awesome-immutable VS xdg-desktop-portal

Interesting article!

My takeaways:

>"The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this."

[...]

>"All of these technologies are essentially building

an entire OS on top of another OS

just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility."

This is basically using containers to replace all system libraries -- to insure that a downloaded binary app always works.

From this point forward, we'll use the term "API" to represent not just Linux kernel syscalls, but the totality of all library calls (system and otherwise!) used by a given downloaded binary application!

Observation: API (in-)consistency (AKA "Stability") one Linux version to another, one Linux distro to another -- is the real problem!

That's the real cause!

Because everything else, everything else, is effect, not cause!

The containerization, the bloated "everything but the kitchen sink" downloads, are the effect of the problem of API (in-)consistency!

Phrased a simpler way -- there is absolutely NO guarantee of consistency between the libraries, system and otherwise, of any two Linux distros!

So if a binary app is to run on all Linux distros -- then it had better damn well better make sure that the exact specific version of all of the libraries that it needs -- are managed by it, not the host operating system!

Containers and bloated library downloads -- are (unfortunately) currently necessary to provide this!

Related:

"Linux Library Mismatch":

https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+library+mismatch

"DLL Hell" (the MS-Windows equivalent)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell

Software Engineering: Bertrand Meyer, "Design By Contract":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

API Contracts: "What is an API Contract?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qM__ozdHCU

Eelcho Dolstra: "The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model":

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf#page=11

Image-based Linux distributions and associated tools:

https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

Spencer Baugh: "Managing Dependencies":

https://catern.com/posts/deps.html

If you're simply in search of other immutable distros, then I would recommend you to look under the "Distributions" section on this page.

The answer to that question is out of scope for what is sensible to write in a comment. Also, because we're mostly still exploring what it is or rather what we'd want it to be. But if you're really interested, then I'd suggest you to dive into this wonderful resource. You don't have to go through everything that's found within. However, I'm sure there's something in there that peaks your interest and you can go from there.

Flatcar uses 2 partitions, A and B, you boot into one and then updates update the one that you're not booted into, when you reboot it it boots into the updated one. It's like Android: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab

I maintain an awesome-list of immutable resources here with a collection of talks and presentations from the people making the stuff: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

However I'm currently focused on desktop stuff since the it's a fairly common pattern in cloud already, I should probably write it up.

Semi-related, a few of us have started a community around composable OCI fedora images, and one of our images is intended to be used as a home server built on CoreOS with ZFS, cockpit, and all the goodies you'd need. It's still fresh and we're looking for help if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore (Disclaimer: I helped start this project)

Some interesting links: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

Found this page for you. It has lots of resources, including videos and guides, about all things Silverblue and other immutable Linux distros, and their tooling. Enjoy.

Note, I haven't tried these two distros myself, but I am strongly considering moving to such a system at the moment. Here is some reading material in case you're interested: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

>Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703

>remapping keys

>Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev)

Up to the compositor.

>Global shortcuts

Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least.

>tunnelling over ssh

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> - O proper screen recording support

Works just fine. I use OBS.

> - broken screen sharing

Never had any trouble with it.

> - No proper global keyboard shortcut

> - No push to talk support

On its way: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711 / https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...

> - Several problems with multiple screens

Haven't had any more than on X11, but then again I do use Nvidia hardware on Linux.

It might help, but at this point Linux containers can't really stabilize the whole environment, especially for games. Particular pain points include accelerated graphics (which theoretically can have a stable kernel interface, but in practice is so complex and performance-sensitive that it's not stable enough to be a "reference platform", so to speak) and modern game controllers (which present a whole mess of concerns typically "addressed" in Flatpak by granting the device=all permission and hoping for the best [1]).

I also know a guy who ran into issues with a kernel update breaking a custom allocator, although I don't know the fine details. That wasn't for a game, but games also use custom allocators for various reasons.

[1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/536

I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

It's being discussed: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/611

The first bug report was filed in early 2022 but unfortunately no progress yet on the matter, even after numerous similar reports ever since.

Yeah been having the same issue since I changed to using the unstable branch, supposedly noticed and fixed upstream for a few variants of the problem (different people with different configurations of DE and xdg-* deps installed report the same issue due to timeouts of the other portals)