Its even worse when you force Firefox to use wayland its icon doesn’t even show.
Edit: Oh since everyone now is confused; I only have the flatpak version of Firefox installed yet it doesn’t use the pinned icon and doesn’t even use the firefox icon under wayland at all.
looks more like a KDE issue rather than a flatpak issue
I use gnome and it works with custom Icons so 🫥
Yeah I’m a heavy flatpak user on both Gnome and KDE and this only happens on KDE for me. Maybe it’ll get sorted in Plasma 6.
I use flatpak and I actually like it. It is one of the ways I can get up to date packages on Debian.
Man up and use unofficial repos that break your system like the rest of us
As you could if you used Testing or Unstable. Also, just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s good. People also use and like crack.
Lol.🤣Wtf
Wtf is this reasoning lmao
Very simple. Debian Testing is rolling distro and has fairly fresh versions, usually couple of months behind. Debian Unstable has all the bleeding edge stuff, also rolling. Neither is unstable and insecure as most would expect. If you want non-Debian, there’s always Arch and Manjaro.
The Eclipse flatpack on OpenSuse Tumbleweed works better than the rpm. I was extremely impressed.
I never intend to use a flatpak or snap, and avoid them like the plague. The whole concept is incredibly ugly to me, and wasteful of computer resources.
The whole concept is incredibly ugly
Depends on the viewpoint. As a software consumer, sure. As a software producer though, not having to deal with with tons of different packaging formats and repositories for different distributions and versions is a blessing.
It wastes resources on the consumer side to free up resources on the developer side, allowing for more time spent on improving the software instead of worrying about millions of different system setup combinations.
Pretty much typical these days. Developers will often use metric tons of middleware hell to avoid writing one function or using native library. What’s that, GTK or Qt require few days to learn. Naah, I’ll just include whole browser with my application and write interface in HTML/CSS. Who cares about people’s configuration, accessibility needs, battery life, screen readers, etc.
There are of course two sides of the story, and you are right that it causes performance/battery life issues. Including a browser does actually improve the situation with screen readers and such.
The big advantage of the “include a browser/large framework” solution is that it allows you to write the application once and use it on web, Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, some weird TV OS, a game console or someone’s car.
Without some middleware you’d be writing 10 different versions and every one would need it’s own native libraries that are “just a few days to learn” and “just a few dozen days to master” and only “a few hundred hours to implement and maintain”, and the result would be what we had in the 2000s: “Sorry, we do not support Linux.”
I’d rather developers don’t support Linux than make Electron application and say “there we go, good enough right”. Because it’s not. When it comes to accessibility, no those applications are not better. You might be thinking their UI is easier to scale and increase contrast but literally none of them respect system theme, colors, font choices.
Some middleware is fine, however blindly importing just about anything is very dangerous and lazy. Cargo cult programming is so widespread am surprised hardware is keeping up with the demand. There’s always the right tool for the job and the wrong tool for the job. Just because you can drive nails with a rock, doesn’t mean you should, nor you see any carpenter doing it.
I’d rather developers don’t support Linux than make Electron application
Hard disagree. I’d rather run an Electron application than having to side-load Windows for some application I actually need. Also, you don’t have to install Electron applications, so if you want you can just pretend they don’t support Linux.
Since when is theming aaccessibility? That’s customizability.
But you can have your wishes easily. If you prefer no Linux support over an Electron app, just don’t install the Electron app and you get the same result.
Consider yourself lucky that you are not visually impaired and need high contrast and/or large themes.
Most native Linux apps have absolutely shit keyboard navigation and screen reader support, if they even bothered testing it at all. So yes web apps are far better for accessibility.
I’m sick of purists who don’t know they’re talking about. If it was up to you there’d be zero growth in Linux and you’d actually be happy with that. Electron exists to put software on multiple OSes at low cost. It’s a good thing. App devs are just jealous that they’re getting replaced by web and mobile devs, both of whom they’ve shat on for decades.
Karma’s a bitch. It isn’t the 90s anymore, the time to move on and learn a worthwhile stack was 15 years ago. If you’re so good then surely you can bring your genius level skills to a web team and show them how it’s done.
You assumption that I am clueless just shows you have no idea what you are talking about so I’ll end up all arguments there. If you wish to prove me wrong, find me one Electron based application which supports high contrast themes and actually took care not to use colors that are problematic to color blindness.
Am a developer and I can very much agree on package managers have nasty configuration, but at the same time flatpak is the exact same thing. No different that any other package. Except now you have to learn yet another standard that’s even less popular than major ones. You can even claim it’s easier, but the fact remains it’s not the defacto standard, so you still have to provide other packages as well as flatpak if you wish to do so.
flatpak isn’t the same because you only have to learn one packaging format and can distribute to virtually any system out there. I really don’t see why you’d also package for every distro individually then. Installing flatpak isn’t that hard, it not being “the defacto standard” shouldn’t be an issue.
If the system supports flatpak. Yes.
So basically the entire Linux desktop then.
Yep lazy developers! That doesn’t care about security!
