I like them a lot, switched to Kinoite⏩uBlue: (Kinoite-main, -nokmods (until that got silently dropped), -main again; 37-39)⏩Secureblue kinoite-laptop-userns
The biggest Problem is that Fedoras Images are not usable.
Filemanager movie thumbnails dont work
Flatpak browsers are not feature-complete and probably not secure (because they can’t create usernamespace-isolated processes for tabs)
they have no NVIDIA support
powerusers will miss ffmpeg
The idea of immutable images is, to have a base that most people dont need to change. You can, but the moment you add NVIDIA proprietary drivers or full ffmpeg, you are in unprotected territory again.
So I like the Distros for their reproducible bugs and future possibility to be a very secure base (you could just verify the hash of the root system to check for viruses). But they cannot be produced in the US.
Fedora is nice but just like with rpmfusion, ublue is the key part that makes it work. And on immutable images this cannot just be added in a welcome dialog, as you need massive overrides by default.
I can’t find an open issue regarding security with flatpaks on librewolf codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues it would be nice if you could open one such that it may get adressed.
Just install ffmpeg in a distrobox or layer it if you desire
Filemanager thumbnails - I usually don’t use big icons (or thumbnails) hence, I don’t remember it too well but that should depend on the file manager, right? And aren’t there tools for thumbnail creation in case they are missing? (I remember something from my time when I used arch)
You cant layer ffmpeg, you need to override-remove everything libav and then install everything new from rpmfusion. I did that, its a mess.
If you just want video playback thats just libavcodec-freeworld, thats why I specifically mentioned ffmpeg.
I am not a fan of Distrobox for small tools. For sure possible but unnecessary and the workflow is a pain. And trust me, I use it daily and even ran libvirt in a rootful one, virt-manager in a rootless one, connected over ssh.
Chromium uses namespaces. Nowadays unprivileged user namespaces, but the legacy suid namespaces are still integrated.
If you want to run Chromium (and I think all Electron apps too) as Flatpak, you replace those namespaces with zypak, which instead isolates processes using flatpak and its seccomp filters.
These are the seccomp filters for every app though, so they are probably way too unrestricted. Also it has a small performance hit.
That is the reason why no Chromium Browser Flatpak is official.
Now the thing with Firefox is, I have no idea what isolation they use. Everyone says its less secure. And they adopted Flatpak as if it was nothing, without any comment on that topic.
The issue is that Flatpak uses a single seccomp filter for bubblewrap, that is used by every app. But browsers would need a different one, with just the added permission to create user namespaces.
Currently this is not even possible when using a seperate repo. Really, no idea. Bubblejail is an alternative with custom seccomp filters and usernamespace permission. But it is very different, uses system packages and is very alpha.
I’m running Onyx (sorry… Fedora Budgie Atomic) on my Thinkpad and love it. Last night I decided to give Sway a shot and, when I was done with that, rolled back to Budgie without any of the cruft of installing additional DE’s alongside each other.
I jumped ship from Ubuntu to fedora last year and fedora is awesome. Fedora has a bit newer packages and the default felt right (albeit I missed system tray plugin from Ubuntu). Some hardware work better OOTB on Ubuntu, so always try with a live distro first.
You can always download it as an extension instead of a system package for the extension, but yeah, it’s available on our repos.
Also, pretty good. It will likely never be as many packages as there are in Debian’s repos, but even without Flatpak there was never a package I couldn’t find either in our repos or on COPR.
I see @joojmachine already answered some of your questions, but regarding “why would hardware work differently on fedra”, I assume it has to do with what kernel is being shipped, and what drivers that is also shipped with the distro by default. Sometimes drivers aren’t shipped due to legal reasons, and a distro can be shipped with a kernel that dosen’t have certain support for certain hardware.
As a contributor, I’m biased, but let me put it this way: it’s the distro that made me so comfortable using it and with a community so welcoming, I became a contributor 😅
I like how Peek hasn’t been updated since like 2019, not even being developed or updated anymore and they recommend it… IT DOESN’T EVEN WORK ON FEDORA!
Disrto theme bugs occur if the dev doesn’t write the app theme agnostic enough. Nothing wrong with flatpak. Those “bugs” will disappear the more flatpak is used
Are those principle still relevant? Particularly with GUI apps? I feel the sandboxing along is a good reason to switch to flatpak (or even snap if you know).
Flatpak itself is a layer of software. You could do that for regular apps too - to take away the hassle of having to manually set it up for each app. I already have two software that implements that logic in parts.
Not everyone values the same things you do. Flatpaks aren't the cause of the fact that different applications don't function correctly with different versions of libraries; they're just the solution.
Flatpak is better for normal people. It's better for most advanced users who don't want to micromanage compatibility issues. And it really doesn't have an impact on people who do want to micromanage because all your alternative ways to install software are still there.
Flatpaks aren’t the cause of the fact that different applications don’t function correctly with different versions of libraries
This problem has been solved by Nix and Guix. Nix is as popular among developers as flatpak is. Add bubblewrap to all applications, and you get nearly all the features as flatpaks. Flatpaks, meanwhile are huge and a bit slow to start - problems that Nix and Guix don’t suffer from.
I do use flatpaks extensively. But they are probably not the best solution to the problems you mention.>
Tbh, for me the value of flatpak is in the isolation (great for how easy it is to achieve), rather than the compatibility.
For example, I run obsidian with no network access and fs access to just the path where my notes are stored. This is really reassuring considering I am not really sure what all the plugins might do. While it is not perfect, it’s much better than having it running natively in my box (I.e. root namespaces).
Isolation is easy to achieve. Flatpak’s sandboxing layer is bubblewrap. It’s an independent software. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a wrapper for bubblewrap that acts like flatpak and launches applications in a carefully constructed sandbox.
It’s also not too hard to cook a Dockerfile for it, or even write a systemd wrapper with security settings. However, with flatpak you get this out of the box and mostly in a transparent way, plus you get all the usually annoying aspects (like having GUI applications work in containers) taken care of.
All of the Flatpaks mentioned on the post are available on Flathub though, we do recognize that most people use it, so we recommend apps available on it.
Ideally becoming an active contributor to the project would be better, maybe you can start with that and eventually contribute with more as time goes on, you can always join our onboarding Matrix room and say hi!
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