FOSS Is Fun

For servers there’s Docker/Kubernetes/Podman, which is well-established and serves a similar purpose as Flatpak on the desktop. Servers were actually first with the increase in popularity of containers.

90 % or more of my desktop (Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue) apps are Flatpaks already. I only have four rpm-ostree overlays (native packages) left: android-tools, brasero/k3b, syncthing (I could switch to SyncThingy for a Flatpak) and virt-manager/virtualbox

With Flatpak there is “flatpak override” which gives you the ability to grant additional permissions or restrict them even further. E. g. I use it to connect KeePassXC with Firefox or to disallow access to the X server to force almost all apps to use Wayland instead of X. It also allows me to prevent apps from creating and writing into arbitrary directories in my home.

Once I reinstall my home server, all its server software will be containerised as well (five years ago I didn’t see the necessity yet). I am tired of having to manage dependencies with every (Nextcloud) upgrade. I want something that can auto update itself completely with minimal or no breakage, just like my desktops.

Any source for that claim?

At least the Fairphone 3 and 4 use public test keys in production:

• https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1546224158769659904
• https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-roms-for-fairphone-3-4/83448/11
• https://web.archive.org/web/2if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/10b5x4n/comment/j67pbny/

Seems like at least the Fairphone 5 finally uses production keys: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/avb-keys-used-in-roms-for-fairphone-5/100314

(Hopefully) obviously /s

Thanks for fixing this issue! I didn’t even know until today that it affected non-Linux systems as well.

Oh no, I thought that was a feature. I came to rely on it to transcribe long tab titles into my text editor. Is there any way to restore the old behaviour in Firefox? Otherwise I’ll have to stick with Firefox 118 or switch web browsers, since Firefox 119 seems to break my longstanding workflow. :(

Any ideas?

They would also need to take responsibility for any security issues related to the chipset. It is also not possible to upgrade proprietary firmware (e. g. for the modem) at all without support from the chipset manufacturer.

Fairphone doesn’t seem to care much about security (they use public keys for signing their OS afterall!), so they may be fine with those compromises.

Qualcomm is interested in selling new SoCs, so even if they actually offer support extensions, their fees are most likely very high to make it unprofitable for manufacturers to go this route.

Have you enabled virtualisation support in your BIOS/UEFI? Many vendors ship their hardware with this switched off by default (and some hardware actually doesn’t support it at all).

I don’t have any issues with Xwayland and simultaneous key presses. Tested with Bottles (i. e. WINE), BeamNG (native Linux build) and the games from SCS Software (also Linux-native). I am running Fedora 38 Silverblue with an AMD RX 5500 XT GPU.

They won’t do that, because older Pixel phones used Qualcomm SoCs and Qualcomm didn’t support these SoCs for more than three Android versions.

They might technically be able to extend support for the Pixel 6 and up (Tensor SoC), depending on the contract and who, Google or Samsung, is responsible for providing the chipset drivers. But even if it is technically possible to extend support, it is probably also unlikely to happen due to the additional expenses it requires.

Overall it’ll be interesting to see how many phones actually live long enough to see their final update after seven years. Considering I already had to replace the battery on my three year old Pixel 5 once (which initially came with Android 10 and got updated to Android 14). USB connectors and broken screens are also common failure points for aging phones.

I don’t like how Flatpak isolates all apps’ config files off into their little sandboxes and makes editing config files annoyin

In my opinion this is one of the best features of Flatpak, as it allows you to uninstall applications cleanly without leaving random files (or entries in your registry / dconf database) all over your computer. Since my first Android phone I always admired how Android handles uninstallation of apps and thanks to Flatpak I can finally have a similar experience on my Linux PCs.

It also allows me to keep a clean home directory, as I don’t allow any Flatpak app to write into the root of my home directory (via global override). So any application (e. g. Firefox) that thinks it is more important than the XDG Base Directory Specification can no longer clutter up my home directory and instead gets redirected to its Flatpak home in ~/.var.

These two use cases alone sold me on Flatpak two years ago and I’ve since migrated all my computers to Flatpak and I wouldn’t want to go back. I can’t understand how (Windows) users still put up with applications reading from and writing into random directories on their PCs and creating or modifying random entries in the registry.

Sway is based on wlroots and therefore does not need to implement the complete Wayland specification itself. Many other Wayland window managers are also based on wlroots and therefore share a common base (compositor).

Furthermore Sway’s git repo has activity up to a couple of days ago: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commits/master

https://hyprland.org/

The Arch wiki lists more options to choose from: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland

You can select a local folder in Obsidian for Android and sync the folder with Syncthing. You can even revoke network permissions for Obsidian and it all works completely offline (Flatpak override: --unshare=network / GrapheneOS: don’t allow the network permission).

This is my current setup, even though Obsidian is not FOSS. I like that it stores standard Markdown files in a traditional filesystem hierarchy, instead of what Joplin does with using Markdown files as a database. This means that with Obsidian I can use any text editor or any other Markdown app to access and edit my notes, whereas with Joplin I would have to export them first to standard Markdown and then potentially rename and reorganise all the files and their attachments.