Mozilla Making Progress With Offering Firefox As A Flatpak On Linux

[starshipeleven]

Has the 600mb of Linux inside Linux been solved ?

Why are you running a distro when you have flatpak. The issue is the "linux" outside, not the one "inside".

[Zyklon]

Has the 600mb of Linux inside Linux been solved ? I speak about the extra Linux that has to be downloaded inside your existing Linux system to get the flatpack binaries to operate ?

Knowing the difference between kernel and userspace should be a minimal requirement for posting here. 🤦♂️

[Tuxie]

Last time I checked, Firefox from Flatpak and Snap couldn't see my GTK theme or my fonts so it was ugly. To have an up-to-date, self-updating Firefox that can see my user themes and fonts I need to unpack the upstream build somewhere in my home directory and create a .desktop file for it in a text editor. It shouldn't have to be this hard.

[Pajn]

Flatpak already has a solution to this problem. It splits up locales as extensions for the flatpak. I'm going to guess it's just an issue with the Firefox build process right now.

Install a flatpak off Flathub, change your locale, then run flatpak update, you'll get the locale for it.

Oh, I did not know that and have never seen one using it. But it sounds great for the future when apps decides to start supporting it.

[treba]

Great to see this. I do hope they will host their own repo independently of Flathub though - apparently Flathub does not yet have the security standards most people would want for a source of software they trust their data with. What I mean here is for example that I contributed two small MRs to one Flathub repo and the maintainer simply gave me write permissions to the repo (I didn't ask for it). It's a open github repo so hopefully I couldn't do weird stuff without anyone noticing, but it still surprised me. To me it indicates little man power and, well, "pragmatic" handling of permissions, rather than strict guidelines.

Apart from that I'm also eager to see Fedora Silverblue shipping more flatpak apps from their official repos - with upstream flatpak support for firefox they will hopefully provide their own builds as well, soon.

[skeevy420]

Last time I checked, Firefox from Flatpak and Snap couldn't see my GTK theme or my fonts so it was ugly. To have an up-to-date, self-updating Firefox that can see my user themes and fonts I need to unpack the upstream build somewhere in my home directory and create a .desktop file for it in a text editor. It shouldn't have to be this hard.

Both the one I linked above and the stable version provided by Fedora take the GTK theme set in Gnome Tweaks in Fedora 31 and 32.

And both the Firefox Beta Flatpak settings and Gnome Tweaks have the same fonts listed.

[nanonyme]

Last time I checked, Firefox from Flatpak and Snap couldn't see my GTK theme or my fonts so it was ugly. To have an up-to-date, self-updating Firefox that can see my user themes and fonts I need to unpack the upstream build somewhere in my home directory and create a .desktop file for it in a text editor. It shouldn't have to be this hard.

In theory Flatpak should be able to use your fontconfig fonts just fine from the host. There's been quite a few issues over time though and the fontconfig setups have had recurring compatibility challenges. Themes iirc is a more challenging thing. You can get things to mostly work by installing your theme inside Flatpak as runtime extension but this use case hits hard into the "works same way everywhere" that requires heaps of isolation from host.

[Jedibeeftrix]

Will be handy if opensuse release microos desktop.

[hax0r]

To save y'all some effort:

flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref

And it worked good enough to sync all my plugins, play a video on Hulu, and post this from my F31 SB Gnome 3.34 Wayland desktop.

thanks, so does this Firefox 75 beta have all the wayland goodies that a Firefox from Fedora repo would have?

[andyprough]

A solution has been created ... Now find and create a problem around it

What a waste of effort and time. No one uses flatpacks anyways. If it's not coming from the distros repository then I wouldn't want to install it anyways.

People do use flatpaks. Almost no one bothers to use flatpak for universally available packages like firefox though. Like you say, this seems like a solution in search of a problem. Although probably the extremely tiny number of people that actually use Clear Linux as their daily driver need something like this. And the dozen or so dedicated SilverBlue users in the world.