Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAs for a "free copy", what does this mean? There is no free version of CrossOver Linux. There's a 14-day free trial. There's a yearly subscription. There's a lifetime subscription. And there's the CrossOver One one-time purchase (which doesn't exist right now). So based on what version it is, that will determine the value of it. Given that they don't say "1 free year", I suppose it's meant to be lifetime or a particular version (CrossOver 21) forever.

They say it's Crossover Linux One, which is not listed officially by CodeWeavers. We've asked for clarification. Will update if / when we get a reply.

Ah, i know that one.

CrossOver One is not officially listed by Codeweavers as of ~August last year. It was a version of CrossOver that received no support and only contained that year's version of CrossOver. There were no software upgrades. It was $39.95USD.

You can see the store page as it originally appeared a year ago with the CrossOver One option here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210102011151/https://www.codeweavers.com/store/

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Quoting: ShinyaOsen

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOn a rolling-release distribution like Arch? No way. All of the packages are up-to-date, and if they're not, they are up-to-date in the AUR.

Use flatpaks on my arch install for handbrake, fre:ac, ungoogled chromium, and Jellyfin Media Player.
Reasons being handbrake has a bug in the arch repo that made HEVC/265 encode take 10 times longer(10fps on flatpak to 0.4fps on arch repo) aur versions dont fix this and the flatpak version is official the only thing I'm missing is fdk-aac which i only use when using 264. Fre:ac only available in AUR crashes constantly and the GUI doesn't show some times so pretty unusable and flatpak version is official. Ungoogled Chromium don't want to compile and flatpak is offical. Jellyfin media player don't want to compile and flatpak is official.
I'll be using the OBS flatpak in the next release as it will be official and have all features available with out needing to compile the missing features from the AUR.
On my laptop that is running opensuse tumbleweed I use the flatpak for asunder as on opensuse asunder isnt up to date and is deprecated since it uses gtk2 still and the creator endorsed the flatpak version.
Not that flatpak stuff is perfect switched off the Firefox flatpak after it bugged my profile and 264 videos playback can be bugged some days probrobly switch back to it sometime in the future again tho.

I suppose it's a matter of taste, for the most part.

From my perspective: I use plain FFmpeg, the brave-bin package (so no compilation), and only use basic features of OBS.

I'm not saying the AUR is without its issues, but it's a lot better than a PPA or nothing. I'll relay my own frustrating experience with the recent Anki situation. Anki was removed from the official repositories following an announcement from Anki that they were going to change their compilation process significantly yet again. I guess the maintainer just got tired of having to deal with it. Now there are 3 or 4 different versions in the AUR, and the best one for compilation is still incredibly involved and failed for me a few times. With the recent update, I couldn't get it to work at all and ended up using the official binary bundle (which worked fine).

Anki is not the typical AUR experience for me; it's very complicated and has a moderate chance of failing to compile. Most of it is stuff like Gazou and xow-git; small programs.

But it can also be better than the alternative. With Audacity 3.0+, all of the AppImages are broken, the Flatpak also seems to fail, and Arch doesn't maintain a version of it past 2.4.2 in the official repositories. The AUR package compiles within 5 minutes and works great. Aside from wxWidgets just being wacky in general, but nothing will fix that.

I personally would still rather contend with the AUR than Flatpak for software right now. Maybe that will change in the future.

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Quoting: CyborgZeta

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOn a rolling-release distribution like Arch? No way. All of the packages are up-to-date, and if they're not, they are up-to-date in the AUR. Flatpak is way too much complexity for me.

I'm on an Arch-based system and use several Flatpaks. Firefox and Thunderbird for better Plasma integration and the sandbox, with everything else for being more convenient and not bloating my system with dependencies.

Also, I never touch the AUR, and Flatpak helps with that.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using Flatpaks on Arch Linux, but I think the AUR addresses some of the biggest issues that distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora don't handle well without Flatpak.

I'm a GNOME user that doesn't use any extensions :P

Using Flatpak and saying that it results in fewer dependencies is somewhat of a strange argument to me. Sure, you need to download more make dependencies for some AUR packages, but you can immediately uninstall them after compilation. With Flatpak, the more applications you use, the more duplicate runtimes/shared libraries (just different versions) you end up with. That's bloat in terms of RAM (having to run multiple of the same runtime) as well as hard drive space.

I don't know how effective Flatpak is at sandboxing applications, and because I use almost entirely free software or applications I trust, or applications that aren't distributed via Flatpak anyway (Microsoft Office), I wouldn't get much benefit out of it anyhow. For Firefox, I use uBlock Origin and block Javascript, remote fonts, the usual blocklists, disable WebGL and hardware acceleration, and that gives me more assurance than any sandbox would.

Does Flatpak have a package for php7.2/php7.2-fpm? Because that would certainly be less of a headache than compiling it from the AUR. I don't really think it's the type of thing you can package with a Flatpak, though. Otherwise, I personally don't have much use for it.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: pbSo what's so special about this box that it costs $60-70 more than the one with preinstalled Windows? I appreciate that they're trying, but I fail to see the point.

It comes with a copy of CrossOver Linux, valued at $59USD per year. I don't know whether it's a lifetime copy, annual, or some variant of their CrossOver One product.

Worth it? Maybe, especially if it's a lifetime copy, which generally goes for about $499.95USD.

