Manjaro needs testers for the upcoming Manjaro GNOME 20.0 release - Snap and Flatpak support OOTB

Woohoo Flatpak OOB incoming, that is rather nice (which has nothing todo with Gnome btw)
Manjaro is becoming better and better with every release, I have no regrets switching to it two years ago.

Quoting: iiari

Quoting: gradyvuckovicFlatpak out of the box?

Woohoo!

I'm loving the slow but steady adoption of Flatpak....

Great explanation, thanks. As someone who hated Snaps (and those plus unstable PPA's pushed me out of the Ubuntu ecosystem) I have a few questions for you:

1) How are Flatpaks with speed? Snaps were soooo slooooow to launch.
2) Is native theming reflected in Flatpaks?
3) If Flatpaks conquer all, what kinda is the point of different distros anymore? They really do become only theming and software selection boutiques. In the best case scenario, as with Manjaro, they develop their own unique apps and workflows.

Thanks!

If you're on Manjaro (or apparently a debian-based distro, although I haven't tried it there), you can install 'bauh' which is a frontend package manager that will let you install flatpaks (and snaps and appimages). I've installed a few and see no discernible difference in speed (and I don't think one should). Most recently I installed the 'cura' flatpak (3d printing slicer program), as I could not get any of its version in the AUR to successfully work and have data loaded for my printer. Its working great installed as a flatpak, so that has really boosted my appreciation of them.


Last edited by inlinuxdude on 21 April 2020 at 11:20 am UTC

Quoting: iiari

Quoting: gradyvuckovicFlatpak out of the box?

Woohoo!

I'm loving the slow but steady adoption of Flatpak....

Great explanation, thanks. As someone who hated Snaps (and those plus unstable PPA's pushed me out of the Ubuntu ecosystem) I have a few questions for you:

1) How are Flatpaks with speed? Snaps were soooo slooooow to launch.
2) Is native theming reflected in Flatpaks?
3) If Flatpaks conquer all, what kinda is the point of different distros anymore? They really do become only theming and software selection boutiques. In the best case scenario, as with Manjaro, they develop their own unique apps and workflows.

Thanks!

1) In my experience I notice no difference in startup time or running speed. In 2018 there were reports of some overhead during the first run of a Flatpak application but that was due to a bug with the fontcache and it's been fixed ever since.

At it's core, it's the same tech as Steam's runtime compatibility mode. There's no VM, no overhead, just lightweight containers as a way of logically sandboxing an application away from the OS so it can have it's own libraries.

You could argue there's additional startup time and memory usage from loading a couple of system libraries more than once, but in many cases the libraries being loaded more than once are libraries that the developers might have had to include with the 'native' version of the application anyway if they needed to target a specific version of the library, so any startup overhead or additional memory is debatable and really minor.

In the underlying tech there's a lot of cool stuff too that makes it very efficient. For example, in addition to sharing installations of runtimes, if two Flatpak applications bundle with them the same library, the library files will be stored only once for both applications, no additional storage space usage.

2) My understanding is that Flatpak applications can be made to respect system theme. I imagine many distros will choose to set this up by default themselves with their OOTB Flatpak coofigurations, but I understand you can install a system theme to Flatpak the same way you can to your distro, and applications will respect that.

3) I think it's great for distro maintainers as it frees up huge sums of their time and allows them to focus on the user experience of their distros rather than trying to maintain vast repositories of applications written by other people.

They can compete on delivering the best user interface they can provide, compete on delivering regular high quality updates and new features to their distros. Compete on performance of their OS, etc. Compete on ease of installation.

So there's still plenty of reason for them to exist and to compete. If it means a couple of unpopular distros become irrelevant because they offer nothing special that isn't available everywhere else, that's not the end of the world either, we probably don't need all 300+ active distributions. But I imagine all the popular distros will find ways to compete on user experience which benefits us all.

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI love Manjaro but not enough to use Gnome ;)

Gnome

Why do you attack against Gnome with such passion? So many new Linux users love it, and in my experience it is the best Linux desktop for tablet.

This Gnome-bashing does no service to Linux in all and should just stop :O

Quoting: inlinuxdude

Quoting: iiari

Quoting: gradyvuckovicFlatpak out of the box?

Woohoo!

I'm loving the slow but steady adoption of Flatpak....

