What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?
Flatpak... I'll warily try it for "user facing" apps.
But after a clusterfuck of trying to get a flatpak Jellyfin to work (HW accel fell over, and it wanted me to dumpster dive into flatseal to unsandbox it so that media OUTSIDE OF HOME could be accessed... never got around to looking at getting it to even boot at startup) I'll shy the hell away from it for daemons.
It's happened constantly since I started using Linux: KDE 4.0, PulseAudio, btrfs (to be fair, most distros didn't really push btrfs as a default), Wayland, etc, and now Flatpak and Snap.
And it's not to say that I don't understand the dilemma: you need to get user feedback to improve the tech, and the pool of Linux users is very small (for desktop stuff). But what that means is that desktop Linux is almost always in a state of partial brokenness. (And please also note that I'm giving a 100% pass on driver issues--that's a given when hardware manufacturers simply only care about working with Windows.)
Honestly, when it comes to "just working," desktop Linux is worse today than it was when I first installed it on my budget laptop in 2007. Wayland is mostly fine for my uses, but others still struggle with its missing features; snaps/flatpaks are slow, bloated, and have strange behaviors because of the permissions models that are NEVER going to be obvious to a casual computer user; and managing an Ubuntu install is still really bad UX.
As an example of the latter, I usually run an "expert" distro on my personal machines, but I decided to slap Ubuntu on a PC that I hooked up to my TV, and after a year or so of just chugging along and running updates whenever prompted, it started displaying errors that my boot partition was full. You've gotta be kidding me... THIS is supposed to be the "easy" distro for normal humans? How the hell do you expect non-tech people to micromanage the /boot partition and delete old kernels and shit?
So, while I agree with all of the technical issues and complaints about things like permissions, security, etc, that advocate for Wayland and Flatpaks/Snaps and whatever, you can't pretend to care about adoption while also pushing out half-baked technology to "stable" versions as though everyone will be happy with beta-at-best functionality.
The monied interests driving a lot of Linux development do not have the same need for these things as end users. To them, Linux is a server, or a lightweight embedded OS, or needed for some other specialized use case.
I bought a new Alienware PC in summer 2022, installed Ubuntu immediately, wiping Windows. Everything worked. Still does. This happens on every new Dell (or Alienware), HP or Lenovo desktop or laptop I've bought the past 2 decades. I can't buy a new machine that has issues with Linux, what on Earth could I be doing wrong that they all work.
Honestly, do you work in Microsoft marketing.
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'll take the bait this time.
Read my comment again. In it I literally say that I run Linux exclusively on my personal machines. I don't have a Windows computer in my home and the only Mac I have that's still running macOS is a work-issued laptop. What are your Linux-never-Windows credentials? Because I bet they don't beat mine unless you're just significantly older than me and have been doing the same as me but for longer.
If one were to read my comment history, they could only conclude that I'm a huge Microsoft hater/skeptic.
Given that the ONLY mention of Microsoft or Windows in my comment was a statement that hardware manufacturers only test their drivers with Windows, this comment is just a strange emotional reaction to my point.
> Everything worked. Still does.
Read the rest of the thread about Flatpak and Snap. Read people's complaints about Wayland. Dig up some old discussions about PulseAudio and Xorg and how we used to have to hand-edit xorg.conf files to set up multiple monitors. If you insist that there are no problems, shortcomings, or missing functionality with Flatpaks, Snaps, and Wayland, you're deluding yourself.
I think you are talking about workflow-breaking changes or stability issues during transitions to newer Linux bits. You explicitly excluded hardware/driver issues that a lot of people gripe about with Linux on laptops. I think your experience here can vary dramatically depending on your choice of Linux distribution, your upgrade tempo, and your expectations.
I've had some frustrations with the UEFI transition and secure boot, because it forced me do research when I just wanted my system to boot. I've similarly suffered some regressions with MATE recently, where it boots to a black screen and I had to dig around to find that switching to a text console and restarting lightdm would get it unstuck. I'm struggling to answer whether these are "driver" things or not.
But, I've been on Fedora for ~20 years now and am happily oblivious to Flatpak, Snap, or even Docker because they have nothing to do with my day to day experience. I also don't think I've dipped my toes into Wayland yet. I've been using XFCE or the MATE desktop rather than GNOME. But I do remember when ALSA was the new thing, then pulseaudio, and now pipewire. I mostly didn't care unless trying to setup some specific sound peripheral. I never had btrfs anywhere except an experimental system, because I always customized partitioning and never really considered the defaults to matter.
If I exclude hardware/driver issues, it seems like this same story applies to Windows. It all depends on what part of the ecosystem you consider to be part of your platform experience. Some people might have some favorite apps that essentially work the same as 25 years ago, while others have experienced multiple upheavals as third parties abandoned or hijacked an old favorite application or forced some kind of migration. It's only gotten worse with all the rent-seeking cloud integrations with everything.
