Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.

I can't help you there. But even if Valve, say, wanted to take over the maintenance of a flatpak that doesn't mean that any other project would want to with theirs.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.

Their official statement is that it's unsupported. Same as snap, and same as any distro but Ubuntu LTS and SteamOS.

Quoting: ValveSteam only officially supports Ubuntu running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or newer and SteamOS, but the Steam for Linux community is extremely resourceful and has managed to run Steam on a large variety of distros. Valve approves of these efforts but does not officially endorse or provide support for them.

Quoting: ValveSteam has been packaged as a Flatpak app by the Flathub community, but this Flatpak app is not officially supported by Valve...

Steam has been packaged as a Snap app by Canonical, but this Snap app is not officially supported by Valve.

As far as the container goes, the Steam container is the same as flatpaks - bubblewrap - and having a container in a container specifically didn't work for bubblewrap. They had to make changes on both ends so that it would work, as I already mentioned. There are probably Phoronix or similar articles going into what exactly they did to make it work.

Edit: found the change. It was

QuoteAllow a subsandbox to have a different /usr and/or /app.
Steam will use this to launch games with its own container runtime
as /usr (the "Steam Linux Runtime" mechanism).

from flatpak 1.11.1 (in 2021) with concurrent changes to pressure-vessel. Prior to that games using the SLR or using later versions of Proton wouldn't work in the flatpak.

Thanks! That's quite interesting. And yes, it wouldn't help me with my vendor, but I was curious what the reasons were...

If Canonical couldn't convince Steam to take ownership of the Snap, I don't think Flathub has much of a chance.

I kind of wonder if there's much point in adopting a Flatpak package as a proprietary vendor. Upstream first needs to create some sort of package that you can package up into a Flatpak, because building from source is obviously not an option. That's almost always a .deb. So in the end you'll be maintaining two packages, at least. You can't do what Bottles did and say, "No! We only support the org.freedesktop.Platform runtime!"

Unless I'm totally wrong?

Edit: I'm probably totally wrong about that. But I wonder if any proprietary developer has actually done or is considering doing this.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

QuoteFixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.

Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.

Flatpak is the fourth most popular distro in the Steam Hardware Survey. Having had to do a bunch of stuff already on both the Steam side and the flatpak side to have container-in-a-container work at all, if there's more they can do to make it work better - why not?

I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.

I don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

QuoteFixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.

Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.

True, and I'd say it mostly comes down to just the fact that Valve is a business and cares about customer service.

Realistically a lot of people are choosing to use Steam via Flatpak these days, rightly or wrongly.

If those people have a bad experience then that's "a bad Steam experience". Even if it's not officially supported. Sure Valve could say "We told you that's not officially supported" but it doesn't matter. Bad experience is bad experience, and if the bad experience happens while in Steam, that's "a bad Steam experience". Bad Steam experiences means less sales.

It's one of those "The customer is always right" situations. Doesn't matter if officially you don't support something, if that's where your users are, gotta try to make it the best experience possible. Good businesses are always bending over backwards trying to give customers good experiences.

Notably, they don't do the same thing for the Snap package.

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QuoteFixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.

Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.

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Awesome.

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Quoting: finaldestI am done with this crap.

I am fed up of this complete utter greed. First we lost physical releases along with publishers destroying games preservation. Now they want even more money by charging £100+ for a broken PC game and now I am required to give yet more money to play the game on release day (AKA On time)

I am done. After 20 years I am now going back to the high seas.

Visual novels are still very much physical. Tens of thousands of them are only available physically.

Big pain to ship them internationally and sometimes they're encumbered by DRM, but they are physical...I wonder if these Japanese games will ever make the shift to digital-only.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySo, I've never really used flatpaks, except maybe one or two that were actually in my distro's repository. So I'm wondering--If you install stuff from Flathub, how do you keep it up to date? Is there some mechanism or do you just have to sort of remember that you ought to, application by application? Do you update, or do you just reinstall a newer version?

You just click the Update All button in GNOME Software or KDE Discover to update your system + Flatpak packages. They're all managed via PackageKit. It informs you if there have been any permission changes between versions. I assume the Linux Mint software GUI would have a similar screen. It updates like any other system package, replacing the older version.