Great explanation, thanks. As someone who hated Snaps (and those plus unstable PPA's pushed me out of the Ubuntu ecosystem) I have a few questions for you:

1) How are Flatpaks with speed? Snaps were soooo slooooow to launch.
2) Is native theming reflected in Flatpaks?
3) If Flatpaks conquer all, what kinda is the point of different distros anymore? They really do become only theming and software selection boutiques. In the best case scenario, as with Manjaro, they develop their own unique apps and workflows.

Thanks!

If you're on Manjaro (or apparently a debian-based distro, although I haven't tried it there), you can install 'bauh' which is a frontend package manager that will let you install flatpaks (and snaps and appimages). I've installed a few and see no discernible difference in speed (and I don't think one should). Most recently I installed the 'cura' flatpak (3d printing slicer program), as I could not get any of its version in the AUR to successfully work and have data loaded for my printer. Its working great installed as a flatpak, so that has really boosted my appreciation of them.

So, Manjaro is actually going to sunset Bauh and now Flatpaks, the AUR, and Snaps will all go through Pamac. Do your Flatpaks respect system theming?

Quoting: gradyvuckovic3) I think it's great for distro maintainers as it frees up huge sums of their time and allows them to focus on the user experience of their distros rather than trying to maintain vast repositories of applications written by other people.

They can compete on delivering the best user interface they can provide, compete on delivering regular high quality updates and new features to their distros. Compete on performance of their OS, etc. Compete on ease of installation.

So there's still plenty of reason for them to exist and to compete. If it means a couple of unpopular distros become irrelevant because they offer nothing special that isn't available everywhere else, that's not the end of the world either, we probably don't need all 300+ active distributions. But I imagine all the popular distros will find ways to compete on user experience which benefits us all.

Great points!


Last edited by iiari on 21 April 2020 at 2:26 pm UTC

Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI love Manjaro but not enough to use Gnome ;)

Gnome

Why do you attack against Gnome with such passion? So many new Linux users love it, and in my experience it is the best Linux desktop for tablet.

This Gnome-bashing does no service to Linux in all and should just stop :O

I've seen far worse Gnome bashing than that :). That said, while I hugely respect their design process, they've done quite a bit to deserve some of bile aimed at them. As I said above, I think 3.36 is much improved and I think the Gnome GUI switchers that Manjaro and some other devs are using as part of their "Hello" packages have the potential to save Gnome from itself :).

Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI love Manjaro but not enough to use Gnome ;)

Gnome

Why do you attack against Gnome with such passion? So many new Linux users love it, and in my experience it is the best Linux desktop for tablet.

This Gnome-bashing does no service to Linux in all and should just stop :O

Three things !

I didn't attack it

Second, I didn't make the original comment

Finally, No point in trying to defend by stating it's "the best desktop" , then state whilst using it on a tablet

Some like it , others don't , Get over it.

Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI love Manjaro but not enough to use Gnome ;)

Gnome

Why do you attack against Gnome with such passion? So many new Linux users love it, and in my experience it is the best Linux desktop for tablet.

This Gnome-bashing does no service to Linux in all and should just stop :O

But it is cool to bash on Gnome, all the kids are doing it :D ... or so I think the people who bash Gnome think. Personaly I used xfce, budgie, unity, I still like Gnome better


Last edited by mihaib on 22 April 2020 at 8:06 am UTC

Quoting: rat2000

Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI love Manjaro but not enough to use Gnome ;)

Gnome

Why do you attack against Gnome with such passion? So many new Linux users love it, and in my experience it is the best Linux desktop for tablet.

This Gnome-bashing does no service to Linux in all and should just stop :O

But it is cool to bash on Gnome, all the kids are doing it :D ... or so I think the people who bash Gnome think. Personaly I used xfce, budgie, unity, I still like Gnome better

Yea, it really makes no sense. Why some people can't JUST USE things they find best for themselves, and leave those that wasn't "a match", be. Gnome is the only DE which works as well on desktop and mobile. No tweaking required.

Gnome is the default in Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop_OS. Those are some distros people try when coming to Linux. And what do they find arriving on discussions, hopes up just to have found Linux: bashing of this and bashing of that and how Gnome makes some "puke". C'mon.

There was a Destination Linux episode (can't remember which) where Noah talked of this same issue spot on. Maybe it's better to not state anything if the only thing coming to mind from some certain DE for instance is some negative slur.

Here in Germany Linux has about 4% user count nowadays! (according to statcounter) ^_^