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I think I've landed on Flatpak as my favourite between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage. AppImage, when it works, is nice though. Snaps are just kind of inconvenient (auto-updates are a no for me) and bloated and the things Canonical are doing as an organization put a bad taste in my mouth.
I've had bad experiences with AppImages. For universal format they do a really poor job at that. And it's a huge step back into Windows direction that you'll have to manually download, update etc your shit. Makes managing a bunch of apps a pain.
The thing with appimages is that they expect the developer to have full knowledge of what libraries need to be bundled with their app, which makes it difficult to make truly universal appimages. In flatpak you just select one of a set list of runtimes and add any additional dependencies on top of it. Flatpak also re-uses the files for each runtime in between the different apps that use it, which saves a lot of disk space.
But isn't appimage the closest one to the app-system from Android? Since things could be really different on many clients an "app-container" is the best solution.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
BTW. I like flatpak, too. It's the most stable, but I never understand it's mechanics. There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
Flatpak is basically GUI-optimized containers. It uses the same technology (namespaces) as docker and podman, just with some extra tools to make GUI-related things work properly. That's why flatpak apps don't use the system's gtk version -- they're running in a sandbox with a different rootfs. You can spawn a shell into the sandbox of a specific app with flatpak run --command=sh com.yourapp.YourApp and poke around it if you want to.
It uses bubblewrap for sandboxing under the hood, right?
Thx, looks like that's the info I've missed.
If you're interested in another approach to containerizing GUI applications, also checkout out x11docker. It's a small independent project maintained by one guy, nothing big like flatpak, but also pretty cool. The name is actually a bit limiting -- it supports both docker and podman, and can run wayland apps as well. One of the coolest features, in my opinion, is the ability to run a separate X server inside every sandbox and forward individual windows to the "host" X server. That way you can prevent apps from spying on your keyboard or other apps' windows.
I'm not too familiar with whatever Android is doing with apks these days tbh. I just don't like how AppImages fails at the one thing it should do (universality) and doesn't have the repo model built in. You can have third party solutions to that but it's just not the same experience.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
I've heard people suggest such a solution. Everything is a container and stuff is just exported out so that it shows up to the system like a normal program. Can't really say I'm the right person to judge the pros and cons.
There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.
It can be both good and bad and sometimes it's necessary. The whole system relies on being able to use different versions of libraries. But having them as separate packs can help in that programs can share those packs so as a dev you can just target one common base and have your stuff work everywhere. And sharing those runtimes has the benefit of someone else keeping it up to date while you can just test if the updated version works for you and switch to that if it does and so on. And with deduplication, runtimes and stuff share the parts that are common to both afaik.
It's a bit more complicated than just shoving everything in but also it's less work than same thing having to be packaged separately for every distro.
Yeah, same here, that's why I specified that they're only nice when they work. Often they just don't work, so Flatpak is better.
Auto-updates are a hell-no for me.
There was a perfectly good user interface for updates. Then Ubuntu decides "wait.. What if we made updates compulsory and effectively random and skipped the UI. The user can do system updates whenever they want, because those don't matter for security or something, but these apps must be updated whenever snap determines they must."
Oh, snap!
Fun fact: there used to be an Authy flatpak that just installed the snap inside
Oh, what the fuck!?
TBH I wouldn't mind it that much. The whole point of flatpak is that the developer can do whatever demented satanic rituals they want inside of the sandbox, and it won't contaminate the rest of the system.
Yo dawg, I herd you like containers so I put snap in yo flatpak, so that u can sandbox in your sandbox
Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It's also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.
Ente Auth > Authy
Yep. I'm selfhosting it now. Works great but selfhosting isn't straightforward yet, still the best Authy/Google/Microsoft Authenticator drop in replacement with sync.
Is self hosting even worth it for auth? I self-host ente Photos myself, because that way I don't need to pay for a subscription, but auth is free anyway, and the backups are entirely e2ee, right?
Probably not but hey I like doing it.
Just an FYI Auth and Photos use the same server program. I think you can already self host Auth just point the app at your Photos server.
I know, but I use the cloud hosted ente auth backup method on purpose, because I don't trust myself with selfhosting and I'm too scared to accidentally rm -rf my server and lose my 2FA seeds. That's also why I don't selfhost bitwarden, even though Vaultwarden is pretty great, and even offers Bitwarden Premium features for free (and I love it cause it's written in Rust lol)
Can I have a moment of your time to speak about our Lord and Savior, 3-2-1 Backups?
I'm too lazy... Yeah I am pretty nerdy, but I still don't want to spend that much time caring about my selfhosting setup and building a homelab. But I'm glad it works for you, and I'm glad ente created their authenticator in the first place. I would have never expected it from them, since they only used to make ente photos, but there we go, they casually just created the best FOSS auth app.
Or just use Keysmith and import your keys there.