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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • To everyone saying you can’t mirror a flatpak repo… you’re absolutely right. There should be a far easier way to set up your own mirror without needing to build everything from scratch. That being said, if you wanted to try to make your own repo with every one of flathub’s apps, here you go:

    https://github.com/flathub

    https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

    Edit: Some did get a flathub mirror working. The issue is that a. Fastly works good enough and b. There is no concept of “packages” on the server side. It’s just one big addressed content store because of ostree, and syncing is apparently difficult? Idk, not being able to sync the state of content is like the entire point of ostree…

    https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/813



  • Am I wrong in assuming that both OS’s should be sharing the EFI and /boot partitions?

    Shared ESP is fine as long as you don’t run out of space. Nothing in /boot should conflict but that’s not guaranteed, although having 2 potential boot partitions means having 2 potential grub configs. I’d make sda3 a ~2GB ext4 boot partition just for Fedora (mounted at /boot), and an sda5 with btrfs with a home subvolume mounted at /home, and a root subvolume mounted at /, then mount sda1 at /boot/efi (this is the default layout iirc, albeit with different partitions, ofc). This might be easier to do in the advanced blivet gui.

    And yes, Linux’s boot process is a convoluted, fragile mess and there are currently multiple ongoing discussions on how to improve it.


  • So you want to build something like apko (alpine packages/repos, used in chainguard’s images) or rules_oci (used in google’s Debian-based distroless images) but for portage?

    I think it’d be cool. Just keep in mind:

    1. Container scanning tools (like trivy), afaik, tend to look for a package db. Going distroless breaks them. I believe this is why chainguard generates a SBOM (software bill of materials).
    2. Container images are already de-duplicated, and often, the gains in pull times aren’t worth the additional debugging effort (for example, you won’t be able to have dig/curl installed without rebuilding and deploying the whole image, or even a bash prompt in most cases). They’re even more not worth it because lazily pulling OCI images is now a thing, though it’s in its infancy. See: eStargz and I believe dragonfly which uses nydus. More generally though, zstd:chunked will probably eventually become mainstream and default, which will all but eliminate the need for “minimal” starting images.
    3. If you wanted to go really small, there’s stuff like slim which makes tailor made images.
    4. Gentoo, afaik, doesn’t really do LTS releases, making it undesirable for server use, which is the main place containers are.
    5. Distroless containers don’t share common base images because they are normally scratch-built. This breaks image deduplication, leading to increased disk usage instead of decreased disk usage, and why I personally swapped off chainguard’s images.



  • So basically ostree deploy fails if you have an existing populated ESP (EFI System Partition), so you’ll have to partition manually atm (in my case, I just made another ESP on the same disk). Other than that, I haven’t run into any problems with Win11 + Fedora on the same disk, mostly because I don’t boot into windows.

    You can read about the issue here: https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284

    Here’s the docs on manual partitioning: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation/#manual-partition

    It’s definitely a pain. One of many papercuts you’ll find with an “emerging” desktop edition on a distro already known to push new stuff before the Linux ecosystem is ready.

    Just be sure to make a backup of your windows data in a separate disk, keep boot drives for normal fedora (in case this ends up being too difficult), windows (in case you give up), and Fedora Kinoite (because duh), and ffs, don’t trust ChatGPT with your sensitive data on your main PC :)




  • Go for FreeBSD: this might require a learning curve, because this is an OS I’ve never used. Are commands that different from debian?

    Both of them are, at the very least, unix-like, so the core command set is mostly the same, albeit with sometimes large functional differences.

    Simply install debian 12.5 again, the easiest choice.

    You are familiar with Debian. This is probably the choice I’d go with.

    Kernels are also updated more often than with debian as far as I know.

    That’s why Debian has backports.



  • This is a great start, but tbh, I’m not fully sold on “verified” flathub apps. Verification requires a token to be placed into a source repo or a website, but there appears to be nothing on actually verifying that the source/site are the original creators. So, for example, if someone packaged a malicious version of librefox and established it under io.github.librewolf-community instead of the canonical io.gitlab.librewolf-community, I’m concerned it’ll still show as verified (though quickly removed). The process can be read about here.




  • Yes, all their images are purposefully normal fedora atomic images with stuff tacked on top. Some of that stuff comes in just scripts to make management a bit easier, some of it comes in the form of utilities like distrobox. They also come with zfs or proprietary Nvidia drivers or other things so you don’t have to manage them yourself, alongside tailscale and rpmfusion for nonfree stuff (like codecs). Some of them also have some light configurations, some of them have heavier configurations (especially in the case of bazzite).

    You can totally do everything ublue does from a stock Fedora atomic image. Ublue just makes it a little more convenient. A sort of “oh, well I was going to do that anyway”.

    Here’s the base dockerfile. As you can see, it confirms all of the above.




  • It wouldn’t be too difficult(tm) to fork their kernel and make custom configs of it. Here’s the git repo that holds their rpms and their respective kernel configs, it’s just that nobody has cared enough to create/propose “slimmed down” specialized kernel images: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/kernel/tree/rawhide You can just clone the repo and point COPR to it, then automatically build custom kernels.

    Awhile ago there was a proposal to move the x86 microarchitecture level. Here’s recent discussion on that proposal: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/what-happened-to-bumping-the-minimum-supported-architecture-from-x86-64-to-x86-64-v2/96787/2

    In general, though, Fedora would not want to leave any users behind. Instead, the proposal for hwcaps is currently being drafted: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3151 With hwcaps, default installs will be x86_64 v1, but will be upgraded to “optimized” packages if available upon updating. This makes packaging a bit awkward, though. Packagers already need to maintain packages for multiple versions of the distro. In fact, they need to support F38, F39, F40, and rawhide atm. Needing to maintain an extra 3 builds for each package on top of x86, x64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x is a bit of a burden, so success might be limited.

    Distrobox, while feature-rich, is still a bit hacky (though it’s still more reliable in my experience than toolbx). You’re not the first to want this, though: https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/440


  • I’d really like it if Fedora didn’t discourage packaging static libs, but still discouraged building packages with static libs. It’d be nice to have them for development purposes.

    I also wish they made “third party” software a bit easier to access in their installer and distro as a whole. The option to enable Nvidia drivers is buried, and even though flathub is now unrestricted when toggled in the installer, it’s not the first priority when prompted for software to install in gnome software.

    A longer support cycle with less releases would also be nice, but would defeat the purpose of the distro. I guess it’d make more sense if CentOS Stream released more frequently and with more packages available in EPEL, similar to Ubuntu.


  • It’d be dangerous if an installed app claimed to be something like sudo or bash. Even if a mechanism was created for flatpak apps to claim a single shell command, there is no centralized authority on all flatpak apps to vet them. If there was for flathub, and each uploaded package was checked, that still leaves every other non-flathub flatpak repo which must implement the same vetting. Because there’s no way to guarantee to do it safely, and because flatpak devs are unwilling to compromise, this is just what we get.

    https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1188