For example, I’m using Debian, and I think we could learn a thing or two from Mint about how to make it “friendlier” for new users. I often see Mint recommended to new users, but rarely Debian, which has a goal to be “the universal operating system”.
I also think we could learn website design from… looks at notes …everyone else.
All distros, or none: flatpak has to improve in regards to launching an app from terminal. Following is a joke:
Why can’t the installation create aliases like
flatpak run jellyfin-media-player? And then highlight conflicts during?It would also be nice if it could alias to the normal command, for example, LibreOffice with CLI commands like lowriter or localc.
Did you know you can evoke LibreOffice from the terminal to convert one file format to another? It can do what Pandoc does, but also works on old .doc files. Flatpak’s weird CLI behavior makes it difficult to use though.
Ask the devs. I haven’t bothered asking so far. There’s fp https://github.com/DLopezJr/fp but I don’t like workaround if it’s easily fixed upstream and it’s not like they wouldn’t know that it’s bullshit. Maybe they can’t decide upon a solution. Or are waiting for another important and relevant update.
Edit: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/994
This is extremely simple to fix with scripts that can be automatically created on install time. Here is a quick script I just wrote. It will search for first matching app and run it. Just save the script as flatrun, give it executable bit and put it into $PATH. Run it as like this:
flatrun freetube#!/usr/bin/env bash # flatrun e # flatrun freetube if [ "${#}" -eq 0 ]; then flatpak list --app --columns=name,application else app="$( flatpak list --app --columns=name,application | grep -i -F "${@}" | awk -F'\t' '{print $2}' )" if [ -z "${app}" ]; then flatpak list --app --columns=name,application elif [[ "$(echo "${app}" | wc -l)" -gt 1 ]]; then echo "${app}" else flatpak run "${app}" fi fiEdit: Just updated the script to output the list of matching apps, if it matches more than one.
That’s super. Thanks for sharing.
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
However in the same way, compromised flatpak app can also put a malicious .desktop file in
~/.share/applications, which also allows execution of arbitrary command, even outside of the flatpak sandbox.User home permission is just incredibly dangerous on linux, I think we need special permission to explicitly allow access to these folders in home. Fortunately more and more app starts to support portal, which makes them much more secure.
Although, I do wish portal would have a access per session vs access forever option. For now if you open a folder through portal, the app was granted r/w permission to that folder forever.
You can use
/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-playerinstead. and then create aliases or symlinks (for example in ~/bin/) for that.@lemmyreader @barbara it’s a bit annoying but I kinda like that I have to manually link it a bit. So I create sh scripts in the usr/local/bin that just execute the flatpak run command
Wow I was not aware of that folder! Thanks.
https://github.com/boredsquirrel/flatalias
Or my PR for that, that makes aliases on every login. I just have to fix it to work with user flatpaks as well: https://github.com/bjoern-tantau/flatalias/tree/patch-1
you’re missing a directory from your PATH if you have to do that. flatpak Has friendly names
You can create a alisis
There’s a reason security people don’t use flatpak, but that’s not it.