I love Flatpaks, the programs are nicely separated so they don’t interfere with each other. They also don’t have flaws like Snap’s low performance or Nix’s complexity.

But being limited to only graphical apps seems like a real drawback. If one wants to use Flatpaks as their primary package manager there have to be some awkward workarounds for cli programs.

E.g., the prime Flatpak experiene is supposed to be on immutable distros like Silverblue. But to install regular cli programs you are expected to spin up a distrobox (or toolbox) and install those programs there.

Having one arch distrobox where I get my cli programs from will not work, as the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

So what is the solution here? Have multiple distroboxes and install packages in those in alternation and hope the boxes don’t break? Use Nix alongside Flatpak? Use Snaps?

  • j0rge
    1·
    10 months ago

    Maybe make that clear when someone opens the host terminal on bluefin, or let the bluefin installer give this info to the user.

    We’re working on a dynamic motd system that will give you some guidance when you first run the terminal. Here’s the issue if you have some feedback! https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/issues/609

    So which one should I use now?

    Yeah the reason it’s ubuntu by default is that’s what the target audience uses, but we’ve been working on a wolfi/brew distrobox that ends up being a better experience, so we’re mulling shipping that by default.

    Also, why prefer homebrew over something like nix? AFAIK, homebrew leads to the same dependency issues that the traditional package managers have.

    We picked homebrew because it’s overwhelmingly the most popular package manager for cloud people and has everything people need. nix doesn’t really fit in a container world, but we don’t stop people from using it, and with devbox there’s at least a common devcontainer pattern people can use. I haven’t really run into dependency issues with homebrew but the new bluefin-cli container maintains state and is destroyed/rebuilt regularly so that hopefully won’t be a problem.

    scattered on the ublue website, blog posts and forum posts.

    Yeah this is annoying and we’re in the middle of consolidating docs, I’m hoping to streamline it by Fedora 40. I’m also working on a 10m “how to use this thing” video, it’s just been hard to spend time on it when we’re still making it. We’re almost feature complete at this point so I’ll start on this soon.

    Your starter steps are exactly what we want the default to be, do you think we should say that more strongly? Thanks for your feedback! I think we can clean up a bunch of this stuff to make it easier.

    • Libretto@iusearchlinux.fyiOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thank you for the answers and listening to the feedback.

      Your starter steps are exactly what we want the default to be, do you think we should say that more strongly?

      Yes, I’d definitely try to make it more clear to the user that the ubuntu/wolfi distrobox is the way to go and that all the other installation methods are just bonus for those who need it.

      Also, I think it’s a bit confusing for newcomers whether to choose bluefin or -dx. It seems like dx is always the better option, even if you end up not using all of the extra features