Do not disassemble.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It’s Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

    To be fair, I don’t have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.




  • It was mostly rhetorical. There’s no way to know that you want the application to have extra access to some folder needed for your theme. That’s the exact kind of thing that would be better handled on a user-input level. You applied your theme, you notice that it is broken with the app, you apply the new expanded permissions to get it to work with your theme.



  • I can’t say with any specifics but flatpaks are sandboxed on purpose, when you override something you’re giving it more (or less) permissions than the developer thought they’d need. “Automatically giving permissions the developer didn’t think they’d need” seems like a crazy thing to try to automate, no?

    Check out Flatseal if you haven’t already. It’s a GUI for flatpak permissions. Might make your life easier in the future.



  • I’m sure it does to some degree, though I don’t know if it’s enough to matter on modern computers, and isn’t that what flatpak does, too? (duplicating dependencies)

    In any event, if you don’t need an application from a specific distro there’s no reason to create that container. The non-ubuntu ones get created when they’re needed. (And I think the next version of VanillaOS will be debian-based, not ubuntu; in case that matters.)





  • I somewhat recently ran across VanillaOS, which I have only really had time to install and play around with for a few minutes, but it seems really cool. A very brief overview is that it is a sort-of-but-not-really immutable OS that leans very heavily on containerization to allow you to install packages from any other distro in a seamless-to-the-user way. So you can install an application (cli or GUI) from an ubuntu repo and use it along side an application from an arch repo. It’s ubuntu-based, but according to the info on that link, the next release switches to being debian-based.

    I mostly use ChromeOS these days-- well, I guess technically I mostly use SteamOS these days-- so I don’t have a lot of hands-on experience with VanillaOS, but I found the concept really cool and from a few minutes of playing around with it, it seemed to work pretty well with respect to the containerization stuff.