Another issue I’ve had with Snaps is just increased boot times. Something to do with mounting all the virtual images involved or something, makes boot take noticeably longer. I’ve tested having an Ubuntu install with Snaps, and then removed the snaps and snapd while installing the same software via Flatpak, and had a noticeable boot time improvement. Hopefully they’ve been working to improve this, but it just soured me on them even more.

As for another install method, mostly for CLI tools, but working with a lot of GUI apps too now, there’s Distrobox. It has a bit of a bloat issue, because you’re basically installing an entire extra headless Linux Distro with it, but it for example allows you to run AUR inside an Arch based Box, and then you can integrate the app you installed with AUR into the host OS, running it near seamlessly, while keeping its dependencies contained in the Box which you can easily remove. By default apps in the Box will have access to the host’s filesystem but you can mitigate this if you want. Distrobox is especially great on atomic read-only Distros, where you can’t directly touch system directories, by allowing you to install apps that expect such access from things like AUR.

A bunch of websites operating as web apps would help explain the bloat. Great idea if somebody is navigating a good chunk of your website. Horrible idea if 99% of your traffic is people being linked to a news article and then leaving afterwards.

Probably, though I encounter the same issue with other office suites too.

The main issue I run into is that even when I use a standard format like ODF, sending a document to someone using a different office suite often leads to various formatting breaking. It’s to the point that if I know the person I’m sending the document to, isn’t going to be editing it, I send it as a PDF.

I felt deceived when Microsoft added ODF file support, only for formatting to still break when exporting/importing from another suite. What was the point if I’d get the same results as loading a DOCX in Libre Office?

They added the Nix directory in SteamOS 3.5 and linked it to the User partition, so now Nix survives SteamOS updates without any workarounds, which is part of why I tried using it.

Yeah, if it wasn’t for my niche needs and desires of using my SteamDeck without touching the system partition, I probably wouldn’t have messed with Nix because of how much of a confusing mess of modes and switches there are, and I’ve used terminal based package managers for years. It’s very far from the simple “it just works” of Flatpaks.

Fucking Canonical at it again.

Probably some online multiplayer ones

Not to mention Flatpaks.

What's the current reliable KDE Distro? I've been rolling with Kububtu for a while now, but Ubuntu's Snap mandate has been getting annoying.

Last I heard, Firefox is making carve outs for some of the APIs that Mv3 is supposed to deprecate.

Valve employees have confirmed that the OLED display is incompatible with the LCD Deck's Mobo. So you can't upgrade just the screen.

C:\Users\Username\Saved Games is a thing. Not a lot of games use it though.

There's also C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games which seems more popular with some devs. Though some devs inexplicably use the base Documents folder, which is just obnoxious.

But yeah, a lot of devs still use AppData. I read a post from a dev once that explained the advantages and disadvantages to each Directory, though I can't remember the specifics, there is at least logic to why saves get stored in so many odd locations.

Reddit Revanced says no!

For me, it's not as memory efficient as something like Edge, but it handles having a lot of tabs open much better. It also has a lot of powerful features under the hood, and some really good power user addons, like Tab Groups.

Another alternative could be Distrobox. Added benefit of the apps being sandboxed, and easily removed in case of issues. Downside is that you are eating up some space with some extra OS images.

/jk

####For an in the wild example, Steam Deck.

Steam Deck runs Steam OS, which is a heavily customized version of Arch Linux by Valve. But unlike normal Arch installs, Valve has locked the System partition(/) to read-only.

The reasons they’ve done this is two fold. First, there’s actually two copies of the system partition. The reason for this is that when an update is downloaded it’s actually written to the other partition, not the one you’re currently using. This way the update happens in the background, and then you just need to reboot for it to switch partitions and do some house cleaning. What this means though, is that any changes you might’ve normally made to the system partition, disappear, as they are now on the other partition you aren’t using. So if any changes you make won’t matter, not much point in letting people make them in the first place. Using Flatpaks, any applications users install would instead be stored in the user partition, and never touch the OS itself.

The second major reason for doing this, is consistency. If people are discouraged or blocked from modifying the system partition, then any bugs or issues that crop up are, 99% of the time, Valve’s fault. And because of that, Valve can more easily diagnose and try to reproduce any reported issues, because theoretically, the user’s Steam Deck should be configured exactly the same as one at Valve HQ. All that’s needed is for a user to report what they were doing when they encountered the issue, and Valve can follow those same steps and hopefully encounter the same issue, get detailed logs, and hopefully quickly push out a patch as needed.

And that’s one version of Immutability. Valve doesn’t go the full nine-yards here, just enough for their use case. In other Immutable Distros, versioning is taken even further, where you can control multiple versions and reset the OS state on the fly as needed, keeping any changes to a minimum and in controlled sand boxes. There’s a ton of use cases for these, but the most obvious benefits are for enterprise and mass-market solutions, where a single configuration is multiplied across a large amount of servers, or end-user devices, allowing for easier diagnoses of issues and pushing of patches. For end-user clients especially, if they aren’t expected to be customizing the OS to begin with, it makes support much easier for IT.

For your average Linux user, the benefits aren’t as large, as you’ll often want to be able to tweak things to your liking. But your Average Joe that just wants a computer that can surf the web and install some apps that can be found as Flatpaks, an immutable OS that they can’t easily screw up is a plus.

If you’re using UEFI in VB, definitely update to the latest version. UEFI support in older VB was pretty bad. Works a lot better now, though I haven’t had time to test this new version of Vanilla OS, so YMMV.