azenyr

Having half of the world depend on a corporate proprietary single company is the stupidest thing ever. They will learn nothing with this, sadly

I don't know what dependencies he has but my 3 year old system that is constantly being updated is full of flatpaks and all of the dependencies combined are only around 3GB. People see 1GB of dependencies and lose their mind.

I change my opinion depending on which app it is. I use KDE, so any KDE app will be installed natively for sure for perfect integration. Stuff like grub costumizer etc all native. Steam, Lutris, GIMP, Discord, chrome, firefox, telegram? Flatpak, all of those. They don't need perfect integration and I prefer the stability, easy upgrades and ease of uninstall of flatpak. Native is used when OS integration is a must. Flatpak for everything else. Especially since sometimes the distro's package is months/years old... prefering distro packages for everything should be a thing of the past.

Same app in native format: 2MB. As a flatpak: 15MB. As an appimage: 350MB.

Appimages are awesome, rock solid, and I have a few on my system, but flatpak never gave me any problem and integrates better with my KDE, and is smaller. Both have their advantages tho. I'm fine with using both. If you are a developer, make a flatpak or an appimage i dont really care just make your software available for linux. Both are fine, choose the one that fits your specific app the most.

But I also think appimages deserve the same attention and great integration with the OS as flatpaks. Stuff like that AppImageLauncher functionalities should just be integrated inside the DE itself.

But we need an universal package format for linux asap. Flatpak is on the front in this race, and I'm fine with it. Appimages second, for sure.

While editing my comment I deleted it by mistake lol. Here is what I was trying to post:

Don't buy a Tesla or BMW. Done.

Edit: im joking, but you can just not connect your car to any internet. Most casual brands have literally zero outgoing connections if you don't add or connect them to a network. Androd Auto and Apple Carplay are just displaying what your phone sends to the screen, the car itself doesn't access the internet through those. Think of android auto and carplay like "HDMI monitors for your phone that have touch too". Your phone does everything the car just displays it.

Connecting via bluetooth should also not be any problem since bluetooth doesn't include internet access (unless you activate that ok your phone but Im sure the car will not use it). Bluetooth only sends and receives small bits of data that your phone chooses to send, not what the car chooses. Contacts names, phone numbers, audio and microphone are the only few data that gets sent to your car and only during phone calls or audio listening.

In the end, just avoid cars that have always connected systems like Teslas or modern BMWs or similar cars. Most Volkswagen, Audi, etc etc are 100% offline cars when you don't connect them to a network. Most now can do it, but most its a subscription service that you can just not buy, and some even need SIM cards to work, that you just not use. Unless its a Tesla, those are connected even if you don't pay the subscription.

Test drive the car. Disconnect it from all networks or don't turn them on. Try to use all features. If the car constantly complains that it has no internet access for all of them, thats good.

Note that GPS access is always on and doesn't require any subscription, so maps and navigation will still work. However that is not really a privacy violation by itself because GPS on cars and phones only receives signal, doesn't transmit anything. You wont have traffic information or weather or anything tho. If you have traffic info, the car is connecting to some network, find how to deactivate that.

Many modern cars are too connected, thats true, but with the exception of a few brands, most cars go 100% offline the moment you disconnect them from their data services or don't pay for that upgrade/subscription. So you will be fine even with a modern car.

And yet people will just shrug it off and keep using windows. And Microsoft loves that.

So you were the "horse armor DLC" of car insurance companies. Congratulations

To be fair, if they are like the example (static silent ads) they would be the least intrusive ads that YouTube ever had. To the point that I don't even mind them. All of YouTube ads should be like this, not annoying, silent, and easily ignored.

has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup

Tell me you are an nvidia user without telling me. Either that is hard to believe. I use KDE daily for more than 8-9 hours a day, sometimes my pc goes for a full week without geting turned off, multiple apps tabs and servers on, themes installed, widgets on the desktop, I am such an extremely heavy KDE user you have no idea. Still, zero crashes. Sometimes something goes a bit "wut" like moving a window around gliches a liiiiiiitle bit, but it instantly corrects itself and goes back to being stable. And I am on Plasma 6.0.3, funny enough has been more stable than Plasma 5.

Update your KDE or use a distro that has better KDE support. Some distros fck up KDE packages and get it unstable. Fedora KDE is rock solid for example. Nobara has been great too and its now KDE by default.

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch...) which might speed up its adoption too.

Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.