Helium is great. I love how it focuses on having 0 distractions. No popups, great default settings.

We’ve heard from a lot of developers working on lower level system components that on package-based systems they can easily install niche command line tools for developers.

…However, after some discussions with the Flatpak developers, we have a plan for how to approach the distribution of third-party tools and we’ve already began prototyping. We’ll share more about this soon in a dedicated post.

I hope this system at least shares runtimes with Flatpak or else I will be severely disappointed. I’d be giddy if it’s actually a case of flatpak offiically supporting CLI tools. It already does, and does it well, just missing a tiny bit of plumbing.

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Proton did not claim anything; the CEO of Proton claimed that Republicans (not Trump) would do better on big tech anti-trust.

This view is not that crazy given that the person Trump appointed was doing her job quite well. Too well to the point that Trump removed her from the position later on.

Flatpak aimed from the beginning to be distro-independent, and consequently the Freedesktop SDK isn’t a repackaging of Debian or Fedora or Alpine Linux, but something more like a DIY Linux From Scratch build. As an app user you don’t notice any of this, because it’s very well executed and apps just work. Again, it’s hard now to imagine a parallel universe where the main Flatpak runtime was Fedora in a trenchcoat, but perhaps that would have impeded the success of Flatpak. (Of course Canonical still built their own app store technology, but I suspect that Canonical re-inventing things is part of every parallel universe).

I still find this “distroless” talk funny. There’s so little difference in whether the Freedesktop runtime is built like “Linux From Scratch” or assembled from Fedora packages. Fedora is also assembled like “Linux From Scratch”. At the end of the day, they’re both just taking upstream code and compiling it. Fedora just has an intermediary step of creating a package.

The only practical differences are the release scheduling, support length, and compile flags. In another world, the Freedesktop runtime could literally just be Fedora packages but with different compile flags that are less restrictive in terms of patents/codecs. And it would make almost no difference apart from the support length being different.

They disabled it with flags, but manifest V2 still existed in the code and could be enabled. This is about Google now removing V2 from the code. That will make it harder for third party browsers to include V2, since they would need to patch it back in and develop new patches to keep it working.