Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.

I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.

  • @[email protected]
    2•2 years ago

    Flatpaks are more restricted and for general use cases this is good.

    Can you name the apps? Maybe there is a workaround.

    For general use cases, for example I maintain a fleet of Debian PCs:

    • core Apps can be native (editor, file manager etc)
    • everything big or foreign should be flatpak

    For example Libreoffice, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Krita. These apps are huuge, and come with huge dependencies your core system does not need. Keeping them isolated via flatpak is saving your OS like 400 packages, it makes updates faster and upgrades more reliable.

    If you install KDE apps on GNOME this can be a problem, but may be not. Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, sucks. You can install Dolphin on Gnome natively. But other apps might be more difficult and Dolphin for sure pulls in loots of KDE Dependencies that are not native to GNOME.

    On everything but KDE you should install Flatseal to view and manage Flatpak app permissions. Its like Android/GrapheneOS (Storage scopes, Network permission), really nice. Libreoffice and other huge projects generally have access to your complete system. I dont like that, but they are not updated to use “Portals” yet, so they need it to NOT result in the problems you describe.

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

    • Scary le Poo
      4•2 years ago

      This should really be a top level comment. This actually solves a lot of my issues with Linux.

      I remember complaining that Linux apps were not self-contained like Windows apps are. And I got the standard speech about losing space with libraries blah blah blah and my reaction is I don’t fucking care.

      In my opinion, Linux dependency setup is hilariously broken. I understand that for the most part it works, but when it doesn’t the results are disastrous generally.

      Also I agree. Nautilus is hot fucking garbage.

      • @[email protected]
        3•2 years ago

        Flatpaks also share runtimes.

        Its bad that they have deduplication, its really unsatisfying. But having maaany runtimes in parallel is simply the state of every OS. I dont know about Android, which is really nice. But sucks also. Filemanagers are very restricted for example.

        And for example Libreoffice, VLC, SciDavis and others just work well as Flatpak for me

    • Tlaloc_Temporal
      1•2 years ago

      Dang, I wish I could find my install history somewhere…

      • I thought I had issues with the Discord Snap (which I’m just now realizing is different to Flatpack), but I’m running the Snap right now, so I guess I got that to work (mostly, maybe this Desktop Portal could fix it? Hmm).

      • Lutris and Wine have been endless trouble no matter what I’ve done, so possibly not the Flatpak’s fault.

      • Steam as a Snap broke some important features, mostly with modding. That’s a deb right now, I think.

      • And lastly mcpelauncher, which was scuffy already, but apparently is a Flatpak.

      Perhaps my impression was clouded by poorly behaved installations and/or poorly understood setups. Also maybe by Snap. I’ll have to try Flatpaks again next time.

      Honestly I’ve prioritized debs simply because that’s similar to what I know, so I can get them to work. Figuring out what exactly I’m doing with 7 part CLI installs is rough, even when they work, and I’ve been trained to skip “app store” links altogether. I am just smol bebe avoiding a windows dualboot as long as I can.