Episode 424 Show Notes

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Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 424!

This is Episode 424.5!

Recorded on Sunday, October 29, 2023

They let me back in here, so I’m Moss; Chillin like a villain im Joe; making “doing nothing” into an art-form, I’m Bill

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Mint Monthly News; Ubuntu 23.10 re-released; GNOME gets new CEO; new RaspPi Imager released; Plasma 6 Release Dates released; Matrix reaches 115 Million users; Bodhi Linux 7.0 AppPack released;
  • In security and privacy: BlackCat ransomware attacks Linux and VMs; 1Password Breach – no harm, no foul; new vulnerabilities found and patched in XWayland, X.org;
  • Then in our Wanderings: Bill shuffles cards; Joe tests more things; Moss keeps busy
  • In our Innards section:
    • We discuss containerized package systems
  • And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

— Play News Transition Bumper —

The News

20 minutes

  • Mint Monthly News – October 2023
    • from the Linux Mint blog (via Londoner)
    • Clem starts off by telling us why the Debian unstable repo is called Sid, and why the Mint unstable repo is called Romeo because each release of Mint has her Romeo which can potentially break her heart. Going forward Romeo will be used to push new features and the changes being workied on in preparation for the next release. This will allow alpha-testers to run unstable versions of Cinnamon, Xapp, Mint tools etc.. without having to compile anything. It will also replace the unstable PPA.
    • New features were added to Hypnotix, the TV viewer application, in preparation for the Linux Mint 21.3 release this Christmas. Channels will be able to be saved as favorites. To ensure Youtube channels continue to work when the yt-dlp package is outdated the ability for Hypnotix to download and update its own local version of yt-dlp has been added.
    • Work has started on Wayland. As mentioned earlier this year, this was identified as one of the major challenges the project had to tackle in the mid to long term. Priority had been given to ISO tools and Secureboot over new features for 21.3 already, and it was felt it was time to invest some resources into Wayland as well. A screenshoot of Cinnamon running in Wayland is shown in the blog post.
    • Cinnamon 6.0, planned for Mint 21.3 this year, will feature experimental Wayland support. You’ll be able to select between Cinnamon (the default session, running on Xorg) and Cinnamon on Wayland from the login screen. Many features are still missing so Wayland is not expected to become the default (instead of X11) until Mint 23 in mid 2026. That leaves 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues.
  • Ubuntu 23.10 Desktop ISOs Re-Released Following Translation Snafu Joe
    • from Phoronix
    • Hours after Ubuntu 23.10 was released last Thursday it was discovered Ubuntu 23.10 ISOs contained malicious user translations for those using the Ukrainian translations within the Ubuntu Linux desktop installer. Canonical suspended the desktop ISOs until the translations could be fixed and ISOs re-spun. That’s now happened and this afternoon Ubuntu 23.10 images are back online.
    • The affected Ubuntu 23.10 desktop ISOs from last week’s translation incident have now been corrected and are back online.
    • Those wanting to download the Ubuntu 23.10 desktop ISO can do so via Ubuntu.com.
    • Ubuntu 23.10 is a great upgrade with Linux 6.5 + Mesa 23.2 + GCC 13.2 powering the system, GNOME 45 being the basis of the Ubuntu desktop, a wealth of other package updates, ZFS root file-system support added to the new desktop installer, and many other package updates. It’s a great step before Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due out in the spring.
  • GNOME Foundation Welcomes Holly Million as Executive Director Bill
    • from GNOME Foundation blog
    • GNOME Foundation welcomed Holly Million as the new Executive Director. Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing.
    • Holly brings three decades of invaluable experience in nonprofit management, having served as a consultant, director of development, executive director, and board member for numerous organizations. Notably, she founded the nonprofit organization Artists United, dedicated to empowering individual artists and fostering collaboration across artistic disciplines for the collective good. Additionally, Holly served as the Executive Director of the BioBricks Foundation, an international, open-source biotechnology nonprofit.
    • Holly holds a Master of Arts in Education from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard University. Her academic background, combined with her extensive professional journey, equips her with a unique perspective that will undoubtedly contribute to the growth and success of the GNOME Foundation.
  • Raspberry Pi Imager Gets New Tabbed OS Customization UI, Raspberry Pi 5 Support Joe
    • from 9to5 Linux
    • Raspberry Pi Imager 1.8.1 has been released today as the latest stable version of this official image flashing utility for Raspberry Pi single-board computers that adds new features and improvements, support for the latest Raspberry Pi 5 model, and more.
