Mastodawn

Jon S. von Tetzchner

Technical Linux poll:

During the @Vivaldi gathering, we discussed a lot which Linux packages we should offer. We always try to be as flexible as possible and we already offer Linux support on Arm and X86 and we offer both DEB and RPM by default. My question to you is what are you using mainly for your installs?

I am sure some will say that their favorite packages are missing, but I can only list 4...

#Linux #Computer

DEB

43.9%

RPM

18%

Flatpak

32.6%

Snap

5.5%

Poll ended at Jul 3, 2023 at 6:28pm.

Rynn the Cyberwitch

flag_transgender

@jon @Vivaldi If something isn’t available via Pacman or AUR via yum I’ll go to Flatpak as my fallback.

Angelino Desmet Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi
sudo pacman -Syu vivaldi vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs

flatpak and snap are not 'real' package formats. They are not native distro packages but fudges made by developers. Probably as a response to alien between the big two (deb/rpm)

Even canonical/ubuntu were not stupid enough to invent their own package format, choosing the massive .deb archive which already existed. Now, they are becoming insidious with snaps

I am rapidly moving to Manjaro and the pacman packages.

Velocipede Rider Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi .txz or I use the "secret tar packages" that one of the team there made. His name rhymes with Oreo. 😜

https://downloads.vivaldi.com/stable/vivaldi-stable-6.1.3035.111-x64.tar

Lehrerseele Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Oh those listed I mainly use DEB. Yet this is rather rarely, since my distribution is #archlinux.

karldenby Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Using nix, would prefer if whatever is provided is easy for other distros to package.

:dontpanic_nobg:Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi so long as there's source code, I'm happy

and forget flatpak and snaps, they're just a phase distros are going through... 😁

Лафиэль Элентари Jul 2, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi
On my server I use nix package manager and NixOS distributive.
It would be nice to add support for building from source for nix package manager.

Jiří Kuchyňka (Anty)Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Pacman (official or AUR) or Flatpak on both x86-64 and Aarch64. Last time I checked only Firefox had good enough support (in official repos for both architectures).

Since Chromium got partially bricked, it's hard to find a good browser with support for both architectures and mobile (both Android and GNU/Linux mobile)... :/

Wandering Thinker Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi DEB, RPM, portable TAR.GZ (like Librewolf), AppImage.

Jungle George 🌳🌴🌲Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Flatpak is the future 🚀

KeyJ Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Hard +1 for .tar.gz, as that works basically everywhere, and does so without any container nonsense.

blinking_cursor

@jon @Vivaldi .tar.zst aka. pacman

sazaland Jul 3, 2023

I'm a Slackware user so I tend to convert the rpm or deb with rpm2tgz/deb2tgz. These options have the most flexibility: though I can use Flatpak as a last resort, I don't prefer it.

Yahiroz Jul 3, 2023

@jon For ease of use especially for those with Steam Decks, Flatpak would be the most accessible

exitcode Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi I am waiting for Vivaldi Flatpak for a long time

Dave MacFarlane Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi I'm using NixOS, it looks like under the hood it's building based on the .deb, so I guess I should vote for that?

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.05/pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/vivaldi/default.nix#L34

nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/vivaldi/default.nix at nixos-23.05 · NixOS/nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS. Contribute to NixOS/nixpkgs development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

jeremi360 Jul 3, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi Arch

@jon @Vivaldi Honestly, anything but snap.

Yuki "neige d'aout" Hazuki 膤 ❄️

@jon @Vivaldi Flatpak support would be nice for Steam Deck users

duser Jul 4, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi
A little late to the poll here but i have a thought. On fedora, its difficult to set up full hardware video decoding/encoding using the rpm native package. Its due to how the mesa packages were removed from fedora's repos. You need to jump through several hoops to get it working and even then, updating the system sometimes throws errors.
The firefox flatpak has encoding from install. Much simpler.

duser Jul 4, 2023

Personally, i favor flatpaks for this reason. It gives me exactly the experience the devs of an app intended. The advantage for devs is that they have one platform to support that covers most (Linux) platforms.
I remember i had to manually set up encoding for vivaldi when i first installed fedora 36. There may be a group of users still running vivaldi without all its features. Going flatpak may fix that

Chris Hodges Jul 6, 2023

@jon @Vivaldi It sounds like my dislike of snaps isn't just me then. It's strong enough that my next clean install won't be Ubuntu