Hi, Via Discover I installed the Flatpak Calibre.
When I start C, then in the taskmanager I see short the Calibre icon and a W icon. Some secs later C icon disappears and only the W icon is visible. C is ok as far as I can see.
What is the meaning of that W?
Can I get the Calibre icon back?
I have a Calibre icon, but I installed via repos, not flatpak… currently 8.7.0.1 (awaiting the latest update to 8.8).
I think this is an issue with Flatpak’s sandboxing and Wayland… was there a specific reason that you installed the Flatpak? That’s surely why you get the ‘fallback’ icon.
On X11, even sandboxed apps could find loopholes/legacy methods to show the icon directly, but in Wayland, the portal is mandatory; if it fails, there’s no fallback.
To fix it, you need the correct portal xdg-desktop-portal-kde . You can check also with echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP which should tell you you’re on KDE/Plasma.
You can also hack it with this:
flatpak run --env=XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE com.calibre_ebook.calibre
Overall, this is just one of the things that drew me to a rolling distribution… repos are updated negating the need for most flatpaks.
Hi Ben, Thanks. On the Fedora forum I got the solution to install the NL packs. So I deleted the flatpak and reinstalled the individual LibreOffice parts. I am ok now.
What are the differences between flatpak and the repos (as you call them). For what I know:
Flatpaks are safer because the software is a installation on its own, not depending on other/earlier libraries installed.
Flatpaks are therefore larger.
Maybe repos are updated more frequently?
So much debate about this topic - but you’re vastly oversimplifying the ‘safety’ aspect… also, I’m bored with folks who evangelise on the subject because basically it’s more sensible to make individual decisions for how best to install an application according to individual circumstances.
Whilst Flatpaks can bundle their own dependencies, this also means bloat - you probably already have all the dependencies you need in your main system, so Flatpak will now duplicate those. This works well with ‘Stable’ distributions where the dependencies and software/repositories are generally quite outdated… so hundreds of MB vs tens of MB for an installation in many cases.
With a distribution like Linux Mint, I remember problems with ‘dependency hell’ and so Flatpaks can avoid that.
With traditional repos (apt, dnf, pacman) the software runs with your environment variables and permissions - integrated into the system.
But the sandboxing is often leaky, or even disabled - and a file manager (like Calibre) NEEDS ACCESS TO YOUR FILES.
Maintainers of distributions make sure that repository software is safe - critical security patches and no issues with integration.
Calibre would update much slower on Linux Mint - but on Manjaro, the repository keeps good pace.. so if you’re running a rolling distribution, I’d vote repositories are the best.
It’s about tradeoffs:
Flatpak can be much larger bundling libraries.
Integration is better with repos, and STABILITY is also best from repositories.
However, Flatpak might be slightly newer - I sometimes see a notification that an update is available a couple of days before I get it via pacman.
Overall, Flatpak might be better for proprietary software, or software you don’t trust… otherwise I see no real advantage. It’s designed (at a cost) to make a single package work everywhere… and that comes at a price. It’s good if you can’t install from the repo.
Neither is universally better - the arguments around them are usually over-extending the benefits that ‘Bob’ had with his ‘proprietary image editor’ and would have no similar benefit for Calibre.
I’m not sure how easy it would be to manage other stuff with the Flatpak - with a traditional install, it’s trivial to visit folders and find plugins and stuff - maybe even just download plugin files to the folder for them to work… not sure how easy that is with the Flatpak.
I highly recommend installing Calibre from Fedora’s native repo (dnf install) to give the best balance of performance, integration and stability for a Fedora system.
I had Calibre installed (on Manjaro) for about 8 years, and it has never missed a beat… it also runs happily in the tray; handles multiple libraries, no problems moving (whilst simultaneously re-formatting) an ‘epub’ book to my Kindle (as an AZW3)…
The maintainer (Kovid) is also very well known, respected, and trustworthy… in case you weren’t aware, he also develops Kitty terminal which is a nice companion to Konsole on plasma.