• @rollingflower
    link
    52 months ago

    Would you say portable builds (like deadbeef) also install another distro onto your system?

    They statically link binaries which is pretty similar.

    You can also extract the appimage and run the AppRun script, comes with the downside that…

    I guess you cannot update an app anymore when doing that.

    Flatpak uses BTRFS compression afaik, so I dont know if it has a performance hit and it can likely not be turned off.

    Is it strange idea to not want my home cluttered by a bunch of useless top level dotfiles?

    That is .firefox etc. Flatpaks put everything in ~/.var/app/ which doesnt clutter anything.

    Those Appimage helpers sound interesting and I will look at them. The tasks of placing somewhere, creating desktop entries etc. is not hard, but needing to do that manually is a strange and broken concept. I suppose those helper programs have some kind of community support, as Balena Etcher or whatever dont supply .desktop files.

    I agree with the problems you mentioned after that. Relying on glibc is bad, using outdated x86_64 architecture is silly. The last one could be fixed easily. The former one probably not that easily.

    Desktop Linux is messy for sure. But Flatpak is just really good at what it can do.

    • @Samueru@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      0
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      That is .firefox etc.

      There is actually a workaround for firefox, but for flatpak you would essentially have to make flatpak have its own home dir, and that is just too much of a hack for such application. As every app being called in flatpak would be under this fakehome as well.

      I guess you cannot update an app anymore when doing that.

      I could make a script for am that does it btw. I’ve never had the need to do this but it is possible.

      The script would run ./*.AppImage --appimage-extract the newly installed appimage, rm ./*.AppImage && ln -s ./squashfs-root/AppRun nameof.AppImage and that is it, it will work with the old desktop entry and symlink in PATH and every time the appimage gets updated it does the same thing like a pacmanhook would.

      as Balena Etcher or whatever dont supply .desktop files.

      https://imgur.com/NUZiECs.png

      • @rollingflower
        link
        32 months ago

        Flatpak does this, just have a look. Every app has its config stored in its own directory. Apps only have access to that directory, if they dont get other static permissions.

        yes you could of course script that, but it doesnt change the problem with appimages having insecure updates. Flatpak uses OSTree, Android has a package manager that saves the signature and if that doesnt match, an update fails.

        you can add images inline with ![title](url)