    • The biggest change in the Raspberry Pi Imager 1.8.1 release is the rename of the Advanced Options feature (accessed using the Ctrl+Shift+X keyboard shortcut) to OS Customization, which is now available as a tabbed UI in the application rather than listing all the options in a single window where you had to scroll the view.
    • Raspberry Pi Imager 1.8.1 also introduces a new Home screen with a new mechanism for selecting the Raspberry Pi device, along with support for Raspberry Pi 5. This is an extra step when flashing a new OS image on an SD card, but it’s very useful for writing the right operating system for your Raspberry Pi device.
    • Another exciting change in Raspberry Pi Imager 1.8.1 is the ability to drag and drop image files into the application for flashing. Moreover, the new version adds support for parsing the uncompressed size of local .xz files to provide you with better progress reports when flashing an image.
    • You can download Raspberry Pi Imager 1.8.1 right now from the official website or from the project’s GitHub page.
  • KDE Plasma 6.0 Release Date Revealed Moss
    • from OMGUbuntu
    • KDE Plasma 6.0, the next major release of the phenomenally popular open-source desktop environment, is under rapid development.
    • An official release schedule has been unveiled and it pins down the precise release date for KDE Plasma 6.0 – plus many of the related technology stacks paired with it.
    • In fact, there are so many package releases happening at the same time that devs are dubbing this the MEGA RELEASE (so please apply a suitably epic vocal sound effect when reading that name aloud in your head).
    • Key dates in the KDE Plasma 6 release schedule:
      • 8 November, 2023 — Alpha
      • 29 November, 2023 — Beta 1
      • 20 December, 2023 — Beta 2
      • 10 January, 2024 — Release Candidate 1
      • 31 January, 2024 — Release Candidate 2
    • Btw, all of these dates include KDE Gear and KDE Framework snapshots alongside KDE Plasma.
    • Things get officially official during the private tarball release taking place on 21 February 2024, which is followed a week later by the main event, the real-deal, the epic emergence, the first stable release:
      • 28 February, 2024 – KDE Plasma 6.0 Release
    • Of course, it should be stressed that last-minute bugs, unexpected issues, or imploding infrastructure, etc., could intervene at any juncture and push these dates out — so don’t take them as sacrosanct deadlines.
  • Raspberry Pi 5 Available Now Joe
    • from Raspberry Pi News
    • Three weeks ago, the latest generation of the Raspberry Pi 5 was unveiled. Since then, they’ve shared insights into the overall architecture of the platform, the RP1 I/O controller, the software stack, the image signal processor, and some of the official accessories, including the case, and the forthcoming updated PoE+ HAT.
    • Behind the scenes, they’ve been working hard with their friends at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Wales (where your Pi is baked) to ramp up the manufacturing and production test processes. Things have gone a little faster than expected, and they’re happy to announce that the first mass-production units will ship to customers this week, starting with subscribers to The MagPi and HackSpace magazines, who have taken advantage of the Priority Boarding promotion.
    • All existing Priority Boarding orders have shipped, and every Approved Reseller in a country where our compliance paperwork has been signed off by the authorities will have received initial stock of both 4GB and 8GB variants, so those of you who have pre-ordered will start to see parcels arriving in your mailboxes. They are continuing to increase our production rate, with the aim of fulfilling all backorders, and getting Raspberry Pi in stock at all our Approved Resellers, by the end of the year – by then, you should be able to just buy one straight off the shelf.
  • Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users Bill
    • from Bleeping Computer
    • The team behind the Matrix open standard and real-time communication protocol has announced the release of its second major version, bringing end-to-end encryption to group VoIP, faster loading times, and more.
    • Additionally, the Synapse open-source Matrix homeserver’s opt-in usage reporting indicates that unique matrix IDs on the public network have surpassed 115 million, indicating massive growth of the protocol.
    • This growth is nearly doubled from its 60 million users in July 2022, which by itself marked a 79% increase from the summer of 2021.
    • “The Matrix ecosystem is thriving,” stated the foundation’s technical co-founder, Matthew Hodgson, in a press release sent to BleepingComputer.
    • “More and more Matrix-based products and services are coming to market in response to rapid growth at every level; from governments and major public sector organizations to enterprises, businesses and everyday people.”
    • You can read about Matrix 2.0’s new features at the article linked in the show notes.
  • Bodhi 7.0 64-bit AppPack Released Moss
    • from Bodhi Forums
    • The Bodhi Team is pleased to announce our much-requested release of The App Pack version Bodhi Linux 7.0, derived from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) base. This release is 64-bit only.
    • The latest ISOs can be downloaded from Sourceforge.
    • A list of the pre-installed applications can be found at the Bodhi Wiki