You aren’t owed a native package for whatever OS you’re using. In fact, you should be thankful that flatpak exists because the most common alternative is piping wget into shell.
And if you care so much about security, just build your stuff from source. Whether flatpak or apt, at some point you will run third-party code.
-said the person that probably has never worked in their entire life
What do you know about someone on the other side of the keyboard, nothing 🙄
Hope it helps you be annoyed at me because I don’t like flatpak and snap.
Why were you so mean to him? Now you made him upset by pointing out how pointless his comment was.
I don’t really understand why you would do anything other than native install unless you really, really need the performance.
Edit: 5 months later and I recognize this was a shit take.
Yes. Great for lazy developers who don’t give a crap about quality.
Agreed
Yesterday I freed up 6GB of diskspace by uninstalling a single flatpak app and running
flatpak uninstall --unusedSomehow flatpak had grown to fill the disk over the years, my installation is about 5 years old, and I have only used flatpak very sparingly.
I don’t get it. Do you have two versions of Firefox installed?
Don’t know about the OP, but I only have one version installed. If I don’t have it open, a single icon shows on the task bar. If I press that icon, FF opens and a second icon shows up, that represents only the opened FF, while the original icon remains.
What are you talking about ? isn’t the firefox icon on the left a standard app from a distro repo instead of a flatpak like the one on the right ?
In that particular screenshot I believe you’re right: the one on the left is Firefox ESR while the icon on the right is whatever flatpak version available.
But I know what OP is referring to as it is a open bug currently, the DE don’t doesn’t recognize the launched instance as the pinned program due to the way Flatpak launched apps. Not an issue with Firefox in particular
I actually took the screenshot myself and yes it is a bug* specifically with Flatpak.
I am having the same thing at the moment with the Firefox snap package under Ubuntu. Except as well as this, when it updates it seems to take out everything else pinned to the task bar with it. Maybe it’s not Firefox doing that, but since I stopped pinning FF it has stopped happening.
No no I only have the flatpak version of firefox installed yet in my taskbar it doesn’t use the pinned icon and on wayland it doesn’t have an icon at all.
What distro and desktop environment are you using?
PEBKAC
Flatpak works great. I’m sorry you don’t know how to use a computer.
“hey guys, I’m having a problem with my Linux install that doesn’t seem very common–”
“YOU’RE STUPID AND I HATE YOU”
this is EXACTLY why Linux gurus have a bad rep. remember the human, for goodness’ sake. don’t act like you’ve never run into a strange problem in your entire computing life that required digging deep into some 2003 forum post to solve.
Same. I would want a Linux system with nothing but Flatpaks. Native packages with tons of unwanted changes and delayed updates can go fuck themselves.
Please show me the QA process applied to flatpaks, so I know that besides it “working” is not full of obsolete vulnerable holes. Or should I just trust the Dev is not a lazy person?
Man, everything works great on my PopOS AMD rig with Wayland.
This bug only exists in KDE, based on my experience
i have no issues with flatpak, once i found out how to fix gtk scaling and theming issues on kde. here’s a link if anyone has those problems as well https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=135846.
Flatpak … is still not great
ftfy
What issues do you face with Flatpak?
first and foremost you’re using flatpak
Yes. I do have some applications installed as flatpak. What’s the problem?
That’s the whole problem, don’t use flatpak. It’s the worst way of solving a problem that’s already solved.
- What problem?
- How is it already solved?
This comment chain feels like talking to a brick wall. It’s just “don’t use flatpak” over and over again but with different words.
The problem with dependencies, that’s the only reason for people to look at flatpak.
See my other comment, and see https://flatkill.org/
Almost all popular applications on flathub come with filesystem=host, filesystem=home or device=all permissions
So if I checked the permissions with flatseal and that statement isn’t true for any of my flatpacks…where do we go from here?
The problem with dependencies, that’s the only reason for people to look at flatpak.
no, not really, flatpak is a distro agnostic way to build and distribute packages, which is HUGE for developers and distros, since those dont have to waste time to repackage (built+test) software to work on their systems and instead use that time to deal with other issues.
The author should really take that site down. AFAIK, all the points are now invalid.
I just feel like you could have provided alternatives? How is it solved? Genuine question…
Basically you install the application inside a little OS with dependencies each time you install a flatpak, that OS is rarely updated with security patches and most of the time has full access to the host OS. https://flatkill.org/
This is a lazy and insecure way of distributing applications with no real benefits.
Exactly. The QA of flatpaks is done in “trust me bro” framework. You can just go back to windows at this point.
If I install a package on my distro I know it went through a shitload of testing and I can be sure I am not installing some crap on my system.
Package managers like apt or rpmn(or whatever for your distro) are the standard way to install software. If there’s a good reason to avoid them, OK, but no good reason was stated here.
There definitely is a problem that flatpak is trying to solve. That problem is dependency hell.
This most often (or rather most famously) occurs with python packaging. Sometimes you can have one package that requires a version that is incompatible with another version that another package requires. That’s why people use python venv these days (or just use pipx).
IMO a better way of solving this is with nix. With nix, it doesn’t require a container, it just builds in isolation.
