Team Silverblue Succeeds Fedora Atomic Workstation, Aims To Be In Great Shape By F30

[stormcrow]

Not a fan of rebranding exercises in general, but Silverblue is a whole lot less awkward and abstract than say, "Ubuntu". U-whatnow?

Ubuntu is apparently a Bantu word for "humanity", or so says Wikipedia. Canonical is a South African company and the idea behind their distribution is a simplified experience anyone can use as a desktop for common tasks. It makes a good deal of sense for a brand name, hence the bruise-purple and orange themes , the circle with the three dots, etc.

Silverblue is just a shade of blue. It doesn't say anything of import to me.

The way I installed gimp flatpak was to go to the flathub website, click the install button, let the Software app do its thing.

(When I searched for the Gimp in software, the flathub version wasnt listed.)

Then I ran it by clicking the icon.

I think for most people that is a reasonable - especially if it showed up in Gnome Software.

I had the opposite experience. Every time I tried to double click the flatpak after installing flatpak support Ubuntu Software would immediately crash, so I had to go the long way around like Candy mentioned. I suspect people that still regularly use the command line wouldn't really bat an eyebrow at that. I just shrugged and opened up a terminal and did it all manually with a shake of my head at the minor irritation of the software center crashes. It's not as straight forward as "apt-get install gimp" but once you have it setup, it's really not that different than any other long winded package name as far as user facing interfaces go. And GIMP 2.10 immediately showed up in XFCE's start menu afterwards. No biggie. Most objections to containers tend to be about basic assumptions, internal designs, and security concerns rather than users have to type a few extra characters. I personally don't care either way, so long as my system is stable, reasonably secure, and generally up-to-date I don't care if it's flatpak, deb, rpm, dnf, yum, *takes a deep breath*, tgz, txz, Docker, snaps, bsd ports, pkgsrc, install shield, zypper, apk, MSI... *passes out from running out of air*

[starshipeleven]

Go and have a look how ridicolous this flatpak stuff is. The command line magic is more horrid than using "dnf install gimp" or "apt-get install gimp".

You know right that apt is a frontend for the actual package manager which is dpkg?
And that dnf is again a frontend for a package manager called rpm?
Have you ever tried operating dpkg or rpm manually (i.e. without using dnf or apt)?
Did you have ever looked at the manual of dpkg to see how mindbogglingly annoying and complex it is to use directly? https://linux.die.net/man/1/dpkg

You know the difference between a primary package manager interface and a user-facing frontend interface?

If you answered "no" to at least one of the above questions, you have no idea of what you are talking about.

It's even more secure than relying on a flatpak with outdated and hostile old libraries that comes bundled with it.

Technically speaking it's more secure to use Flatpack because it sandboxes the applications/libraries. Even up-to-date libraries and software have bugs, with compartimentalization you lock them down.

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[Candy]

You know right that apt is a frontend for the actual package manager which is dpkg?

I don't see any relation between your answer and my previous comment related to flatpak.

And yes. I know rpm quite good because some of my (our) internal processes are related to it. Even today I manually ran a "rpm -qa -last | less", to observe some stuff that I wanted to remove.

But yet this is in no way related to my valid concerns about flatpaks ... oh wait! I just read whom I was replying to... Never mind.

[Danielsan]

Maintainers and Packages are the Linux killer combo, thus using flatpak to handle the packages makes sense only because the main package managers do not contemplate a rollback system. The idea to have a stable system that you can dirt with bundle packages is cool, but at least you must have a well tested and bug-free core system.

However nix package manager already provide a rollback system and multiple instances of the same software. Nix-os and GUIX-sd use this package manager, deb packages were created to share the whole Debian project at that time rollback a package wasn't so important as for many today, I know very few about RPM but I can image that RedHat doesn't want get rid of a piece were invested a lot of money during the time.

[Candy]

Technically speaking it's more secure to use Flatpack because it sandboxes the applications/libraries. Even up-to-date libraries and software have bugs, with compartimentalization you lock them down.

Technically wearing a space suit before leaving the house is also more secure than leaving the house by wearing normal clothes. Who says that the locking down sandboxing system is without errors ?

But let me show you a different issue:

Someone could release a faked flatpak somewhere on the net and the user installs it. The fake can be anything. Keylogger, Passwordlogger, Hidden advertisments and so on. So how can I trust, that the flatpak that I got is not a faked one ? I mean, the same is valid for rpm and deb packages. But at least I know that I receive the correct packages from trusted sources. In worst cases I can point with my fingers at someone and say "you provided that package". Flatpak is as secure and unsecure as everything else. It's just something that people try hard selling us as the optimal solution.

It's not.

It's just an alternative with own pros and cons. The same applies for the canonical product.

[torsionbar28]

Ubuntu is apparently a Bantu word for "humanity", or so says Wikipedia. Canonical is a South African company and the idea behind their distribution is a simplified experience anyone can use as a desktop for common tasks. It makes a good deal of sense for a brand name, hence the bruise-purple and orange themes , the circle with the three dots, etc.

Yup, that's exactly my point. The word is so foreign and unusual that you have to look it up and research its definition, relevance, and even pronunciation. And then there's the definition, how does "humanity" tell me anything about an IT product? It doesn't.

Ergo, it's quite the awkward and abstract name.

Silverblue may be just as abstract as Ubuntu, but since when are abstract software names uncommon? How do "Linux", "GIMP", "GNOME", "Firefox", "Chrome", "Fedora", etc. tell you anything at all about what the product is or what it does? But at least the word Silverblue is familiar and pronounceable, and that gives it an edge over the clunky looking and sounding "Ubuntu" in my book.

[starshipeleven]

I don't see any relation between your answer and my previous comment related to flatpak.

Your own problem.

And yes. I know rpm quite good because some of my (our) internal processes are related to it. Even today I manually ran a "rpm -qa -last | less", to observe some stuff that I wanted to remove.

Also flatpack can remove packages with a similarly brief commandline.

But yet this is in no way related to my valid concerns about flatpaks

You aren't voicing your concerns, you're making wrong comparisons. Flatpack commandline interface isn't supposed to be used directly but through a frontend application like apt or dnf, or even a GUI application like GNOME store.

[pal666]

I think I'll stay with "dnf install gimp" or "apt-get install gimp" and click on a simple Icon, once it's installed.

not, if they move gimp out of repo to flatpak
and nothing prevents flatpaked apps to be run via simple icon or be installed via simple gnome software

[pal666]

some random guy from Poland or somewhere has my back, and I get the update.

this does not scale when you have N software projects and M distros. you need N * M guys from poland. what flatpak tries to do is to make software vendors produce one flatpak each, usable by M distros, and free guys from poland to work on base distros.

[pal666]

I really hope that distro maintainers will use *pak* only for very, very few applications.

*pak* is not intended to be used by distro maintainers *at all*. *pak* is intended to be used by software vendors. i.e. by libre office devs, octave devs, krita devs, etc