I don’t use appimages much these days; too many have been broken in the past for various reasons so I skip them, generally speaking.
I won’t use Nix. I don’t feel like learning it.
I use podman for Jellyfin, but that’s what I used before, or Docker, on other machines.
Tailscale is a manual install, via this script mentioned in the docs. Doing this manually is not hard, but I was missing steps I needed to do.
Private Internet Access’ VPN client I manually installed using sysext to see how that worked. This was not really necessary, as the only bits in /usr is the icon and .desktop file, and can go elsewhere.
For MC I used Kontainer but it is not ideal if I forget to create an alias for it and can’t remember the full path when I am connected to that system remotely.
Things to install when I might need them:
Openshot for the random video edit - probably Appimage here as Flatpak is a bit behind on this, or I will just learn Kdenlive if necessary
Timeshift or Btrfs Assistant - probably not necessary but may be handy , and not sure if I need to build from source or use a container doohickey.
Steam and OpenRGB are only relevant when/if I install this on my main daily driver.
Intel Compute things if I ever decide to look at local AI setups on my main PC (Intel Arc B580). Podman is the likely route here.
Unless I explicitly want them sandboxed, lately I have been getting tarballs of web browsers and unpacking them in my home directory. Most browsers will self-update from official sources when deployed like that and I find it very clean. It also eliminates all of the issues with running a browser in a flatpak.
Tailscale, vscode from a tarball because it can self-update and needs integration with the system (link), CLI tools (fish) from nix and gui apps from flathub (Libreoffice, etc.) (KDE Linux should include more apps by default) (edit: and kitty from standalone binary)
By the way, if anyone needs a web app manager try Web App Hub
I’ve been testing it out on my silly AMD A4-9120C based Chromebook with 4GB of ram. I’ve installed everything as a flatpak, such as LibreOffice and Only Office, LibreWolf, Nanosaur (1 and 2), Steam, and some other stuff. I installed both office suites because I wanted to see how Only Office would preform on such a potato. Poorly. I only really use flatpaks anyhow on my regular Fedora systems.
A bit of an aside but man does KDE Linux fly. Its so performant. I’ve tried Debian 13 XFCE on this thing and it was usable, but KDE Linux feels a lot more responsive. Once the stable version comes out I think I’ll probably replace it with Fedora as my daily driver.
Seriously, my more powerful desktop is on Fedora (was on Kinoite, now on vanilla fedora), and my much slower laptop is on KDE Linux, and somehow laptop feels faster
Same lol, my main desktop has a 5950X in it, and somehow my dingus Chromebook feels with in a reasonable distance. I also have a Framework 12, but with the i3 in it, running Fedora Kinoite. I’ll probably wack KDE Linux on there one day but for now its fine as is.
KeepassXC/Brave: Initially installed in distrobox (arch), made them work in flatpaks, but planning to switch back to distrobox because of security reasons. Upgrading my distrobox via arch has some issues so I need to sort it out first.
Emacs/Jetbrains toolbox: distrobox (arch). Don’t think there’s any other alternative (maybe Nix but I couldn’t install nix via devbox since it needs access to /urs/local and it’s immutable)
Kclock: flatpak. Doesn’t wake up my system, but otherwise works. I can see it being a good idea to have it installed by default.
In case of keepassxc I don’t think there is a strong security reason but I want to install it together with a browser, and for browsers flatpak makes internal sandboxing less secure from what I read.
I also made syncthing service work via distrobox so I’m not planning on keeping homebrew and will just get all the CLI tools from distrobox. I wish there was a way to (auto) update distrobox via discover…
Edit: installing stuff from discover in distrobox would also be welcome ofc.
