[Howto] Three commands to update Fedora

These days using Fedora Workstation there are multiple commands necessary to update the entire software on the system: not everything is installed as RPMs anymore – and some systems hardly use RPMs at all anyway.

Background

In the past all updates of a Fedora system were easily applied with one single command:

$ yum update

Later on, yum was replaced by DNF, but the idea stayed the same:

$ dnf update

Simple, right? But not these days: Fedora recently added capabilities to install and manage code via other ways: Flatpak packages are not managed by DNF. Also, many firmware updates are managed via the dedicated management tool fwupd. And lost but not least, Fedora Silverblue does not support DNF at all.

GUI solution Gnome Software – one tool to rule them all…

To properly update your Fedora system you have to check multiple sources. But before we dive into detailed CLI commands there is a simple way to do that all in one go: The Gnome Software tool does that for you. It checks all sources and just provides the available updates in its single GUI:

The above screenshot highlights that Gnome Software just shows available updates and can manage those. The user does not even know where those come from.

If we have a closer look at the configured repositories in Gnome Software we see that it covers main Fedora repositories, 3rd party repositories, flatpaks, firmware and so on:

• 

  Third party RPM repositories

• 

  Fedora default repositories

• 

  Flatpak and firmware sources

Using the GUI alone is sufficient to take care of all update routines. However, if you want to know and understand what happens underneath it is good to know the separate CLI commands for all kinds of software resources. We will look at them in the rest of the post.

System packages

Each and every system is made up at least of a basic set of software. The Kernel, a system for managing services like systemd, core libraries like libc and so on. With Fedora used as a Workstation system there are two ways to manage system packages, because there are two totally different spins of Fedora: the normal one, traditionally based on DNF and thus comprised out of RPM packages, and the new Fedora Silverblue, based on immutable ostree system images.

Traditional: DNF

Updating a RPM based system via DNF is easy:

$ dnf upgrade
[sudo] password for liquidat: 
Last metadata expiration check: 0:39:20 ago on Tue 18 Jun 2019 01:03:12 PM CEST.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package                      Arch       Version             Repository    Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 kernel                       x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       14 k
 kernel-core                  x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       26 M
 kernel-modules               x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       28 M
 kernel-modules-extra         x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates      2.1 M
[...]

This is the traditional way to keep a Fedora system up2date. It is used for years and well known to everyone.

And in the end it is analogue to the way Linux distributions are kept up2date for ages now, only the command differs from system to system (apt-get, etc.)

Silverblue: OSTree

With the recent rise of container technologies the idea of immutable systems became prominent again. With Fedora Silverblue there is an implementation of that approach as a Fedora Workstation spin.

[Unlike] other operating systems, Silverblue is immutable. This means that every installation is identical to every other installation of the same version. The operating system that is on disk is exactly the same from one machine to the next, and it never changes as it is used.

Silverblue’s immutable design is intended to make it more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Finally, Silverblue’s immutable design also makes it an excellent platform for containerized apps as well as container-based software development development. In each case, apps and containers are kept separate from the host system, improving stability and reliability.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/

Since we are dealing with immutable images here, another tool to manage them is needed: OSTree. Basically OSTree is a set of libraries and tools which helps to manage images and snapshots. The idea is to provide a basic system image to all, and all additional software on top in sandboxed formats like Flatpak.

Unfortunately, not all tools can be packages as flatpak: especially command line tools are currently hardly usable at all as flatpak. Thus there is a way to install and manage RPMs on top of the OSTree image, but still baked right into it: rpm-ostreee. In fact, on Fedora Silverblue, all images and RPMs baked into it are managed by it.

Thus updating the system and all related RPMs needs the command rpm-ostreee update:

