Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I use both GNOME and KDE. I do have a system tray, but it’s for a single program: fcitx-mozc. If I didn’t need to build ibus-mozc from source, I would just use that. iBus IMEs get their own spot in the top right without needing appindicators. That being said, I don’t need the system tray either as I can just switch between Japanese and English with CTRL+SPACE. But it’s nice to have some kind of constant indication what IME I’m using.

On the subject of a dock, though, I love the way GNOME completely separates it from the workspace. It just takes up space and I don’t have any utility for it. Windows and macOS only allow you to hide the dock; not remove it completely. I’ve accidentally opened the dock by moving my cursor to the corner of the screen way too many times and it is sooo annoying. This never happens on GNOME because it’s just not possible.

Also I tend to think it’s been designed for people who are more comfortable using a keyboard. I’m mostly a mouse person.

That’s absolutely true, but you can navigate GNOME completely with a mouse. If you’re on a laptop, you can use the trackpad to flick between workspaces with three fingers. Every aspect of the GNOME desktop is navigable with the mouse, including the Activity Overview. GNOME’s workflow changed the way I use computers.

One thing I miss from KDE is GNOME’s tiling. KDE’s is far more inconsistent. But there are a lot of things I like more about KDE too. I use it in basically the same way as GNOME.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I wonder if the same is going to be true of Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually requires you use Mercurial to contribute at all, rather than managing both git and Mercurial.

That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Aussies tend to be quite direct. It’s basically our natural state. I get how it can be perceived as hostile, but I don’t actually think Brodie is very abrasive. He seems like a pretty relaxed guy.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I don’t doubt it, but this is a good place to start.

This claim has interesting phrasing:

Adding X11 sandboxing via a nested X11 server, such as Xpra, would not be difficult, but Flatpak developers refuse to acknowledge this and continue to claim, “X11 is impossible to secure”.

If you look at the GNOME post, you’ll see they haven’t argued against including a nested X server at all:

Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure.

I’m not saying they haven’t refused to acknowledge this elsewhere, but it’s strange to point to this blog post which acknowledges that the sandbox is very much a work-in-progress and agrees with Madaidan that X11 is hard to secure.

Does Xpra provide better sandboxing than XWayland? If not, I think the Flatpak developer’s solution to this is: just use Wayland. And obviously, there’s plenty of room to improve with the permissions Flatpak does offer.

I did some searching on the Flatpak Github for issues and found that you can actually use Xpra with Flatpak, and the answer is “just use Wayland”:

• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3833
• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3684

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This is also concerning:

As odd as this may sound, you should not enable (blind) unattended updates of Flatpak packages. If you or a Flatpak frontend (app store) simply executes flatpak update -y, Flatpaks will be automatically granted any new permissions declared upstream without notifying you. Using automatic update with GNOME Software is fine, as it does not automatically update Flatpaks with permission changes and notifies the user instead.

Source: privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#…

It’s great that GNOME Software notifies you when permissions change! I don’t use Flatpak enough to know, but I hope flatpak update notifies you too if you don’t use the -y option.