— Play Security Transition Bumper —

Security and Privacy

10 minutes

  • BlackCat ransomware uses new ‘Munchkin’ Linux VM in stealthy attacks Moss
    • from Bleeping Computer
    • The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware operation has begun to use a new tool named ‘Munchkin’ that utilizes virtual machines to deploy encryptors on network devices stealthily.
    • Manchkin enables BlackCat to run on remote systems or encrypt remote Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet File (CIFS) network shares.
    • The introduction of Munchkin to BlackCat’s already extensive and advanced arsenal makes the RaaS more attractive to cybercriminals seeking to become ransomware affiliates.
    • Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has discovered that BlackCat’s new Munchkin tool is a customized Alpine OS Linux distribution that comes as an ISO file.
    • After compromising a device, the threat actors install VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine using the Munchkin ISO.
    • This Munchkin virtual machine includes a suite of scripts and utilities that allow the threat actors to dump passwords, spread laterally on the network, build a BlackCat ‘Sphynx’ encryptor payload, and execute programs on network computers.
    • Upon boot, it changes the root password to one known only by the attackers and leverages the ‘tmux’ utility to execute a Rust-based malware binary named ‘controller’ that begins to load scripts used in the attack.
    • BlackCat emerged in late 2021 as a sophisticated Rust-based ransomware operation as the successor to BlackMatter and Darkside.
    • The RaaS has followed a successful trajectory thus far, regularly introducing advanced features like highly configurable intermittent encryption, data leak API, Impacket and Remcom embedding, encryptors with support for custom credentials, signed kernel drivers, and upgrades on the data exfiltration tool.
    • Notable BlackCat victims in 2023 include the Florida Circuit Court, MGM Resorts, Motel One, Seiko, Estee Lauder, HWL Ebsworth, Western Digital, and Constellation Software.
    • More information and harmful scripts can be found at the link in the show notes.
  • Okta Support System incident and 1Password Bill
    • from 1Password blog
    • Suspicious activity was detected by 1Password on their Okta instance related to their Support System incident. After a thorough investigation, they concluded that no 1Password user data was accessed.
    • On September 29, we detected suspicious activity on the Okta instance that is used to manage employee-facing apps. They immediately terminated the activity, investigated, and found no compromise of user data or other sensitive systems, either employee-facing or user-facing.
    • Since then, they’ve been working with Okta to determine the initial vector of compromise. As of late Friday, October 20, this was confirmed as a result of Okta’s Support System breach.
  • XWayland & X.Org Server See New Releases Due To Three More Security Vulnerabilities Joe
    • from Phoronix, by Michael Larabel
    • The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed.
    • October began with new X.Org security vulnerabilities, two of which dated back to the year 1988. Now as we approach the end of October, three more vulnerabilities have been made public.
    • CVE-2023-5367 is an out-of-bounds write within the XIChangeDeviceProperty/ RRChangeOutputProperty where memcpy() can end up writing into memory outside of the heap-allocated array. CVE-2023-5380 is for a use-after-free within DestroyWindow. The latter vulnerability only affects multi-monitor “Zaphod” mode setups. The third is CVE-2023-5574 and is another use-after-free bug, this time within DamageDestroy and also affecting multi-head Zaphod mode setups.
    • X.Org Server 21.1.9 and XWayland 23.2.2 were released today with the X.Org patches to address these out-of-bounds and use-after-free errors. These three CVEs come as a result of the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative where they have also uncovered many other X.Org vulnerabilities over prior years.
    • More details on today’s updates via this X.Org Security Advisory.

