Sorry, I should note that 26.3 is not released yet. This is a “snapshot”, aka a development build. The full version of 26.3 will be released in a couple of months.

I updated the title to reflect that 26.3 is not released yet.

Definitely agree, particularly when it comes to security.

Valve takes a snapshot of Arch repos, frozen in time. They then spend months developing on top of this version. And by the time it’s released, it’s multiple months out of date. They don’t pull in security updates; Arch is a rolling release, they don’t backport fixes like Debian or Fedora does.

Definitely misremembering.

Helium is great. I love how it focuses on having 0 distractions. No popups, great default settings.

Yes, but still important to keep in mind because it broke release expectations. Pop!_OS used release new versions every 6 months and then stopped releasing new versions while working on COSMIC and now only does LTS releases.

And now that COSMIC is “done”, it’s still not quite clear when they will release 26.04. I actually just found a quote from the CEO of System76 where he said “Future Pop!_OS releases, starting with Pop!_OS 26.04 LTS, will now align with the Ubuntu LTS release timing (approximately two weeks after the Ubuntu release date)” but that obviously didn’t happen.

Pop!_OS gets Cosmic updates before they are even technically released.

Pop!_OS packages are not cutting edge. They are based on Ubuntu LTS. They do keep some packages more up to date than Ubuntu, such as Cosmic, kernel, mesa. But the vast majority of packages are from Ubuntu LTS unmodified.

Pop!_OS has also been lagging in using the latest Ubuntu LTS. They stuck to 22.04 for almost 4 years before releasing 24.04. It’s also not clear when they will update Pop!_OS to 26.04, but that should not take as long as 24.04.

We’ve heard from a lot of developers working on lower level system components that on package-based systems they can easily install niche command line tools for developers.

…However, after some discussions with the Flatpak developers, we have a plan for how to approach the distribution of third-party tools and we’ve already began prototyping. We’ll share more about this soon in a dedicated post.

I hope this system at least shares runtimes with Flatpak or else I will be severely disappointed. I’d be giddy if it’s actually a case of flatpak offiically supporting CLI tools. It already does, and does it well, just missing a tiny bit of plumbing.

Yes, the packaging mess that Atomic distros cause.

I want a couple of functional things:

• To be able to safely upgrade my system silently, without interruptions, and rollback of necessary
• To know my system is not drifting away from upstream defaults and to restore it to a “factory” state
• To sandbox applications

I’d like to be able to do all that efficiently and cleanly too. Atomic systems generally fulfill those first two while traditional distros struggle, which is why I stick to Atomic distros.

But whereas you can use a single package manager on Arch and get everything (albeit without easy sandboxing), Atomics keep adding more and more. Here’s your rpm-ostree, flatpak, toolbox, homebrew, sysexts, etc.

I find sysexts particularly insulting because they regress so much on traditional packages for so little upside. Doesn’t even have dependency management.

I would wish we would stop creating so many package managers and just focus on improving existing ones.

In a more ideal world we would have something like

• Distro based on Freedesktop runtimes
• Flatpak that officially supports both GUI applications, CLI applications, and even daemons/services
• Flatpak would also be able to reuse the Freedesktop runtimes of the host system

Technically yes, practically no.

Windows doesn’t include the drivers to read Linux file systems (except through WSL) and Vanguard sure doesn’t either.

If you encrypt your disks, then it definitely can’t.

deleted by creator

Certainly an interesting vulnerability, but one you shouldn’t worry about.

If you do really care about sandbox security, the first thing I would recommend doing is globally blocking filesystem access to anywhere in your $HOME that runs script code, such as:

• bash files like ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile
• ~/.local/bin and ~/bin
• ~/.ssh

I have a script that I use to control flatpak overrides and I do something like this:

# paths to block
GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS=(
    "~/.bash_logout"
    "~/.bash_profile"
    "~/.bashrc"
    "~/.profile"
    "~/.ssh"
    "~/.zshenv"
        "xdg-config/zsh"
    "~/.local/bin"
    "xdg-config/systemd"
)

# globally block these paths
for path in "${GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS[@]}"; do
    flatpak --user override --nofilesystem="$path"
done

# but allow some apps like text editors to access them
for path in "${GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS[@]}"; do
    flatpak --user override --filesystem="$path" org.gnome.TextEditor
done

Proton did not claim anything; the CEO of Proton claimed that Republicans (not Trump) would do better on big tech anti-trust.

