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.

Major people of the project had moved on. It’s being maintained, getting security fixes, but pull requests are slow to be merged.

That is planned. But pulse is not secure, so exposing it is not great.

Don’t believe so, best that’s currently available is skimming through the video to look at the slides.

Here’s my short summary of the presentation, I tried to denote what’s being worked on (open PR), what’s kinda being done (WIP), and things stuff they’d like to be done in the future (wishlist). May be somewhat wrong.

• Flatpak is stagnant
• Red Hat is working on a better way to preinstall flatpak apps (open PR)
• Flatpak should is slowly moving towards OCI and away from ostree (more tooling available, don’t need to maintain their own tools)
• Better permission handling that is more backwards compatible (open PR)
• Should directly use Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio (WIP)
• Allow user namespaces in flatpak sandbox (WIP)
• Move dbus proxying into dbus brokers (wishlist)
• Improve network sandboxing (wishlist)
• Improve drivers handling, currently drivers need to be built for each runtime, could cause issues if using EOL app on new hardware (wishlist)
• Work on portals directly improves flatpak

Unfortunately, it’s not in a great situation. Flatpak is stagnant. There’s a lot of cool things in the works, like a stronger sandbox, preinstalling flatpaks more effectively, etc, but merging things is hard.

Please tell me Wayland is enabled, even if it’s not the default.

I’m not going to trade Firefox for a browser that is years away from being even remotely daily drivable. Even once/if it’s able to render pages mostly correctly, it will still take a while after that to make it fast.

Even with Mozilla’s funding, they’re behind on implementing featues. Ladybird has much less funding and their current policy is to just rely on donations.

While Librewolf does have its advantages, I find it hard to recommend over regular Firefox, at least for most people. Librewolf disables some features like WebGL due to security and privacy concerns.

It’s not making it worse. They like anime, so they have an anime girl as the mascot; a very tame one too.

But some people freak out about it.

If you use Anubis for free, he asks that you keep the girl on for marketing purposes.

If you pay / support the project, you can remove it.

Honestly, it’s a good way to encourage people to pay up because some people absolutely hate it.

I was wondering about that too. At first I assumed they were only allocated a few of the cores for their testing, but a typo seems more likely.

I thought this was going to be about that Mozilla exec speaking about Firefox as a legacy project where AI was their new focus.

Mozilla is independent. All the search deal really is is that Mozilla sets a default option to point to Google’s URL and not another. In exchange, Mozilla gets millions of dollars.

The reality is that the majority of users would choose Google even if it wasn’t the default. So Mozilla is both providing the most popular option as the default and benefitting from it.

Anyone who doesn’t trust Google, such as me and presumably you, have the freedom to change the default.

Overall, I don’t think Mozilla is wrong. Without the Google Search deal, Firefox will have less resources to build a competent browser.

But Mozilla has also done a poor job at becoming financially stable without this search deal. It also doesn’t help that Mozilla’s CEO’s salary keeps going up in spite of the declining market share.

It would have been nice is Mozilla was able to fill a niche like Proton: building a suite of secure and private services. But instead they’re moving towards advertising.

I’ve never needed to downgrade Firefox.

Canonical is making the security patches.

Also, you don’t have to release your source code changes to the public. You only have to release your changes to those who have access to the product.

That being said, Canonical probably does release the source code changes for their security fixes, I just don’t know where.

Yes. Ubuntu has two main repos, main and universe.

main is relatively small and includes everything that comes with Ubuntu by default. Canonical secures this repo with security fixes for everyone.

universe is not officially supported by Canonical. It’s updates are done by community members. However, Ubuntu started a service called Ubuntu Pro / ESM that provides updates for packages in universe. It’s opt in because Canonical wants companies using Ubuntu to pay for Pro in order to help fund Ubuntu. However, Pro is also free for personal use on up to 5 machines, so there’s no reason not to enable it. f it was enabled by default then no one would pay for it.

GTK3->GTK4 should be easier than GTK2->GTK3.

Unfortunately not. There’s been a number of things on Nvdia’s side that slowed down Wayland adoption.

They didn’t always support Xwayland hardware acceleration.

Nvidia pushed for a technology called EGLStreams while everyone else agreed on GBM. So the desktop stack had to support both. Nvidia eventually relented and started supporting GBM.

Nvidia didn’t support VRR or night light for a while.

Nvidia didn’t support necessary stuff for Gamescope to function properly.

And overall Nvidia on Wayland was just buggy. I remember that many games failed to launch or had weird performance issues. But those issues just went away when I got an AMD card.

But things are in a much better state today. Though I did recently test a 20 series card on Fedora 41 and it was a terrible experience on the proprietary drivers. But when speaking with orhers, they didn’t share my issues.