Thing is, this will probably end up a VHS vs Beta Max.
Imo a better alternative to flatpak is the nix package manager, but as I said to the other guy this’ll most likely end up a VHS/betamax situation.
Both things are trying to solve dependency hell in different ways. Flatpak just builds and runs everything in a container, where as nix sets up virtual environments and builds things in isolation with per package dependency trees in an effort to make builds entirely reproducible (to the point that no matter what system you compile on, you will get the same hash).
Edit: as the other guy said, just use your systems package manager unless it doesn’t exist in the repo and you can’t be bothered to package it yourself. It’s the standard recommended method.
How does your server instance here on Lemmy show as “null” it’s not even a URL??
the only reason to use flatpaks is if your system doesnt come with a good package manager and repositories (pacman+aur, nix, etc), and dont want to build from source.
snaps, on the other hand, should be avoided at all costs imo.
Or if the repos contain outdated versions of the software. And yes, snaps are cancer, still cannot avoid them. 🥲
true. i kinda meant ‘good (package managers and repos)’
Could you elaborate on snaps? I’ve used them here and there and people seem to have really strong opinions on snap that I just don’t understand.
Tied to proprieatry backend, snap store looks like ass and runs like one, spawns loop devices that mess up the /mnt folder, tied to fake .deb packages that install snaps instead. Basically, a lot of proprieatry nonsense that St. Ignucius frowns upon.
Yikes! I’m going to have to do more reading, I guess. My experience with snap is exclusively limited to installing certbot on RHEL.
I use the Firefox flatpak on multiple different desktops and distros and I’ve never seen this issue. All on wayland (no difference on x11 either). Weird.
I’m using KDE + Firefox Flatpak + Papirus Icons and I haven’t had this issue (so far). Could it be an icon pack issue or something similar? Otherwise yeah it’s either KDE or the flatpak
Just don’t use flatpaks… it’s a miserable experience all around
(and snaps are somehow even worse)deleted by creator
Why would you need another package manager next to the one supplied with the distro? The one that is supplied has packages that are tested and guaranteed to work (when on a stable release).
Yes, they are (sometimes very) outdated, but those packages are working. Additional package managers just add to the dependency hell (introducing bugs).
It’s kinda one size fits all solution. It allows Devs to build their package one way and have it on pretty much every distro, which is a major sticking point for Linux apps. I don’t see why you would use a flatpaks if your distro has the software already though. I use flatpaks alot less now that I’ve moved to endeavour from fedora. The AUR is a godsend.
Also flatpak doesn’t add to dependency hell, the dependencies it installs are also flatpaks and are completely separate from the system. Recently the arch package of steam simply stopped launching proton games for some reason, I thought I messed something up on my system so I rolled to an old btrfs snapshot and it still didn’t work. However the flatpak version of steam just works.
Do you realize why is that? That Dev will build the package once lifetime and dont give a shit about proper testing nor updating libraries. And your home dir is probably exposed to this buggy craphole.
https://openqa.opensuse.org This is what an update goes through when a proper QA process is applied in a standard distro packaging system. This is what flatpak does not ever comes close to. Flatpak is just windows approach ported to linux. Quality and trust comes from package to package and can vary from good to dogwater.
Btw not sure you realize you are complaining about broken package on bleeding edge distro.
Lmao, why are you so agressive? It’s a packaging format not bloody politics. I never complained about anything, I stated that one package format was broken and the flatpak wasn’t. The mere existence of flatpaks does not and will never threaten the traditional packaging method, or it’s QA. Flatpaks merely provide smaller developers an easy way to get their application published, as well as end users a stress free way to install said apps. And yes, they can range from good to dogshit, that comes with the territory of leaving it entirely up to the publishers, but I think Linux users are capable of identifying which flatpaks are dogshit and which aren’t. Also what do you mean my home dir is probably exposed? Like it isn’t exposed when I install a regular package? Remember the steam bug that just completely wiped your install because they made an assumption with a single variable? Buggy software will always exist, at least with flatpak you can limit an apps access to your system
Please stop projecting on others, that would be nice.
Yes, your home is exposed on both sides. One side tested in proper QA, the other in “trust me bro” env. Lol…. one moment you say that bugs happen and right after that you generalize everything based on one shit that happened on steam package. First you say you are not complaining about anything but then you go to “flatpak better!!!”. Fisrt you say flatpak security is good and when you should back your claims you go with “Linux users detect bugs and security holes very good. Of course they do… after the system goes tits up :D
So… either please stop talking nonsense or present some facts that try to back that nonsense at least.
Flatpak is a last resort. Only used when the package is not available on the repository or the version is too out of sync with the environment. If I really really need to run the latest version of that software, it’s easy to run a Flatpak. But that is only and exclusively for final user software, never for services or background running application, or a new can of worms is opened.
what? They suck on ubuntu/debian-based distros like mint and pop os, they suck even more on arch, and i hate them as a developer.
I guess the whole world should start using that crap so his dev majesty stops crying…
based
Oh… dude… Fanboys won’t like that…