$ rpm-ostree update
⠂ Receiving objects: 98% (4653/4732) 4,3 MB/s 129,7 MB 
Receiving objects: 98% (4653/4732) 4,3 MB/s 129,7 MB... done
Checking out tree 209dfbe... done
Enabled rpm-md repositories: fedora-cisco-openh264 rpmfusion-free-updates rpmfusion-nonfree fedora rpmfusion-free updates rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
rpm-md repo 'fedora-cisco-openh264' (cached); generated: 2019-03-21T15:16:16Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free-updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-13T10:31:33Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree' (cached); generated: 2019-04-16T21:53:39Z
rpm-md repo 'fedora' (cached); generated: 2019-04-25T23:49:41Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free' (cached); generated: 2019-04-16T20:46:20Z
rpm-md repo 'updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-17T18:09:33Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-13T11:00:42Z
Importing rpm-md... done
Resolving dependencies... done
Checking out packages... done
Running pre scripts... done
Running post scripts... done
Running posttrans scripts... done
Writing rpmdb... done
Writing OSTree commit... done
Staging deployment... done
Freed: 50,2 MB (pkgcache branches: 0)
Upgraded:
  gcr 3.28.1-3.fc30 -> 3.28.1-4.fc30
  gcr-base 3.28.1-3.fc30 -> 3.28.1-4.fc30
  glib-networking 2.60.2-1.fc30 -> 2.60.3-1.fc30
  glib2 2.60.3-1.fc30 -> 2.60.4-1.fc30
  kernel 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-core 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-devel 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-headers 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-modules 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-modules-extra 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  plymouth 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-core-libs 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-graphics-libs 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-plugin-label 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-plugin-two-step 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-scripts 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-system-theme 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-theme-spinner 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

Desktop applications: Flatpak

Installing software – especially desktop related software – on Linux is a major pain for distributors, users and developers alike. One attempt to solve this is the flatpak format, see also Flatpak – a solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem.

Basically Flatpak is a distribution independent packaging format targeted at desktop applications. It does come along with sandboxing capabilities and the packages usually have hardly any dependencies at all besides a common set provided to all of them.

Flatpak also provide its own repository format thus Flatpak packages can come with their own repository to be released and updated independently of a distribution release cycle.

In fact, this is what happens with the large Flatpak community repository flathub.org: all packages installed from there can be updated via flathub repos fully independent from Fedora – which also means independent from Fedora security teams, btw….

So Flatpak makes developing and distributing desktop programs much easier – and provides a tool for that. Meet flatpak!

$ flatpak update
Looking for updates…

        ID                                            Arch              Branch            Remote            Download
 1. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale               x86_64            1.6               flathub            1.0 kB / 177.1 MB
 2. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale               x86_64            18.08             flathub            1.0 kB / 315.9 MB
 3. [✓] org.libreoffice.LibreOffice.Locale            x86_64            stable            flathub            1.0 MB / 65.7 MB
 4. [✓] org.freedesktop.Sdk.Locale                    x86_64            1.6               flathub            1.0 kB / 177.1 MB
 5. [✓] org.freedesktop.Sdk.Locale                    x86_64            18.08             flathub            1.0 kB / 319.3 MB

Firmware

And there is firmware: the binary blobs that keep some of our hardware running and which is often – unfortunately – closed source.

A lot of Kernel related firmware is managed as system packages and thus part of the system image or packaged via RPM. But device related firmware (laptops, docking stations, and so on) is often only provided in Windows executable formats and difficult to handle.

Luckily, recently the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) gained quite some traction as the default way for many vendors to make their device firmware consumable to Linux users:

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service is a secure portal which allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates.

This site is used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients such as fwupdmgr and GNOME Software.

https://fwupd.org/

End users can take advantage of this with a tool dedicated to identify devices and manage the necessary firmware blobs for them: meet fwupdmgr!

$ fwupdmgr update                                                                                                                                                         No upgrades for 20L8S2N809 System Firmware, current is 0.1.31: 0.1.25=older, 0.1.26=older, 0.1.27=older, 0.1.29=older, 0.1.30=older
No upgrades for UEFI Device Firmware, current is 184.65.3590: 184.55.3510=older, 184.60.3561=older, 184.65.3590=same
No upgrades for UEFI Device Firmware, current is 0.1.13: 0.1.13=same
No releases found for device: Not compatible with bootloader version: failed predicate [BOT01.0[0-3]_* regex BOT01.04_B0016]

In the above example there were no updates available – but multiple devices are supported and thus were checked.

Forgot something? Gnome extensions…

The above examples cover the major ways to managed various bits of code. But they do not cover all cases, so for the sake of completion I’d like to highlight a few more here.

For example, Gnome extensions can be installed as RPM, but can also be installed via extensions.gnome.org. In that case the installation is done via a browser plugin.

The same is true for browser plugins themselves: they can be installed independently and extend the usage of the web browser. Think of the Chrome Web Store here, or Firefox Add-ons.

Conclusion

Keeping a system up2date was easier in the past – with a single command. However, at the same time that meant that those systems were limited by what RPM could actually deliver.

With the additional ways to update systems there is an additional burden on the system administrator, but at the same time there is much more software and firmware available these ways – code which was not available in the old RPM times at all. And with Silverblue an entirely new paradigm of system management is there – again something which would not have been the case with RPM at all.