My mother in law has been happily running manjaro with gnome for a while. Now, truth to be told, she was navigating gnome 2 Ubuntu more than a decade ago but things were mostly not working back then. Upgrading versions was a minefield with mostly terrible results.
Maybe the state of things suited you better somehow. I just can't imagine how.
Ubuntu has not been a good distro for a few years now. Even Fedora is more stable now and you get new software.
We never had as good Linux desktop situation as it is now. The biggest complaint is that if you want to use graphics optimized programs you kinda have to use Nvidia and that's still problematic on Linux.
What this boils down to for regular use is that some big companies only offer a snap for their proprietary app while most open source stuff seems to be on flatpak. With significant overlap of course.
> What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access
Use an immutable distro like Silverblue or Kinoite. Those are more-or-less Flatpak-only, extremely stable and fairly rigid with security.
I wish flatpacked apps actually used the isolation (most don't, so http://flatkill.org/2020/ is still true today) but that isolation is mostly under the control of the packager, not you.
On this point, Deno ( https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/basics/permissions ) and pledge.com ( https://justine.lol/pledge ) are better; you have to explicitly allow-list what you want, instead of hoping that the potentially very untrustworthy and third-party packager had your best interests in mind and denylisting what you don't want.
If you want to build the allowlist yourself, doesn't firejail already do what you want?
Snap is terrible; there is no reason to consider it. Mostly because there is only one app store allowed and it's really slow to launch apps.
NO. No. No. No Snap. No flatpak. No rolling release distribution nightmares either. Standard LTS for me (with snap and flatpak disabled with an apt preferences file).
Flatpak... I tried a dosbox flatpak and it was 3 gigs. Regular package? 3 megs.
I run Linux mint to avoid them as much as possible. All of the flatpaks pretend nobody has files somewhere other than the home directory, and softlinks don't work. Have a mdadm raid in /mnt? Can't see it.
So basic frequent use cases can't be supported by a "modern security and permission system". Then no thanks.
All communication of this with the developers of snap, for example, are dismissed with a high amount of condescension. Which is pretty typical with most things whenever you have to deal with security. They imposed the dogma, and you have to comply to it.
And the delay whenever the snap has to interact with the file system, there's like a 5 second delay every time it happens. When trying to access a SSD based file system. That is unacceptable
Look we do not have infinite Moore's law steppings, or gigahertz of serial speed coming down the pipeline. Moore's law is running out. We can't be adopting some system like a stealing light, 50% of the practical performance of the user interface. Hard disc drives are going to start to not get bigger. The technologies we use for increasing the size of hard disk now already reduce the reliability of the drive.
So snaps in their elk really are not something I look forward to. For now just run the distro's lake Linux mint which doesn't use them
You are counting the runtime size. That is shared between all apps that use the same runtime. As I already had it installed for another app, the download size for the dosbox flatpak on my fedora machine was 1.6MB.
I also recommend installing flatseal to easily see and manage file access permissions of flatpak apps.
> On Firefox 119 I thought I was losing my mental faculties (even more) since I kept losing track of the cursor for a whole day. Turns out that it’s a Windows “feature” where you hide the cursor when you start typing into some input box. Maybe this is a Firefox-wide regression on Linux though. Difficult to find other examples of it on Linux via Google.
Firefox hides the cursor while typing, but it should unhide as soon as it's moved (at least it does for me)
> - More fun than a problem: `firefox --version` spews a warning: `update.go:85: cannot change mount namespace according to change mount ...` > - My dear XCompose wasn’t respected because of course you have to copy it to inside some dang `/home/me/snap/common/utensils/computer-applicances/apps/Firefox` tree
Those should both be snap specific.
> - The keyboard just does not work sometimes. No other apps seem to have this problem. So it’s apparently not some idiotic “applications that use X work but under Wayland it doesn’t” (or vice versa). Does a restart help? No. Seemingly only a computer reboot.
I don't know about that one. Could be Ubuntu or snap, but it does not happen on Arch. Out of curiosity, are you running firefox through xwayland or native wayland? (It says so on the about:support page under "Window Protocol")
By default, it shoves it into some parallel file system within the snap.
Oh did you forget to actually explicitly save it into the downloads directory? Yeah, you have no idea where it is now.
Oh and of course when the download file explorer widget opens up, you can't get the mouse focus. Probably because there's some security boundary between Firefox and the file system.
Usability of firefoxes vastly decreased as a result of snaps
Finally, well this isn't a big deal to me. Apparently a lot of the open source people don't like it because the Firefox nap is basically just a call. The internet pull down binary command that pulls a huge binary blob and they don't like this.
Snap has done such a disservice to open source software’s perceived quality.
I don't think I did anything to change that either.