All those same options are available by right clicking on the app. Though thinking some more, the status icon being dynamic does give it some extra flexibility, I think it can show recently launched games. Still, does that mean Firefox should get a status icon so that you can access recently opened sites? Should your file manager?
The complaint against the app indicators is that apps tend to throw their icon in there for no reason. Why does Steam need to show itself there? Why doesn’t Firefox?
There’s also some technical reasons why they’re bad. There’s quite a few different protocols to show the icons up there, all each with their own pros and cons. But none can handle sandboxing properly, so work is being done towards a new protocol.
You can check if you are using Xorg or Wayland in the Settings -> System -> About -> System Details page. If you’re using Wayland, you’re all good, nothing changes. If you’re using Xorg, you may notice some changes. If you’re using NVIDIA on Ubuntu 24.04, you’ll be on Xorg by default. If you’re using a later version or AMD/Intel, you’ll be on Wayland be default.
To keep it short, X11 was the old protocol for creating and managing windows. Xorg implemented this protocol. But both the protocol and implementation have many shortcomings that are difficult to address for a multitude of reasons (breaking compatibility, poor code base, a ton of work, etc).
Rather than putting lipstick on a pig, a new protocol, called Wayland, was created. It was designed for modern needs and tries to avoid the pitfalls that X11, Windows, and MacOS have. It doesn’t just copy what those three did, it’s more opinionated, so some people love it a lot (like me) or hate it a lot because it changes the way things have to be done and simply does not implement some functionality, either purposefully or because the work hasn’t been done yet.
I don’t use Zoom enough to know, but it probably still works.
My last experience with the Zoom app on Wayland (a few months ago?) required me to do a manual config file change to launch the app properly. And Zoom says they fixed the screen sharing options, not sure how true that is.
Getting ready for Zoom to have instructions to install i3 rather than fixing their Wayland support.
You could install Linux Mint onto a flash drive. Though keep in mind that flash drives aren’t that robust, the flash chips are cheaper and will fail faster than SSDs.
This also also affecting me. Though it was just because I was unaware of the USB wake function. Since I have, I made it a habit to suspend, then immediately lift up my mouse to turn it off. Though I guess that’s not an option for wired mice.
I run Fedora Silverblue on a N100.
It’s very usable. For most actions, it feels pretty similar to my much more powerful desktop. but has some limitations.
The battery life is still better than most laptops, but yeah, not as good as MacOS.
Might end up buying a Pixel 9A to make sure that Anubis keeps working on GrapheneOS.
- Xe, the Anubis developer
The touchpad would be very unresponsive for several minutes after waking from sleep. It would still work, but had a crazy latency. Happened in both Windows and Linux.
I believe I could’ve hacked around it with this command.
I use Silverblue and MacOS daily, I enjoy the former so much more.
Unfortunately my relatively new Lenovo laptop has a small but also major driver bug that hasn’t been fixed in all the time I’ve had it. Bad to the point I got the Mac to have actual working hardware. But I do not enjoy MacOS in the slightest. At best I can say it harasses you less than Windows and respects the user a few degrees more than Windows.
That’s what I’m saying. The OS installer can be super nice and intuitive, but the process of getting to that point, messing with the BIOS, is troublesome.
I know in the past there’s been tools that allowed you to install Linux from within Windows. That would be a great way to work around this problem, though I think there are certain limitations with that approach.
A person can only specialize in a small number of things.
I’m happy to learn about computers, but when it comes to, say, cars, I have no desire to learn. If I have a car problem, I don’t have the knowledge of how to even look up a problem.
Honestly I think the bigger barrier is the BIOS. The button to get to the boot menu is different on every motherboard.
Wasn’t vertical integration, was done by packager.
We don’t believe that the openSUSE Deepin packager acted with bad intent when he implemented the “license agreement” dialog to bypass our whitelisting restrictions. The dialog itself makes the security concerns we have transparent, so this does not happen in a sneaky way, at least not towards users. It was not discussed with us, however, and it violates openSUSE packaging policies.
Not by default, but you can optionally enable it.
Ah I had the same issue. JavaFX still uses X11. By default VSCode only lets X11 be used if Wayland is not available (this is the X11 fallback permission). Disabling X11 fallback will let VSCode use Wayland and let JavaFX use X11. I might make an issue for this on the flatpak’s GitHub asking for this change.
Honestly, the truth is that setting up containers for development will always be a hassle. My low tech way is just to make a distrobox container with its own home folder, install an IDE in it, and install packages. The more proper way to do it would create your own containerfile to build your container for developing.
VSCode also has its DevContainers extension but that doesn’t work in VSCodium and does some weird things.
Flatpak’s usefulness for programming depends on the IDE and language. IDEs like VSCode largely suck because they are not designed to work in flatpak. But some languages still do work well in them, such as Rust, since Flathub provides the Rust SDK and dependency management is done with cargo. But it sucks for C++, where you typically install dependencies using your system package manager.
IDEs like Gnome Builder are pretty good. It’s designed to work within the flatpak sandbox. Even when running as a flatpak, you can choose to build things using containers or your host system. And of course also build using the Freedesktop runtimes.
I recently setup JavaFX with the flatpak version of VSCodium and have it working pretty well. You first need to install the Java SDK from Flathub, set an env variable to tell VSCode to load the SDK. The more annoying part was JavaFX since it’s not part of the JDK anymore. I just downloaded the JavaFX tar, extracted to a directory called JavaFX, and set $JAVAFX_HOME to point to it. Since VSCode has host filesystem access, it can access it. Few more steps than traditional Linux, sure, but still easier than MacOS and Windows.
Not sure about your database situation though.
But you don’t need a status icon to run in the background.
If Firefox wanted to, they could make Firefox continue running in the background. They could even app a system tray entry for Firefox to access recently visited sites or favorite sites, like what Steam does.
This paradigm is actually the norm on MacOS. When you X out of an app, it doesn’t actually close. It will just have no open windows but stay open on your dock.