— Play Wanderings Transition Bumper —

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Joe
    • I put the new 4020 fan on the front of the hot end on my 3D printer. The old one was starting to make a grinding sound. I have put the barrel connector on there for quicker replacements in the future and I like how it has turned out. I do need to do some more cable management just to make things neater but it is working well and I can’t complain.
    • I have not replaced the other fan yet since it is still a pretty new 4010 and is working well and I think that with the larger 4020 I would have to redo my settings again and reduce the speed even more.
    • I also notice that the passive sound of the new fan is a lot more that the old one. Now we get to see how long it lasts. Hopefully next time I can get a Noctua or another silent fan model and see how well that works.
    • I know I was talking last time about modding a ATH-M50 and I have started doing that. I put on the modded ear cups which make them more comfortable to wear and increases the sound stage. I also added a couple of port holes to the closed back to allow for more movement. I am still working on adding Bluetooth to it. I think I want to do it in a non invasive way unless I want to work on another one as well.
    • I also had to reprint my foot pedal that I use with my USB switcher. I thought about redesigning it again and seeing if I could bulk up the portion that broke but I think that I will try another method that I have seen and see if it strengthens the plastic noticeably. I am simply going to coat the problem area of the part in super glue and see if it lasts longer. I can always redo the design later.
    • Adding the glue did make it feel sturdier. But now lets see if it lasts more than 6 months.
    • Chrome remote desktop started randomly working again. I was testing out alternatives and I looked and could see that one of my computers was still reachable. Some changes had been made in that I could no longer choose a screen size that would match my phone and look good. This is not as much of a problem when I am hooked up to a large screen and using DEX but it is very noticeable on my phone screen alone.
    • By alternatives I was thinking about the method that I use to have a second screen for my mini laptop, the OneGx. It is over the network and I can set the screen size to whatever I choose. The only thing that I would have to do after I add the virtual screen is shut down the main screen. I am not sure how well this will work from a remote location as I have only used this over the local network.
    • I also wanted to test out using a tablet to mirror the screen of my phone. I don’t think that it would be all that useful but I think that it could be fun. I could not find any applications that did it well and allowed me to control the phone from the tablet. There should be something out there to do this easily but I have not found it yet.
    • I started using Droidcam again because I am lazy and did not want to keep moving my camera back and forth. I mention it because I had some trouble setting it up at first. You still need to load the drivers for v4l2loopback but if you try to connect from the computer to the phone then it will throw an error and not connect. You instead need to set it to receive and then go to the phone and tell it to connect to the computer and that works fine.
  • Moss
    • I’ve been keeping busy with school and trying to keep my life together.
    • I almost bought a piece of property, but fell $1,100 short. It still may be available later, but for now we are concentrating on my wife’s upcoming knee surgery, which could also cost us thousands even with her insurance.
    • Nothing new broke.
    • Distrohoppers’ Digest got off without a hitch. It was a great episode.
    • I’m current on Full Circle Weekly News.
  • Bill
    • Well in the last two weeks I’ve not done much, except replace the power supply in my HP TP-01 from the factory installed 180W device to an upgraded 400W replacement. This new power supply offers the added 6 prong wire to power the new Radeon Pro WX7100 I purchased. The upgraded video card needs the power allowed it through the PCie x16 port it’s plugged into, in addition to the 6 pin plug coming directly from the power supply. This new video card is a huge improvement from the AMD FirePro w5100 I was using previously given it’s ability to encode x264 and HEVC video relieving that duty from the CPU which was doing it before. This is especially useful when I’m recording the shows and doing live-streaming. My CPU usage has gone down from about an average of 40% on 16 threads to less than 5.
    • Since installing the new Radeon Pro card, I’ve been introduced to the idea that the opensource Mesa driver provided by most Linux distibutions doesn’t get you 100% there, in terms of the capabilities. I only stumbled on this realization when I tried to use this card to play Skyrim on Steam. The game sees the card as a premium card and sets all of the defaults to “ultra” the highest setting for graphic rendering. The card winds up, heats up and can barely render the game while using the Mesa stack. I thought I’d go to AMD’s website and see if this is one of the card that has a proprietary driver associated with it – and of course, it does! Now interestingly, I now know why we call the proprietary Nvidia driver a “binary” driver, though we don’t necessarily do the same for the proprietary AMDGPU PRO drivers. This is because what you download from AMD is actually a script that has to be executed with the necessary flags to install and enable certain optional functionality, such as OpenCL. The script adds a PPA to the system, then installs several driver level packages to enable advanced support and professional functionality. I found the documentation on the AMD website to be straight forward for the type of person who would use a card like this, and I got everything working without any problems. I ran GLXGears while using the Mesa stack and got the standard 60 fps, which matches it to the refresh rate of my monitors. After installing the AMDGPU PRO driver, GLXGears reports a mind-numbing 14,000 fps. After some light searching, I see there’s also an AMDGPU PRO driver for the FirePro w5100 I replaced with the new card, which begs the question as to whether or not I was getting even close to the capability of the old card.
    • I’d like to rave on for a few minutes about a project many of us have no doubt heard of, though perhaps haven’t taken the time to try. Ventoy is an open-source project that allows an easy method of having many different bootable ISOs on a USB stick, and an interface similar to a grub screen to choose which ISO you want to boot from. It’s dead simple to set up and so simple to add ISOs to the drive, I was sure I was doing it wrong, which I wasn’t. Ventoy is an excellent tool for the inveterate distro-hopper, but is perfect for someone who wants to try several distros before settling on one full stop. Another, arguably more interesting feature of Ventoy is that it will if enabled, skip the process of checking for the TPM 2.0 module, as well as the requirement of signing in with an online account. I decided to put this functionality to the test while setting up a friend’s HP Compaq Elite 8300 which I would assume without any real research is not capable of running Windows 11 due to the arguably arbitrary requirements of Windows 11. Ventoy installed Windows 11 Pro brilliantly on the machine and it runs perfectly acceptably. The machine receives updates, and is even showing up as “activated” which surprised me even more. So if anyone needs to install Windows 11 on any machine, try Ventoy. You won’t be sorry.