You can also run:

flatpak update

in the terminal if you like.

Incidentally, rolling back to a previous version of a Flatpak requires the terminal and is a little obscure, but it's easily possible. For instance, let's say you want to downgrade GIMP. First we need to know the Parent commit:

flatpak remote-info flathub org.gimp.GIMP

Then update to the Parent commit:

flatpak update --commit=02da1cc51c2b5f9fe03487ff6024e95be68f22e1f10c73ca6a10f8de84e8d321 org.gimp.GIMP

To see all of the previous versions, run:

flatpak remote-info --log flathub org.gimp.GIMP

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Quoting: Pyrate

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualNo official Signal Desktop package. Where do you get it? From the unverified Flatpak? From openSUSE's OBS, which is maintained by a Fedora packager? From the COPR? Do you compile it yourself?

So the flatpak is not verified? I never realised that! is this worthy of concern? I don't know how this works, can one like check how the flatpak is built or whatever so one can be sure there were no modifications? What do you use to get Signal then if not the flatpak?

You'll almost certainly be getting your Flatpaks from Flathub. This is the way Flathub works:

• A user creates a manifest file (which is just a text file) with a bunch of instructions.


• Flathub builds a Flatpak package based on that manifest.


• The Flatpak package appears for download on Flathub's repositories.

Flathub is responsible for building the packages, so it always matches the manifest.* However, the manifest might be malicious. Flathub does manually review all initial Flatpak submissions and permissions changes, so that's some assurance.

Now, about Verification. Take a look at the Signal Flathub page: https://flathub.org/apps/org.signal.Signal

You'll see it says "Unverified". All this really means is that Signal Foundation (the original developer) is not responsible for the manifest or the package. The Flatpak is built by the community, which may or may not be trustworthy. It's a risk you need to take into account. Signal only provides a .deb package officially and nothing else.

Compare this to a "Verified" package, like Thunderbird. It's a package by the original developer, so you can trust it as long as you trust the original developer.

*: Mozilla provides the Flatpak package for Firefox, rather than Flathub building it. It's a very unique case.

And now...Signal

I apologize in advance for sending you down the garden path: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630

To save you a lot of reading, a trustworthy option might be the Open Build Service RPM package provided by cryptomilk, who is a Fedora Proven Packager and contributor to Signal.

[1]: March 2018, cryptomilk expresses interest in creating an OBS package when Signal signs their git tags and OBS supports GPG sigs: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630#issuecomment-373272490
[2]: October 2019, cryptomilk starts working on the OBS package: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630#issuecomment-545581829
[3]: April 2020, cryptomilk gets the package working on OBS: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630#issuecomment-611564892
[4]: July 2020, cryptomilk moves the OBS package to a new URL: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630#issuecomment-664135377

Or maybe you decide "the Flatpak is probably trustworthy enough" and like the idea of auto-updates, so you just use the Flatpak package.

Or you decide that you only trust Signal and just build it from source: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#linux

I never managed to settle on a decision. When I come back to Fedora, I might investigate container options like Podman/toolbx...

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI managed to compile Gamescope on Fedora

I haven't messed with it myself, but gamescope is in the default repositories, so very easy to install. Same for mangohud, goverlay, lutris, wine, and "almost" anything that is open source.

So it is.

I forget why exactly I compiled Gamescope from source on Fedora...there might have been a regression. Or I just didn't realise it was in the repositories!

One program I was surprised to find in Fedora's repositories was Cinelerra-GG.

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualinstalling patent-encumbered encoders/decoders, like the ones for H.264/H.265. You need to get those from RPM Fusion

I prefer the "fedora-multimedia" negativo17 repository myself.

Thanks for the tip!

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAudacity is really out of date!

Current version in the repo is 3.3.3; that is indeed out of date, but it's less than a year old, going by the official Audacity website. Oh, but 3.4.2 is there for Fedora 40 (I think 3.5 just released a few days ago?):
https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/audacity/audacity/

Fedora 38 had Audacity 3.1, which was missing several major improvements from recent versions (I forget what exactly, I didn't use it for long). This is really a program that should be kept up-to-date throughout the Fedora release rather than pinned to a certain version. I don't know if it's possible to import newer project files in older versions of audacity, but I collaborate with users from other operating systems on various projects, so that would be a requirement. Yes, 3.5 just came out this week.

