Flatpak recently got a method of preinstalling flatpaks.

A flatpak cannot install a snap on your system. Apt can install a snap because when apt installs and updates packages, it can also run scripts as root. That’s insecure and potentially dangerous, so flatpak doesn’t have that ability.

All of those, apart from loop devices, are not technical limitations, but results from Canonical’s poor management and monopolistic desires.

Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.

But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical’s own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there’s the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.

I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you’re using AppArmor). But it’s Canonical’s poor management that really drags it down.

But as an actual option or not? I think OP is referring to those who say “I’m going to switch to Linux” like those politicians to pay so much lip service to freedom, democracy, privacy while at the same time voting to erode all of those. The implication being that they won’t actually ever switch to Linux.

You can tinker for the most part, it’s just done differently. In the Universal Blue world, that would be creating your own OCI container using their image template or blue build.

The nice thing is that it makes the OS much more reproducible than imperative commands and scripts.

I wouldn’t consider using IronFox since, from what I hear, Firefox’s security is worst on Android. Even Linux has better sandboxing than it. While I’m sure IronFox is better, I’m not sure how much better it can be.

As for Librewolf, I’m considering it. I’ve actually had it installed for maybe two years at this point but never really used it. It’s nice that it removes the annoying popups from Firefox and lacks the crypto of Brave. And it should be more secure due to the hardening and disabling of features. And while the security and sandboxing isn’t as strong as it is on Windows/MacOS or Chromium’s, at least it should be better than standard Firefox.

I don’t like Brave’s leadership or crypto, but the problem for me is that Brave ticks the most boxes

• Adblocking
• Privacy
• Security
• Multiplatform
• Web Apps

There are browsers that do stuff better, like Vanadium and Trivalent, but those are locked to specific platforms, have poor built in ad blockers, and encourage you to never install extensions for security reasons.

And if I want to avoid the Chromium monopoly, there’s Webkit which still manages to have good security and privacy, but there’s no Webkit browser on Android and on Linux, Gnome Web feels slow to use and doesn’t have a good adblocker.

That being said, I’m still on Firefox right now. Chromium has some weird quirks on the desktop that annoys me so much.

Not a security issue, copyright/license issues.

In my experience, many Gnome apps make doing complex tasks pretty easy compared to third party apps. However, it is at the cost of customization and questions like “why can’t I do this???”

But in general, Gnome’s simple design works for me, most things feel clean and polished. I don’t need the vast majority of features offered.

In the cases where Gnome’s default aren’t powerful enough, often times the KDE equivalent isn’t good enough for me either despite offering more features and customization.

As an example, Gnome Text Editor vs Kwrite and Kate. GTS has the basics I need like line numbers (Apple’s text editor does not have this…) and that fits 80% of my needs. But what about more advanced things? Well, no markdown support but I don’t think Kate has that either. What about coding? I’d rather use a dedicated IDE than Kate or GTS.

The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.

It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top

You can purchase used electric cars too.

That’s valid.

That’s also part of the reason I like Webkit. It’s in a nice spot between Firefox and Chromium when it comes to security and performance. And importantly, is not from an ad company and often passes on browser specs that would be harmful to privacy and security.

I forget what the site is called, but I saw one that nicely layed out different browser specs and gives the explanation why one of the engine developers decided against supporting or implementing it.

I just wish there was a good Webkit browser on Linux. Unfortunately, Gnome Web just feels slow and unresponsive despite good benchmarks.

The truth is that Chromium is really good. It has the best security and performance.

Vanadium takes that and makes changes to make it more secure and private.

No, it’s a limitation with swaybg so they created a tool that doesn’t have that limitation.

Sideloading or preinstalling?

Sideloading already existed, but only for ostree flatpaks. Flatpak also supports OCI flatpaks, but the support for those aren’t as good, hence the previously missing side loading support.

“We do <thing > because we always did before <thing 2>” is not a good point

I didn’t mean it in a “this is better way”. I’m just saying that Wayland was designed around the idea of client side decorations, not server side decorations. Gnome has stuck to the more purist vision of Wayland, which makes sense since I believe they were its biggest proponent.

That can be dropped eventually too. Compositors like Niri don’t implement Xwayland support directly, and instead use Xwayland Satellite.

The for argument is basically the following

• Wayland as a protocol was designed around CSDs, protocols for SSDs came years later
• Having the client control the CSDs simplifiies things for the compositor and apps
  • The compositor has less things to implement and test
  • Modern apps tend to prefer CSDs anyway since it provides more flexibility, very common on MacOS and Windows
  • It’s difficult to coordinate things between the client and compositor.
    • Something that annoys me about KDE is that they do this headerbar look where the top part of the application will match the color of the the titlebar. However, the top part of the application is drawn by the application and the titlebar is drawn by the compositor. But when the color changes (such as going from unfocused to focused), they do not update at the same time, so for a frame or few the top part of the application is a different color than the titlebar. That wouldn’t happen under CSDs.

No

[Blockchain] technology is neutral. People make it good or bad.

Sure, maybe. But you’re making it clear you’re in the bad camp too when you’re announcing this with NFTs.