— Play Innards Transition Bumper —

Linux Innards

30 minutes (~5-8 minutes each)

  • Snap, AppImage, Flatpak – Moss
    • We wanted to talk about 3 of the more popular containerized application formats for linux and provide a bit of a comparison for them and discuss what we use and why
    • First in general, why you might want use containerized packages over distro-native packaging formats
      • Portability
        • Containerized applications should be able to run wherever you take them as they should have all of their libraries bundled together
      • Improved Security
        • Containerized applications can be run in isolation from everything else and so are protected and can be isolated from the rest of your system which protects your system called sandboxing
      • potentially faster startup times
      • Can also be easier to manage
      • So as a bit of a summary, containerized application packaging formats pack the dependencies in the same package as the application. Which eliminates conflicts between packages but this full packaging of application and dependencies does come at the cost of using more space.
    • All three support sandboxing but it is mandatory for flatpak, all have native theme support and bundled libraries while flatpak and appimage are fully portable.
    • All three also have an app store and you can have multiple versions installed
    • All of them can do automatic updates though appimage takes a bit more work and a lot of times you just end up downloading the new version and deleting the old one
    • Snaps has the most amount of applications available thanks to Ubuntu/Canonical and Flatpak has the least
  • History – Moss
    • AppImage (from Wikipedia)
      • AppImage’s predecessor klik was designed in 2004 by Simon Peter. The client-side software is GPL-licensed. klik integrated with web browsers on the user’s computer. Users downloaded and installed software by typing a URL beginning with klik://. This downloaded a klik “recipe” file, which was used to generate a .cmg file. For main ingredients, usually pre-built .deb packages from Debian Stable repositories were fed into the recipe’s .cmg generation process. In this way, one recipe could be used to supply packages to a wide variety of platforms. With klik, only eight programs could be run at once because of the limitation of mounting compressed images with the Linux kernel, unless FUSE was used. The file was remounted each time the program is run, meaning the user could remove the program by simply deleting the .cmg file. A next version, klik2, was in development; and would natively incorporate the FUSE kernel module, but it never reached past the beta stage. Around 2011, the klik project went dormant and the homepage went offline for some time.
      • Simon Peter started a successor project named PortableLinuxApps with similar goals around that time. The technology was adapted for instance by the “portablelinuxgames.org” repository, providing hundreds of mostly open-source video games.
      • Around 2013, the software was renamed again from portableLinuxApps to AppImage; the license became the MIT license. AppImage is the format and AppImageKit is a concrete open source implementation. The development happens in a GitHub repository.
    • Flatpak (fron Gnome History)
      • The initial release of Glick, Alexander Larsson’s first application bundling project, was in August 2007. Glick 2 waited until November 2011. Then, in July 2012, “GNOME OS” session was held at GUADEC: a high level discussion of GNOME application developer experience. One outcome was a commitment to plan a new application bundling format.
      • Alex then released an experimental “bundler” framework in September 2012.
      • In January 2013, planning meetings at GNOME Developer Experience hackfest, Brussels, which featured a discussion of “Linux Apps” proposal. In attendance: Colin Walters, Lennart Poettering, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and more. Work was begun on xdg-app in December 2014, and the first commit was on 2014-12-17. The initial xdg-app release was September 2015, followed in March 2016 by the first major xdg-app release. With this release, a full set of tooling and runtimes was made available for the first time.
      • In June 2016, xdg-app was renamed to Flatpak, and flatpak.org was launched. Accompanying press release includes endorsements by Red Hat, Endless Computers and Collabora.
      • In August 2016, Endless OS 3.0 released, the first publicly available OS to use Flatpak by default, and adoption of Flatpak by Apertis IVI became public knowledge.