"the first 1,000 orders get a free copy of CrossOver Linux"

Fair point about only the first 1,000 orders; I doubt the price will go down after that.

As for a "free copy", what does this mean? There is no free version of CrossOver Linux. There's a 14-day free trial. There's a yearly subscription. There's a lifetime subscription. And there's the CrossOver One one-time purchase (which doesn't exist right now). So based on what version it is, that will determine the value of it. Given that they don't say "1 free year", I suppose it's meant to be lifetime or a particular version (CrossOver 21) forever.

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Quoting: pbSo what's so special about this box that it costs $60-70 more than the one with preinstalled Windows? I appreciate that they're trying, but I fail to see the point.

It comes with a copy of CrossOver Linux, valued at $59USD per year. I don't know whether it's a lifetime copy, annual, or some variant of their CrossOver One product.

Worth it? Maybe, especially if it's a lifetime copy, which generally goes for about $499.95USD.

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I still don't really get what the audience for the Steam Deck is. I kind of want to buy one, but then I remember I have no use for it. I can play games in bed with my laptop. I have 4 GNU/Linux computers already. If I'm outside, I don't want to play games, otherwise I wouldn't have gone outside.

I guess I don't really understand the portable gaming idea to begin with. I did play Pokemon a lot as a kid, but those days are long gone. I played a lot of mobile games when I was younger, too, but that was mostly the novelty of it rather than them being any good. I don't think that phase lasted very long.

I guess it doesn't help that a lot of the games I play involve using Textractor, copying text to the clipboard, looking it up in a J-J dictionary, and creating an Anki card. Not really the type of gaming suited for a small, portable device without a keyboard.

I just have no idea what to think, because I am clearly not the target audience for this.

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For proprietary games, sure. And for distributions on a slow release schedule with frequently like Debian, Ubuntu LTS, and even Ubuntu proper, sure.

On a rolling-release distribution like Arch? No way. All of the packages are up-to-date, and if they're not, they are up-to-date in the AUR. Flatpak is way too much complexity for me. I tried it when I was new to GNU/Linux and it confused the hell out of me. I'm sure I could manage it now, but I don't want to. I don't mind AppImages because they tend to manage themselves and aren't particularly ambitious. However, even they tend to have less features than the non-sandboxed version (see the Cinelerra-GG handbook for the differences).

I'd rather games come with a .sh install script like GoG games do than be required to deal with Flaptak. I see no place for it on distributions like Arch Linux.

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Quoting: MayeulCIronically the Proton version works better than the native version in the Steam Flatpak.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI love the format; it's so simple, gives the developer a lot of control, and solves the age-old issue of dependencies being updated over time.

There's plenty of issues with the format too: it's harder to update said dependencies, it still relies on a bunch of dependencies on the host, it also relies on a couple of weird tricks.

Basically, the most interesting part of the format is that it's delivered as a single file. Great for running multiple versions side-by-side, and easy to use in a portable way. Besides that, not much.

Flatpaks are relatively portable too, it would probably be pretty easy to provide one-file exports, although it would require flatpak on the target computer as well to run :)

I'm not a developer, but as far as I'm aware, it's up to the developer what they include in the AppImage. And they also get to decide how they want the AppImage to be updated—it's in their hands.

On the flip side, assuming these two points are accurate, that means a lot of the onus is on the developer to do things correctly. AppImages aren't really "standardized" in the way that Flatpak is, so there's a lot less direction. Just look at Audacity 3.0+; all of the AppImages they've ever shipped have been broken in some way on GNOME 41+.

I do have concerns about whether a Flatpak would hold up in 10 years time. I'm sure an AppImage would with the right dependencies; you just need to flip an execution bit and execute it. Flatpak just seems like a more complex system with reliance on a considerable amount of infrastructure existing in the same way it does today. Also, sandboxing makes things more complicated.

From an end-user perspective: I already have to manage both the main repositories for my distribution and the AUR for a choice few packages, I don't want to manage another package manager like Flatpak (and I really don't like the CLI interface; actually, I think I hate all package manager's interfaces except for pacman). AppImage makes things simple; I just open the application and it tells me whether it wants to update, and I update (or not).

Yes, I would rather Flatpaks than Snaps, of course.

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Quoting: JpxsonSince they have packaged the Steam version as an AppImage it also won't work with Flatpak Steam. I've asked on Discord if they would consider switching to using the Steam Runtime Soldier instead, since that would solve both this and the Manjaro issue. They answered that they would look into it.

It's disappointing that Flatpak is incompatible with AppImages. Personally, I would love it if GOG, for example, distributed all their games as AppImages. I love the format; it's so simple, gives the developer a lot of control, and solves the age-old issue of dependencies being updated over time.

It would be nice if Steam offered a middle ground that allowed the user to choose which version of the game they download; the Flatpak or the AppImage, in much the same way that software like Gnome Software does.

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I didn't receive the email others appear to have received from Humble. I suppose because I'm not subscribed to the right emails.

However, I did make a support inquiry with some of my questions and received this response:

QuoteHi,

Thanks for writing in! The Humble Games Collection is replacing the Humble Trove. Starting February 1, Mac and Linux versions of the DRM-free games currently in the Humble Trove will no longer be available. The ones provided from the Humble Games Collection are all DRM-free, but the are Windows-only. You can find more information about this here: Changes Coming to Humble Choice FAQ

Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

It appears that all games shipped with the Humble client will be DRM-Free. But only available on Windows.

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