At the same time it needs to be kept in mind that these are pure desktop systems – and there Gnome Software helps by being the single pane of glas.

So I fully understand if some people are a bit grumpy about the new needs for multiple tools. But I think the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.

[Howto] Rebasing Fedora Silverblue – even from Rawhide to Fedora 30

I recently switched to Fedora Silverblue, the immutable desktop version of Fedora. With Silverblue, rebasing is easy – even when I had to downgrade from Rawhide to a stable release!

Fedora Silverblue is an interesting attempt at providing an immutable operating system – targeted at desktop users. Using it on a daily base helps me to get more familiar with the toolset and the ideas behind it which are also used in other projects like Fedora Atomic or Fedora CoreOS.

When Fedora 30 was released I decided to give it a try, went to the Silverblue download page – and unfortunately picked the wrong image: the one for Rawhide.

Rawhide is the rolling release/development branch of Fedora, and is way too unstable for my daily usage. But I only discovered this when I had it already installed and spent quite some time on customizing it.

But Silverblue is an immutable distribution, so switching to a previous version should be no problem, right? And in fact, yes, it is very easy!

Silverblue supports rebasing, switching between different branches. To get a list of available branches, first list the name of the remote source, and afterwards query the available references/branches:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ ostree remote list
fedora
[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ ostree remote refs fedora
[...]
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/testing/silverblue
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/updates/silverblue
[...]
fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/silverblue
fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/workstation

The list is quite long, and does list multiple operating system versions.

In my case I was on the rawhide branch and tried to rebase to version 30. That however failed:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 569 B transferred in 4 seconds
Checking out tree 7420c3a... done
Enabled rpm-md repositories: rawhide
Updating metadata for 'rawhide'... done
rpm-md repo 'rawhide'; generated: 2019-05-13T08:01:20Z
Importing rpm-md... done
⠁  
Forbidden base package replacements:
  libgcc 9.1.1-1.fc30 -> 9.1.1-1.fc31 (rawhide)
  libgomp 9.1.1-1.fc30 -> 9.1.1-1.fc31 (rawhide)
This likely means that some of your layered packages have requirements on newer or older versions of some base packages. `rpm-ostree cleanup -m` may help. For more details, see: https://githResolving dependencies... done
error: Some base packages would be replaced

The problem was that I had installed additional packages in the meantime. Note that there are multiple ways to install packages in Silverblue:

– Flatpak apps: this is the primary way that apps get installed on Silverblue.
– Containers: which can be installed and used for development purposes.
– Toolbox containers: a special kind of container that are tailored to be used as a software development environment.

The other method of installing software on Silverblue is package layering. This is different from the other methods, and goes against the general principle of immutability. Package layering adds individual packages to the Silverblue system, and in so doing modifies the operating system.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/getting-started/

While Flatpak in itself is a pretty cool solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem it usually comes with sandboxed environments, making it less usable for integrated tools and libraries.

For that reason it is still possible to install RPMs on top, in a layered form. This however might result in dependency issues when the underlying image is supposed to change.

This is exactly what happened here: I had additional software installed, which depended on some specific versions of the underlying image. So I had to remove those:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree uninstall fedora-workstation-repositories golang pass vim zsh

Afterwards it was easy to rebase the entire system onto a different branch or – in my case – a different version of the same branch:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 569 B transferred in 2 seconds
Staging deployment... done
Freed: 47,4 MB (pkgcache branches: 0)
  liberation-fonts-common 1:2.00.3-3.fc30 -> 1:2.00.5-1.fc30
  [...]
Downgraded:
  GConf2 3.2.6-26.fc31 -> 3.2.6-26.fc30
  [...]
Removed:
  fedora-repos-rawhide-31-0.2.noarch
  [...]
Added:
  PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin-1.1.12-5.fc30.x86_64
  [...]
Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

And that’s it – after a short systemctl reboot the machine was back, running Fedora 30. And since ostree works with images the reboot went smooth and quick, long sessions of installing/updating software during shutdown or reboot are not necessary with such a setup!

In conclusion I must say that I am pretty impressed – both by the concept as well as the execution on the concept, how well Silverblue works in a day to day situation even as a desktop. My next step will be to test it on a Laptop on the ride, and see if other problems come up there.

Flatpak – a solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem [Update]

Linux packaging was a nightmare for years. But recently serious contenders came up claiming to solve the challenge: first containers changed how code is deployed on servers for good. And now a solution for the desktops is within reach. Meet Flatpak!