      • In October 2016, Flatpak 0.6.13 released. This release introduced major command line improvements, automatic checking and installation for runtimes, and capabilities that allow applications that cannot be freely redistributed (like Spotify and Skype) to use Flatpak.
      • In December 2016, Flatpak 0.8.0 was released. This is the beginning of the first stable release series.
      • In March 2017, at the GTK+ hackfest in London, Flatpak plans are made, and the idea of Flathub was discussed. By July 2017, Flathub was up and running!
      • In October 2017, Flatpak 0.10.0 released. This started the second stable release series, considered LTS. Then, in August 2018, Flatpak 1.0.0 was released.
    • Snap (from Linux TLDR and Wikipedia)
      • Canonical (the daddy of Ubuntu) introduced the Snap package management system in 2016 to revolutionize Linux software distribution.
      • Addressing issues like dependency management, version conflict, and security, ultimately enhancing the user experience and simplifying package development for developers.
      • Snap initially only supported the all-Snap Ubuntu Core distribution, but in June 2016, it was ported to a wide range of Linux distributions to become a format for universal Linux packages. Snap requires Systemd which is available in most, but not all, Linux distributions. Other Unix-like systems (e.g. FreeBSD) are not supported. ChromeOS does not support Snap directly, only through Linux distributions installed in it that support Snap, such as Gallium OS.
      • Ubuntu and its official derivatives pre-install Snap by default, as well as other Ubuntu-based distributions such as KDE Neon, Solus, and Zorin OS. While other official Ubuntu derivatives such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu MATE have also shipped with the competing Flatpak as a complement, Canonical will prohibit them from doing so beginning with Ubuntu 23.04, meaning that it must be installed manually by the user.
  • Breakdown – Joe
    • Snaps
      • One thing about the snap applications is that they are all listed in the Snap Store and are the default on OS’s like Ubuntu which means more of them and generally more support for them. Installing them from command line is very similar to how debs are installed from the repo.
    • Flatpak
      • Flatpak is built to be portable and to make it wasy to distribute applications and the command line offers the exact same functionality as deb or rpm. Something interesting about flatpak is that every application is built against a runtime that provides basic dependencies for applications but can have more bundled with the application. So some common libs are shared which helps to reduce size
    • AppImage
      • Appimage is a little different in that there really is no need to do anything from the command line. You get the application executable and check the flags. After that it works similar to a .exe in Windows and Everything that application needs is bundled into the file. I think that makes it great for having your applications on a usb drive that you can take with you anywhere and as long as the system is linux it should work
  • Application packages are always distributed in their compressed form. This helps with the internet bandwidth of distributing the application. When the application is installed on the client side, depending on the package, the package might be stored and run as compressed or decompressed. For example, the Snap packages are always stored and run compressed. Similarly, the AppImage packages are never uncompressed on the client side. Storing and running packages compressed has the added benefit of reduced disk space usage.
  • On the other hand, the Flatpak packages are always decompressed on the client side. This means the Flatpak packages are almost always bigger than both Snap and AppImage packages.
  • As was mentioned earlier sandboxing is an important feature of containerized packages both for security and stability. It means that the applications can be run in isolation and malicious programs will not have an effect on your entire system. Same with malfunctioning applications.
  • By default Flatpaks and Snaps will do sandboxing out of the box but for Appimage it requires a bit more work and the installation of some kind of sandboxing software.

— Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

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10 minutes

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