This view is not that crazy given that the person Trump appointed was doing her job quite well. Too well to the point that Trump removed her from the position later on.

You’re forgetting that Universal Blue doesn’t just ship Fedora stuff.

They include stuff from Homebrew and Flathub out of the box.

Homebrew shipped the backdoored xz library while (by luck) Fedora stable didn’t.

Do they still do 15 minute bugs? That could still use some work.

Occasionally I get an itch to try Plasma and immediately get disappointed every time as I encounter some sort of bug just setting up the panel. Last time I tried was 6.6.5, so it wasn’t just a point 0 software issue.

As a side note, I still get so confused by the “new” panel/desktop edit mode introduced in 6.1.

I don’t think there’s much of a package up-to-date difference between LMDE and Linux Mint. Both Debian and Ubuntu LTS are released every two years. Ubuntu in even years, Debian in odd years. So every year they trade being more up to date.

Main difference now is that Linux Mint has access to Ubuntu’s hardware ennoblement stack.

Preface: I have been daily driving Fedora Atomic for the last couple of years and have also used a bit of Aeon and NixOS.

My opinion is that while atomic/immutable desktops are overall a good idea, they are marred by poor planning, a refusal to fix existing tools, and some cope.

There are way too many package managers and waste in this space. I think flatpak is a large cause of all this friction due to fact that it is always “sandboxed” and only focuses on GUI apps. The fact that it does not aim to support CLI apps (despite being able to handle them quite well!) means that we must have another tool, traditionally podman via toolbox/distrobox. The sandbox doesn’t play well with certain subsets of apps, notably things like VSCode. At least Flatpak Next seems like it will address this part with its unsandboxed mode.

I also find it quite strange how some developers revel in wasted space and inefficiency. So many duplicated libraries between the host, flatpak, podman, and homebrew. With better planning, we could’ve had shared runtimes (such as Freedesktop) between the OS, flatpak, and whatever CLI package manager. Instead we have something like Fedora packages for the host OS and podman (not shared), flatpak using Freedesktop, and brew shipping their own stuff.

I also think that systemd sysexts are poorly designed, it’s crazy they’re being pushed. It’s pretty much a package manager without dependency management. And for what upsides? It has no sandboxing, it’s not portable between distros and distro versions, and must vendor dependencies to work around having no concept of dependencies. And we’re already seeing fragmentation with Fedora and OpenSUSE working on their own frontends to manage sysexts.

Flatpak aimed from the beginning to be distro-independent, and consequently the Freedesktop SDK isn’t a repackaging of Debian or Fedora or Alpine Linux, but something more like a DIY Linux From Scratch build. As an app user you don’t notice any of this, because it’s very well executed and apps just work. Again, it’s hard now to imagine a parallel universe where the main Flatpak runtime was Fedora in a trenchcoat, but perhaps that would have impeded the success of Flatpak. (Of course Canonical still built their own app store technology, but I suspect that Canonical re-inventing things is part of every parallel universe).

I still find this “distroless” talk funny. There’s so little difference in whether the Freedesktop runtime is built like “Linux From Scratch” or assembled from Fedora packages. Fedora is also assembled like “Linux From Scratch”. At the end of the day, they’re both just taking upstream code and compiling it. Fedora just has an intermediary step of creating a package.

The only practical differences are the release scheduling, support length, and compile flags. In another world, the Freedesktop runtime could literally just be Fedora packages but with different compile flags that are less restrictive in terms of patents/codecs. And it would make almost no difference apart from the support length being different.

They disabled it with flags, but manifest V2 still existed in the code and could be enabled. This is about Google now removing V2 from the code. That will make it harder for third party browsers to include V2, since they would need to patch it back in and develop new patches to keep it working.

Now I wish I didn’t upgrade to 26.5 from 15 a couple weeks ago. I could’ve entirely avoided the worst parts of 26 design.

Interesting, what hardware do you run?

I haven’t used Plasma for any significant length of time since 5.27. Coincidentally, the first major version of Plasma where Wayland was actually daily drivable for me, previous versions would have at least one desktop crash a day.

But my experience on Gnome Wayland has always been good. At least, better than X11, even on NVIDIA before the Wayland compatibility was “good”. Don’t remember exactly dates or version umbers, but it was shortly after it got hardware accelerated Xwayland and before NVIDIA added GBM support. And when I switched to AMD, it only got smoother and more stable.

And recently have been trying out labwc/wlroots and it’s been a very stable experience too.