• 31 Posts
  • 90 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 21st, 2022

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  • Funny. True, on superstable but also super unstable systems, having separated apps makes most sense.

    Not actually on “immutable” rpm-ostree systems, as these have the best and most solid package management.

    So actually when people say “these immutable systems, you just use Flatpaks”, actually on the regular systems you should mainly use Flatpaks.



  • Crazyy!

    Btw I am XWayland free since today!

    I have a list of recommended apps here

    Some apps need environment variables:

    Qt:

    • qpwgraph

    GTK

    • GPU Screen recorder, I guess

    Electron

    • Nextcloud Flatpak
    • MullvadVPN RPM
    • Signal Flatpak
    • (Element, I switched to the Webapp in Librewolf)
    • Freetube Flatpak

    You can use xlsclients -l to detect apps using XWayland.

    Some may even want to run apps through XWayland on purpose, like KeepassXC for Clipboard access or autotype. Lets see how long it takes to implement all the needed protocols.


  • You got me in the first part XD

    No joking, apart from that

    But since apparently PulseAudio is the GNome / Microsoft approved way

    I think I understand your point.

    Pulseaudio is outdated, Pipewire AND Pulseaudio are now needed. Maybe also just Pipewire, and you can somehow fake Pulseaudio?

    I never used a system without Pulseaudio, and Fedora has both (?) Or just Pipewire.

    Pulseaudio is the old stuff that apps want to use, pipewire is the new cool stuff (I recommend qpwgraph) which allows like everything.

    Aaand it is not overcomplicated, it isolated apps and introduces a permission system. Privileged programs that channel the requests and permissions, and sometimes need user interaction. Its actually less chaotic, the problem simply is that Flatpak ALSO tries to run all apps everywhere. And apps are mostly not up to date, so Flatpaks have randomly poked holes everywhere.

    Today I worked on hardening configs for my apps. I maintain a list of recommended ones here. I will just put my overrides in my (currently still private) dotfiles, will upload them some day.

    I am for example now Wayland only. Not all apps want to, but with the correct env vars (which I just globally set for all flatpaks, hoping it will not mess with anything), all apps use it.

    This makes the system way faster, and applying different vars on the apps is very easy with Flatpak.

    Literally no downsides!

    Not true. It still has no updating mechanism, the binary may be official, but the rest are random libraries that may not be well versioned or controlled, etc etc.

    The post is specifically about upstream supported Appimages, while Flathub is mainly maintained by the same 4 peolple (it is crazy). The request is for upstream devs to maintain Flatpaks.

    But for sure not everything is nice. Runtimes are too huge, outdated apps cause huge library garbage, downloads are inefficient, …



  • I am pretty happy with GrapheneOS. Things like separate toggles for internet, or long powerbutton press foe torch are missing.

    But you cannot imagine how much effort it is to maintain such a project, and their base is stable, the updates are damn fast.

    First stability and security, then features.

    Their core OS is minimal on purpose. I use the phone, vanadium (hardened chromium, with JIT toggle, now with adblock, completely degoogled), their attestation app, etc.

    Most of the other stuff are random FOSS projects, I dont even use sandboxed play, but if I wanted to I could create a separate user profile and install it just in there.

    DivestOS is doing sandboxed microG which is way more secure than unsandboxed, but still tons of effort and will break a lot.




  • Not sure but GrapheneOS has an “LTE only” mode, stock Android only has preferred Network afaik.

    visiting only known websites is not a scaleable option, a browser needs to be secure. Kiwix is the browser that basically runs desktop Chromium on Android, so it has Addon support. But that is also soon manifest v3 restricted, and likely pretty insecure.

    of course the user data partition is not checked, but every other important one. I have not tested what would happen when it is modified though.

    I dont know what magisk did, but I think that is only about Google Play adding their “safety” scanning to the OS. Nothing regarding boot. But yes, likely there could, can or should be OS components scanning things too.

    Googles stuff is pretty insecure, for example the latest SafetyNetFix simply disabled hardware cryptography, as they still support insecure phones.

    For sure this is very complex and there are always vulnerabilities found in Android and GrapheneOS.