Preface

In the beginning I probably should admit that over the years I identified packaging within the Linux ecosystem as a fundamental problem. It prevented wider adoption of Linux in general, but especially on the desktop. I was kind of obsessed with the topic.

The general arguments were/are:

• Due to a missing standard it was not easy enough for developers to package software. If they used one of the formats out there they could only target a sub-set of distributions. This lead to lower adoption of the software on Linux, making it a less attractive platform.
• Since Linux was less attractive for developers, less applications were created on/ported to Linux. This lead to a smaller ecosystem. Thus it was less attractive to users since they could not find appealing or helpful applications.
• Due to missing packages in an easy-accessible format, installing software was a challenge as soon as it was not packaged for the distribution in use. So Linux was a lot less attractive for users because few software was available.

History, server side

In hindsight I must say the situation was not as bad as I thought on the server level: Linux in the data center grew and grew. Packaging simply did not matter that much because admins were used to problems deploying applications on servers anyway and they had the proper knowledge (and time) to tackle challenges.

Additionally, the recent rise of container technologies like Docker had a massive impact: it made deploying of apps much easier and added other benefits like sandboxing, detailed access permissions, clearer responsibilities especially with dev and ops teams involved, and less dependency hell problems. Together with Kubernetes it seems as there is an actual standard evolving of how software is deployed on Linux servers.

To summarize, in the server ecosystem things never were as bad, and are quite good these days. Given that Azure serves more Linux servers than Windows servers there are reasons to believe that Linux is these days the dominant server platform and that Windows is more and more becoming a niche platform.

History, client side

On the desktop side things were bad right from the start. Distribution specific packaging made compatibility a serious problem, incompatible packaging formats with RPMs and DEBs made it worse. One reason why no package format ever won was probably that no solution offered real benefits above the other. Given today’s solutions for packaging software out there RPM and DEB are missing major advantages like sandboxing and permission systems. They are helplessly outdated, I question if they are suited for software packaging at all today.

There were attempts to solve the problem. There were attempts at standardization – for example via the LSB – but that did not gather enough attraction. There were platform agnostic packaging solutions. Most notably is Klik which started already 15 years ago and got later renamed to AppImage. But despite the good intentions and the ease of use it never gained serious attention over the years.

But with the approach of Docker things changed: people saw the benefits of container formats and the technology technology for such approaches was widely available. So people gave the idea another try: Flatpak.

Flatpak

Flatpak is a “technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux”. It is an attempt to establish an application container format for Linux based desktops and make them easy consumable.

According to the history of Flatpak the initial idea goes way back. Real work started in 2014, and the first release was in 2015. It was developed initially in the ecosystem of Fedora and Red Hat, but soon got attention from other distributions as well.

Many features look somewhat similar to the typical features associated with container tools like Docker:

• Build for every distro
• Consistent environments
• Full control over dependencies
• Easy to use  build tools
• Future-proof builds
• Distribution of packages made easy

Additionally it features a sandboxing environment and a permissions system.

The most appealing feature for end users is that it makes it simple to install packages and that there are many packages available because developers only have to built them once to support a huge range of distributions.

By using Flatpak the software version is also not tied to the distribution update cycle. Flatpak can update all installed packages centrally as well.

Flathub

One thing I like about Flatpak is that it was built with repositories (“shops”) baked right in. There is a large repository called flathub.org where developers can submit their applications to be found and consumed by users:

• 

  Flathub Games

• 

  Flathub feed of new and updated applications

• 

  Flathub popular apps

• 

The interface is simple but has a somewhat proper design. Each application features screenshots and a summary. The apps themselves are grouped by categories. The ever changing list of new & updated apps shows that the list of apps is ever growing. A list of the two dozen most popular apps is available as well.

I am a total fan of Open Source but I do like the fact that there are multiple closed source apps listed in the store. It shows that the format can be used for such use cases. That is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. Also, there are quite a few games which is always good 😉

Of course there is lots of room for improvement: at the time of writing there is no way to change or filter the sorting order of the lists. There is no popularity rating visible and no way to rate applications or leave comments.

Last but not least, there is currently little support from external vendors. While you find many closed source applications in Flathub, hardly any of them were provided by the software vendor. They were created by the community but are not affiliated with the vendors. To have a broader acceptance of Flatpak the support of software vendors is crucial, and this needs to be highlighted in the web page as well (“verified vendor” or similar).

