I’ve a couple questions about this distro in general. So I’ve downloaded and installed the latest version 3.4.7 and so far all of my hardware being detected and working.
Updates
Is this normal that apps aren’t updated to the latest version? Chrome for example is using an 68.x version and I’m getting asked to update. But it newer finishes. If I click update all in app center I’m asked to reboot. Doing that the circle repeats, nothing changing. The latest version should be 69.0.3497.92 but it remains on 68.
Also got a couple other updates for vlc and endless plattform that reappear after a while but not updating.
Root and OSTree
I’ve used a standard ubuntu before so I’m not particular new to linux. But regarding security if a password is not set for the user account what happens to the su account? Will it remain on the system without password required or disabled? Guess the same question comes to mind if one would need ssh access to said machine.
Odds with the install media
Is this normal behaviour when booting into live mode I’ve chromium as the default browser. But after installing to disk and setting region to germany I see google chrome installed. Is this due some regions being restricted to google services or a bug?
Panel indicator
I see panel indicators working in vlc, browser etc. But when the app center is running the background there is no indication for that? Believe its a bit broken. Might be general question but what’s the point of pinning something there when it’s literally in front of you on the desktop. This seems a bit of space inefficient.
Energy saving mode
Lowest settings suspend can be set to is 15 minutes. How would one set this 10 minutes or lower without going into some hacky terminal workaround. I know it’s a limitation by the gnome stack but it should be possible to implement from a developer standpoint.
Ok? And what this has to do with being asked? Asking why there is chromium in live mode and chrome on install but whatever.
You using the unicorn version because I don’t? Display energy saving and suspend is not the same thing. Don’t blame you it’s well hidden. Click on settings → energy → click on suspend automatic. (Second colum from the bottom) There the lowest settings is 15 mins for sending the system to suspend.
Appreciate the time but using google translate responses leaves me with more questions than answers.
I think one of the main reasons Endless uses Chrome as the default browser (Chromium is also installed by default) is down to the ‘codecs’ and the licensing for them.
By default Endless only offers support for formats that are ‘free software’ as in freedom. Indeed, it is possible to purchase a package of these codecs from Endless (they don’t include them due to licensing costs etc.). Chrome has many of these included where as Chromium does not.
Endless also suggests installing VLC for media playback - this gets around the licensing too as that ‘cost’ will have been born by the VLC developers.
My concern isn’t so much about providing chromium in live mode and chrome on install. Was a bit curious why it’s doing that. I get the issue with codecs and licenses. Chrome is a better choice as default. Also lets not forget chromium excludes widewine drm so netflix and other services wouldn’t work.
My main concern is security with this distro. As observed updates do not work or aren’t rolled in time. A browser specific should be updated on time to be protected from the latest cve’s. I mean it’s a week since v69 was released and all those fancy exploits are still in the system ready to be used.
On a sidenode I wonder why they using flatpak over snaps. Snaps has the same packages as of
snapcraft .io/vlc
snapcraft .io/libreoffice
snapcraft .io/spotify
snapcraft .io/skype
Figures the twitter, whatsapp and facebook applications are just browser shortcuts
Except chrome which still has to be provided upstream or firefox which supports widewine drm except it’s opt-in and not enabled by default.
snapcraft .io/firefox
On a duly note firefox has issues with youtube livestreams because it’s missing the ffmpeg codec package due licensing reasons. Why it needs that? VP9 support being used by youtube and other sites. It’s that hard finding a working browser on linux in 2018 eh?!
From a security standpoint snaps also runs in containers isolated from the system. Snaps are provided by app developers and rolled out as released. Not a week later which from a security standpoint is - pretty bad!
Edit: Disabled links by adding a spacer because its messing up the format
I have only a little experience with both ‘formats’ i.e. Snaps and Flatpack - by choice I wouldn’t use either and I’m quite happy sorting out dependencies in the terminal. The main issue, for me, is that in Flatpack you can end up with many copies of the same libraries, all at different revisions, taking up valuable storage - is this the same with Snaps?
On my daily machines I run Linux Mint 19 (I’ve been running Mint since 13 on and off but settled on it from 17 onward). and SwagArch. Both are on laptops and both use their own package management (I usually use the command line for that). I also have a bespoke distro which I use as my network firewall (I won’t publish that here, for obvious reasons!!).
For what Endless is it works well enough - it is on my 9 year-old’s laptop - low spec and Atom based and kinda ‘disposable’ really. She rarely uses the internet on it but does enjoy having the Learning apps installed and some of the educational games - all of which come from FlatHub / Endless.
As yet, I haven’t had any issues updating the software via the app store but that may be because I only have certain stuff installed.
I do use the TOR browser quite regularly and that tends to follow a few days or so behind the actual browser updates but I generally don’t worry too much about being a revision behind.
Agreed - the ‘modern’ internet is a pain, with so many different ways of doing things - personally I would get rid of Flash, Java, Java Script, DRM and the like - do everything in HTML5 and make sure EVERY website was using HTTPS only!
The automatic Chrome install is intentionally disabled in live-mode, because live-mode is live (no persistance) that would mean installing Chrome in RAM, so that would be a lot of RAM eaten up.
Once Chrome gets activated on the installed system you can still switch back to Chromium as the default browser and put it on the desktop. We’re exploring if we can make Chromium the default again in future without sacrificing the extra site/multimedia compatibility provided by Chrome.
Chrome appearing as an update but not being updatable sounds like a bug - after reproducing this once more you could help us by running eos-diagnostics at the terminal and uploading the resultant log file here.
I believe the first user account is automatically created as an admin (i.e. sudo access). Regardless of the password status on user accounts, the root account is never assigned a password in the UI (but you can set one manually in the terminal if you wish).
The root issue with the chrome is that google pulled it from their repos due being too old.
After a clean install software center reported "Couldn’t download from dl.google/insertstableof68.deb package with a 404 error.
I’ve pinged given address on a second pc and it’s indeed gone. Any new installed pc’s with given iso will not have a browser unless your pull request from ostree grandualy updates to 69.
For root password I discovered softwarecenter updates are run by the root acc on the read-only os part. While the user sits as quest on the -rw mounted parts however sudo -s access works with set password as usual. That’s all fine and dandy from a security standpoint as long as untrusted repos aren’t added.
Btw there is an outdated version of chromium aswell. It’s still on 67 while 69 should be out or 70 on beta and 71 on canary/waterfall.
Problem with widewine on chromium is licensing. Google widewine is propritary. I don’t think distribution can be done without licensing issues. Especialy for some asian regions where google services are restricted with local authoritys altogether. E.g China, Hongkong
Sorry for the slow response. Chrome-69 install is now fixed.
You may see a theming problem making the titlebar hard to read. That will be fixed shortly in another update.
Unfortunately we wouldn’t gain anything from using the version-free URL that you point out, because we do need to embed filesize and checksum too. We do have processes that we execute internally that avoid this situation, however we had a difficulty with the new version 69 that took some time to overcome, hopefully won’t happen again.
