Bazzite lead developer here, we actually never used the flatpak. Our first release had it installed in a distrobox container on the desktop images. Deck images always had RPM Steam because Steam is essentially functioning as a desktop environment there. We moved them both to be RPM for support consistency reasons.

Smells like FUD to me.

It’s the same RPM that’s installed in workstation from RPM fusion. There’s nothing custom about that.

Gamescope is also an RPM, it’s a slightly newer version than what Fedora packages but it’s packaged the exact same way. Neither of those are likely to break because they are fundamental to the basic functionality of the deck images.

Additional pre-installed packages are added, but existing packages are not touched.

It’s immutability comes directly from silverblue and kinoite, again nothing custom there.

Such as?

I’m not sure what you mean by that, it’s directly built on Fedora which is probably one of if not the best workstation OS.

The very first release was actually a steam deck release, the desktop release came later.

We solve this problem by treating distroboxes as cattle and not as pets. Blow them away at any time.

Which btw also include the Fedora Flathub repository.

We no longer touch the repos as Fedora is now in agreement with using Flathub.

You start to sound like a GrapheneOS dev. It makes no sense to prevent users from reinstalling removed packages.

It’s for user security. I have no interest in debating this decision, my reasons are outlined.

Distrobox updates automatically on Bluefin and Bazzite.

In this case we disagree with Fedora, Atomic Fedora should not have Firefox in image. It does not matter to us what they do, we explicitly remove it.

If you like the way Fedora builds their Firefox RPM, that’s all the more reason for you to use a fedora distrobox.

I shutdown my laptop every day and update every day. That is fine for me.

Irrelevant. Not everybody does. Some people pin an old image due to a bug and sit on a far older image. If you had it your way, they’d be using a week or month old build of Firefox – that’s unacceptable.

Removing Firefox prevents people from reinstalling it

Good. I can promise you if that gets fixed and I have a way to continue to prevent it, I will.

Flatpak Firefox does not have the ability to create user namespaces for tab process isolation. This is due to all Flatpaks using the same badness-enumerating seccomp filter, there is no additional hardening possible and they still block userns creation.

This is an issue for Mozilla. They are happy enough with the state of the Flatpak to not only verify it, but list it on their website. Unless you’ve got a CVE for the Flatpak version of Firefox I don’t see any point in even engaging with this argument.

We remove Firefox because having it on the image is a security hazard. You want your browser to update more often than your operating system.

We prefer the flatpak, but if for some reason you need the RPM I would suggest installing it with distrobox.

To harm a competitors stock prices more than they are paying out

Yes they do, and you can bet that’ll go away as soon as Apple thinks x86 isn’t important (to them).

Least British Lemmy user

It’s for anybody, incredible tool.