust on my old PC, but that command is gone in the latest Bazzite for whatever reason, so (on my new PC) I installed it using the command here: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer