Also PKGBUILD’s are the superior packaging format. Back in the day people use to talk about preferring debian or redhat based distros based on how much they liked debs or rpms. Building packages on Arch is easier than pretty much any distro I have ever tried to build packages on.

I used them for some things, but other things still don’t work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.

To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren’t something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don’t just break all the time. I’m not running untrusted software.

Basically no solution is perfect, but they don’t need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn’t to say they don’t have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that “being designed from the ground up” to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever “cobbled together” thing we currently have and that isn’t always the case. I’m specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for “cobbled together”.

One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed “from the ground up” to do what they do. However, I don’t make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.

Maybe pipewire and the ROC protocol? I’m not sure if it can be used on windows. You will have to refer to their documentation to get anything working. On Arch the package is called pipewire-roc. On Android the app you will need is roc droid. I have used it from linux to android, but have never introduced windows into the mix.

Well she was right. I did learn something new about those commands.

I’ve been using some ancient java app called jmkvpropedit to do this.

Depends on how the project and how long they have been around.

At least I don’t need to pay for freeware. Last I checked, the cost of Windows was included in my laptop and I didn’t get the option to not install an OS even though I fully intended to install Linux on it.

About the time that Windows 10 came out. I was just messing around and ended up liking it.

I’m constantly surprised at this point how anyone fails at it. Not to mention there are a number of distros that provide them out of the box now and somehow people still say they couldn’t install it.

Finally time to bust this out again.

Believe it or not. kde’s khelpcenter is what I have been using. Not sure if it includes images, but it renders simple html files and according to the Arch package. It is only like 7 MiB. Way better and faster than using a whole browser, but doesn’t really support javascript obviously.

Yep, I remember when distros had to ship git versions of sddm with unmerged patches to fix issues because of the disconnect between the sddm maintainer and kde developers who seem to be doing most of the work. They are unfortunately limited to goals and architecture of that separate project project and its maintainer and its finally time to get away from it.

That is a work in progress and isn’t finished.

Is this actually a bug though? I just don’t think krunner or many other calculators for that matter use delimiters anymore. Therefore, the only thing it is changing based on regional settings is the use of the comma or period to denote a decimal.

I could be wrong considering I had a bit of trouble understanding the post. I just bring this up because in American English there are no delimiters for thousands place or above either.

Also I don’t see how from this post the decimal point is wrong. Sure it is simplified to one decimal place, but again many calculators do this. Perhaps op simply needs something that provides more fine grained control over number formatting than what krunner is supposed to.

You can configure the kde clipboard manager to never delete things or keep a higher amount of things. That is how I have mine setup.

Wrong sub

The link says it is a pre-release.

KMail isn’t available on flathub, so the only way you would see it in discover is if you have done what everyone is telling you not to do on arch. You need to uninstall all of the packagekit dependices. Then you will be able to use discover safely and only install flatpaks.

What tablet if you don’t mind me asking?

Honestly, I would say it isn’t great for anyone who has to do something low level even once. Now that there are open source nvidia kernel drivers that has solved a pretty big issue for most people who would be interested in immutable distros, but there are still many other drivers and issues that your regular user may face.

One example off the top of my head is that flatpaks specifically can’t ship systemd services if I recall correctly. A lot of wayland apps for thigns like input have to use daemons because of wayland’s security model. Lact for AMD and now Nvidia GPU control, ydotool, or even gui versions of such tools for remapping input.

Snaps require custom kernel modules that aren’t used outside of ubuntu, so I hesitate to trust them regardless of any of the other issues people have with them.

This basically leaves appimages which aren’t available for everything and don’t always seem to work at least not as reliably as flatpak. I even tried to package the rstudio forensic software as an appimage myself, so I could have an easy way to use that proprietary piece of software, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get it to work with distrobox either using the official methods they provide to install it on linux. I did get it working in a chroot for some reason, but it had graphical issues. In the end, I made a PKGBUILD for arch and got it working that way.

The point of all this is that a lot of times people say immutable is great for average, non tech savvy people, but I believe that literally everybody ends up needing to do low level stuff at least once or twice every so often. Which simply isn’t a great experience since you end up having to do layering which throws these theoretical average users right back into the normal complexity of a mutable system, but with even more uncertainty in my opinion.

Now then with all of these caveats. I do still agree that immutable distros are great for the aforementioned group of people and I know this statement contradicts a lot of what I have described above. The reason why I think they are great for the less tech savvy people however isn’t because of any actual technical merit of the systems design though. Immutable distros are great for people like Linus Sebastion because it limits what they can do. You simply have to accept what is there the same way that you have to on proprietary systems like Mac and Windows. Those systems force you to do things a certain way unlike Linux and that is what people like Linus need because they have no business mucking around with the system to begin with.

Lastly, all of this only works because devices like the Steam Deck are being run on specific hardware thus guaranteeing there compatibility. This is what we ultimately need. There would be much less need for low level operations to get drivers or change settings to make wifi or audio work right on a billion different devices if these people were buying linux compatible hardware in the first place.