Sadly there’s reality. The reality is to get away from the evil distributions the Flatpak creators have made… another distribution. It is not a particularly good distribution, it doesn’t have a decent package manager. It doesn’t have a system that makes it easy to do packaging. The developer interface is painfully shoehorned into Github workflows and it adds all the downsides of containerisation.
While the developers like to pretend real hard that Flatpak is not a distribution, it’s still suspiciously close to one. It lacks a kernel and a few services and it lacks the standard Linux base directory specification but it’s still a distribution you need to target. Instead of providing seperate packages with a package manager it provides a runtime that comes with a bunch of dependencies.
If you need a dependency that’s not in the runtime there’s no package manager to pull in that dependency. The solution is to also package the dependencies you need yourself and let the flatpak tooling build this into the flatpak of your application. So now instead of being the developer for your application you’re also the maintainer of all the dependencies in this semi-distribution you’re shipping under the disguise of an application. And one thing is for sure, I don’t trust application developers to maintain dependencies.
Even if there weren’t so many holes in the sandbox. This does not stop applications from doing more evil things that are not directly related to filesystem and daemon access. You want analytics on your users? Just requirest the internet permission and send off all the tracking data you want.
Developers are not supposed to be the ones packaging software so it’s not hard at all. It’s not your task to get your software in all the distributions, if your software is useful to people it tends to get pulled in.
Another issue is with end users of some of my Flatpaks. Flatpak does not deal well with software that communicates with actual hardware. A bunch of my software uses libusb to communicate with sepecific devices as a replacement for some Windows applications and Android apps I would otherwise need. The issue end users will run in to is that they first need to install the udev rules in their distribution to make sure Flatpak can access those USB devices. For the distribution packaged version of my software it Just Works™
I have done more work on OpenSeaMap. It started with me being annoyed with plotters costing too much and ended in me using many hours to mark down rocks from satellite images.
It’s still pretty basic and there is no good way of collecting water depth info, but fun to improve it.
I can’t remember if my dad sent me up an Ubuntu server on an azure hosted VM or if we installed it on an old laptop that was shitting out but either way, I’ve always gone back and forth since I was like 13 or 14.
For servers, I use Linux exclusively. I don’t see a need for windows on them and as such have just always used either Ubuntu or RHEL for anything that I need to treat as a server. For laptops, I generally started with windows and then installed Linux a few years later but if I get a new one it’s gonna be Linux out of the gate.
My desktop, on the other hand, is different. I’ve always used windows on my gaming desktops due to compatibility but a few years ago I tried Linux as my only OS for a bit. I loved using it at first, but then I ran into all the issues with trying to run a beefy gaming PC on Linux. Fan curves were a nightmare to set and half the time they couldn’t find my fans so they were either at full blast or off, and I hated the idea of using the bios because I don’t want to turn my PC off to set them. RGB was okay but some of my stuff didn’t get found, and all I wanted was a solid color but it was very hard. Some games didn’t work and they were the ones I wanted most.
Ultimately, I went back to windows but then a year or two later the steam deck came out, so gaming has come a long way. I’m very much considering it again but I have to do my research beforehand to see what tools I’ll need. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll take them!
I’m not sure what fan issues you were hitting, but I’ve been gaming on linux (with nvidia on manjaro) for the last couple of years just fine. Steam/proton has made so much possible that wasn’t before.
Can’t recommend manjaro btw. EndeavourOS is my new go-to.
Wild. Maybe I did something wrong but I tried finding a simple interface to set fan curves and most places I found were terminal-based, and as much as I love the terminal, I don’t like it for things like fan curves.
Also for OS, last time I went with Pop!_OS and I have that on my laptop now, but I’m not that picky. I just liked that Pop!_OS had drivers built in for Nvidia.
I do plan on trying again, but my #1 priority is standing up this Poweredge R720XD I have sitting behind me. Server racks are too expensive.
To be clear, I haven’t messed with my fan curves on linux, I’ve just never had an issue with my fans being on “full blast or off”.
I know manjaro and endeavour both have tools that handle proprietary nvidia driver installation, but I’ve only tried manjaro’s so far (mhwd). It works fine, but running updates are a bit of a manual chore. Completely defeats the purpose of the tool imo.
Ah okay, I get you now. When I said “full blast or off” what I meant was using the tools I found, I could either turn them on or off, I couldn’t find the granular controls to set like, “at +10 degrees go to 25% power” type thing. And again, maybe I was doing it wrong, but I’m pretty fluent with Linux and just had no idea what I was doing.
I was about 16 and made a Slax CD to get around my schools locked down WinNT/XP installs. After school I ran Ubuntu on an '06 Acer laptop for a while but later switched to W7 for gaming. When W10 launched with ads in the start menu I moved to Debian and have been totally happy since then.
A smaller scale anecdote of mine — I have been using Linux for more than a decade as a second daily driver. I need to make the switch. Everything I need now is on Linux except Visual Studio. So I planned to change my main programming language. It is slow and painful, but I think I am on the right path. Windows 10 is truly the last Windows, for me.
As of W10 I stopped trusting Windows. Having ads bundled into a >$200 OS shows me that being an OS is no longer the primary goal.
Previous to that I had been using Debian as a media server so the switch was pretty painless. I can play 90% of my Steam library on Linux, edit photos, edit videos, stream, browse, and do literally everything I used to do on Windows.
I really liked Windows XP & 7, it was good in the time I was tech illiterated, but I buyed a new laptop and I have to use 10. I didn’t hate it. But then, 11 comes. And was crap That time I was becoming concerned with privacy and decided to switch straight to Arch. Best thing I did in a computer. And I was more convinced when I saw that Windows 12 desktop concept that Microsoft showed, basically crapier MacOS.
I am happy with Arch KDE. The only problems I had until today were caused by my unknowledge. I don’t plan to ever return windows.
You’re right - could have sworn that they used it. NIffy website i did just found was osm-apps.zottelig.ch that points out the different variety of OSM. On a side note, I have switched over to /e/OS on my main cellphone and it uses Magic Earth, which def uses OSM.
It was easier to set up than Windows. Windows took longer and had more missing drivers. Linux Mint worked almost perfectly out of the box–all I did was change the video driver for my dedicated graphics (and that was done easily by picking one from a provided list).
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