If you’re interested in another approach to containerizing GUI applications, also checkout out x11docker. It’s a small independent project maintained by one guy, nothing big like flatpak, but also pretty cool. The name is actually a bit limiting – it supports both docker and podman, and can run wayland apps as well. One of the coolest features, in my opinion, is the ability to run a separate X server inside every sandbox and forward individual windows to the “host” X server. That way you can prevent apps from spying on your keyboard or other apps’ windows.

The thing with appimages is that they expect the developer to have full knowledge of what libraries need to be bundled with their app, which makes it difficult to make truly universal appimages. In flatpak you just select one of a set list of runtimes and add any additional dependencies on top of it. Flatpak also re-uses the files for each runtime in between the different apps that use it, which saves a lot of disk space.

Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.

Flatpak is basically GUI-optimized containers. It uses the same technology (namespaces) as docker and podman, just with some extra tools to make GUI-related things work properly. That’s why flatpak apps don’t use the system’s gtk version – they’re running in a sandbox with a different rootfs. You can spawn a shell into the sandbox of a specific app with flatpak run --command=sh com.yourapp.YourApp and poke around it if you want to.

Oh, what the fuck!?

TBH I wouldn’t mind it that much. The whole point of flatpak is that the developer can do whatever demented satanic rituals they want inside of the sandbox, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the system.

A lot of “hardware raid” is just a separate controller doing software raid. I thought I lost access to a bunch of data when my raid controller died, before I realized that I could just plug the disks directly into the computer and mount them with mdadm. But yes, hardware raid seems a bit pointless nowadays.

The dopamine rush when you nail a complicated %s regex search-and-replace first try is insane

Yeah, neovim is better

Born too late to conquer the world
Born too early to explore the stars
Born just in time to have edits of my shitposts shared on a niche online community 😤

(Jokes aside, I’m glad you liked/hated my meme enough to make an edit :-) )

Thank you for the detailed response, very informative. You make a really good point about centralized logging, I can see how that can be very helpful when you run A LOT of different server process on one machine. I get centralized logging as a bonus of running everything in Docker, but I can see how it is nice to have logging as part of the init system if you want to run a lot of services natively.

Out of curiosity, why exactly do you not have a choice in not running systemd? Is it company policy / are they clients’ machines?

I’m more of a runit guy, but I started using Alpine recently, and I have to say, openrc is also pretty nice!

Fstab is for critical partitions

Hush everyone, don’t tell this guy about noauto, it’ll burst his bubble

I’ve gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven’t heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever. The only arguments I hear in favor of systemd, even from the its diehard defenders, are justifications why it’s not that bad. Not once have I heard someone advocate for systemd with reasoning that goes likes “Systemd is superior to legacy init systems because you can do X much easier” or “systemd is more secure because it’s resistant against Y attack vector”. It’s always “Linus says it’s allright” or “binary logfiles aren’t a problem, you can just get them from journald instead of reading the file”, or “everyone already uses it”.

When it comes to online discourse, systemd doesn’t have advocates, it has apologists.

After the latest bullshit from Microsoft

I like how your comment works regardless of whether you consider “latest” to be the past year or the past decade lol.

Imagine using linux in 2024, TempleOS all the way

He really insists on debian-based, I don’t really know why. And, while Void IS really solid, it isn’t exactly known for the most expansive package collection. Xournal, for example, is not available through XBPS (there is a xournal package, but it just installs xournal++), which is one of the programs he likes a lot. I told him it’s on nix, but he doesn’t want to use nix.

But I agree, Void is amazing, I use it on my laptop. One little-known cool feature of Void is that its official docker images come in busybox/musl libc, busybox/glibc, and coreutils/glibc variants, it gives you a nice scale from most minimalist to most compatible.

I like your comment a lot because you can substitute a lot of different things for “snap” and it still ends up sounding like a very reasonable opinion

I feel like I would be more okay with leaded gasoline if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with anarcho-capitalism if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with PFAS-coated cookware if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with single-use plastic bags if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with cryptocurrencies if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with generative AI if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with eating highly processed meat if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase ‘Yes, do as I say!’

But speaking seriously, I think he tried it for a while and didn’t like it either… not sure why specifically tho, I’ll ask him

It’s not a miniscule gripe tho. Snap is still broken for many users, and relying on it for something as critical as a web browser is asking for trouble. Experimental technologies like snap should be opt-in for users who are willing to deal with the issues they create. Do they really expect a novice to see firefox’s filepicker not behaving correctly, and think “Aha, an XDG desktop portal issue! Let me drop everything I’m doing and go troubleshoot that” ? Ubuntu is meant to be linux for normies, they don’t have the time or the knowledge to deal with snap.