I noticed a few other programs on Fedora weren't kept up-to-date, like QBitTorrent, but that didn't matter as much to me as Audacity. Audacity 4.0 will be Qt-based, so hopefully that will make building it easier for Fedora in the future.

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualWhen I tried to watch videos with mpv, they would crash suddenly a few minutes in.

I assume that's from rpmfusion; you could try the negativo17 version.

Will do, when I get around to trying out the new Fedora release.

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Quoting: tuubiI suppose one might want to play around with gamescope, but no game actually requires that stuff as far as I know.

Visual novels are a chore to play without Gamescope. Almost all of them have broken fullscreen, or you can't move the window at all, or... other stuff.

Localization teams tend to do some engine hacking to fix that stuff, but if you want to play the Japanese version, it's usually like that.

Quoting: WoodlandorWayland graphics flickering under Nvidia drivers seems to be fixed with the final release.

Considering NVIDIA's new driver that fixes this isn't due to be out until halfway through May (and that's just their Beta driver, their production release won't be out for probably another month after that), explicit sync is very much still an issue on Wayland and will likely be until June sometime.

Quoting: legluondunetWhat distribution you will advice for gaming?

Most of those dependencies can be installed via Flatpak, but Arch by far makes installing all of this stuff natively the easiest.

A friend tried to install Gamescope on Mint and openSUSE, but they had a lot of trouble compiling it. I managed to compile Gamescope on Fedora while cross-referencing the AUR package for the right dependencies, and after about half an hour, I got there.

Best way to install Gamescope is to install the Lutris/Bottles + Gamescope Flatpaks. Any distribution would work then, but you would need to use the Steam flatpak if you wanted to use Gamescope on Steam.

It isn't hard to install NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers on Fedora. What is difficult, in my experience, is installing patent-encumbered encoders/decoders, like the ones for H.264/H.265. You need to get those from RPM Fusion, and while I followed the commands exactly, they didn't work the first two times. I have no idea why they worked the third time. Although I think Fedora provides AAC in its own repositories? Anyway, OpenH264 was flat out broken for me (lots of fun artifacts), so I needed the FFmpeg decoder for H.264, which I could only get from RPM Fusion.

In case anyone was curious, here's the list of remaining patents for H.264. About three-quarters of them are expired now, and by the end of April, around 11/58 pages of patents will be left. Do note that quite a few of them can be disregarded, as the most widely used version of the H.264 standard is the High Profile, patents for which would need to have been filed in 2007 or before. A number of patents apply to later standard revisions which are not in nearly as wide use.

Further sources about patent expiration dates for H.264.[1][2] Also, maybe Unified Patents will invalidate a few more before they expire naturally! But probably not.

Other things that were annoying on Fedora (my experience was Fedora 38):

• No official Signal Desktop package. Where do you get it? From the unverified Flatpak? From openSUSE's OBS, which is maintained by a Fedora packager? From the COPR? Do you compile it yourself?


• Audacity is really out of date! You need to get the AppImage or the Flatpak, which in my experience are both broken in different ways.


• There's also no desktop package for Bitwarden...same reason as Signal: Fedora does not package Electron currently because it's hard.


• For some reason, fcitx5 was broken due to a Fedora-specific reason. I know this because I needed to run im-chooser, a Fedora-specific program, to fix the issue. I have no idea what the issue was, but at least I can write in Japanese now.


• When I tried to watch videos with mpv, they would crash suddenly a few minutes in. This happened reliably. You might be wondering why I didn't report it—well, the error reporting program also crashed and wouldn't produce a backtrace. GNOME-Abrt never successfully generated an error report for me.

That being said, I'm going to try Fedora 40/41 again on a computer I don't care about. And I'm going to try Fedora Workstation this time instead of the KDE Spin. I hope Fedora is the kind of distribution you can leave alone for a few weeks and not come back expecting breakage.

I'll probably replace it with Pop!_OS, eventually...

[1]: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=184869
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F

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