Hosting your own hub

As mentioned Flatpak has repositories baked in, and it is well documented. It is easy to generate your own repository for your own flatpaks. This is especially appealing to projects or vendors who do not want to host their applications themselves.

While today it is more or less common to use a central market (Android, iOS, etc.) some still prefer to keep their code in there hands. It sometimes makes it easier to provide testing and development versions. Other use cases are software which is just developed and used in-house, or the mirroring of existing repositories for security or offline reasons: such use cases require local hubs, and it is no problem at all to bring them up with Flatpak.

Flatpak, distribution support

Flatpak is currently supported on most distributions. Many of them have the support built in right from the start, others, most notably Ubuntu, need to install some software first. But in general it is quite easy to get started – and once you did, there are hundreds of applications you can use.

What about the other solutions?

Of course Flatpak is not the only solution out there. After all, this is the open source world we are talking about, so there must be other solutions 😉

Snap & Snapcraft

Snapcraft is a way to “deliver and update your app on any Linux distribution – for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things.” The concept and idea behind it is somewhat similar to Flatpak, with a few notable differences:

• Snapcraft also target servers, while Flatpak only targets desktops
• Among the servers, Snapcraft additionally has iot devices as a specific target group
• Snapcraft does not support additional repositories; there is only one central market place everyone needs to use, and there is no real way to change that

Some more technical differences are in the way packages are built, how the sandbox work and so on, but we will noch focus on those in this post.

The Snapcraft market place called snapcraft.io provides lists of applications, but is much more mature than Flathub: it has vendor testimonials, features verified accounts, multiple versions like beta or development can be picked from within the market, there are case stories, for each app additional blog posts are listed, there is integration with social accounts, you can even see the distribution by countries and Linux flavors.

And as you can see, Snapcraft is endorsed and supported by multiple companies today which are listed on the web page and which maintain their applications in the market.

• 

  snapcraft.io main page

• 

  detailed view with option to download multiple versions

• 

  snapcraft’s iot page

Flathub has a lot to learn until it reaches the same level of maturity. However, while I’d say that snapcraft.io is much more mature than Flathub it also misses the possibility to rate packages, or just list them by popularity. Am I the only one who wants that?

The main disadvantage I see is the monopoly. snapcraft.io is tightly controlled by a single company (not a foundation or similar). It is of course Canonical’s full right to do so, and the company and many others argue that this is not different from what Apple does with iOS. However, the Linux ecosystem is not the Apple ecosystem, and in the Linux ecosystem there are often strong opinions about monopolies, closed source solutions and related topics which might lead to acceptance problems in the long term.

Also, technically it is not possible to launch your own central server for example for in-house development, or for hosting a local mirror, or to support offline environments or for other reasons. To me this is particularly surprising given that Snapcraft targets specifically iot devices, and I would run iot devices in an closed network wherever I can – thus being unable to connect to snapcraft.io. The only solution I was able to identify was running a http proxy, which is far from the optimal solution.

Another a little bit unusual feature of Snapcraft is that updates are installed automatically, thanks to theo.9dor for the hint:

The good news is that snaps are updated automatically in the background every day! 

https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/basic-snap-usage#2

While in the end a development model with auto deployments, even dozens per day, is a worthwhile goal I am not sure if everyone is there yet.

So while Snapcraft has a mature market place, targets much more use cases and provides more packages to this date, I do wonder how it will turn out in the long run given that we are talking about the Linux ecosystem here. And while Canonical has quite some experience to develop their own solutions outside the “rest” of the community, those attempts seldom worked out.

AppImage

I’ve already mentioned AppImage above and I’ve written about it in the past when it was still called Klik. AppImage is “way for upstream developers to provide native binaries for Linux”. The result is basically a file that contains your entire application and which you can copy everywhere. It exists for more than a dozen years now.

The thing that is probably most worth mentioning about it is that it never caught on. After all, already long time ago it provided many impressive features, and made it possible to install software cross distribution. Many applications where also available as AppImage – and yet I never saw wider adoption. It seems to me that it only got traction recently because Snapcraft and Flatpak entered the market and kind of dragged it with them.

I’d love to understand why that is the case, or have an answer to the “why”. I only have few ideas but those are just ideas, and not explanations why AppImage, in all the years, never managed to become the Docker of the Linux desktop.

Maybe one problem was that it never featured a proper store: today we know from multiple examples on multiple platforms that a store can mean the difference. A central place for the users to browse, get a first idea of the app, leave comments and rate the application. Docker has a central “store”, Android and iOS have one, Flatpak and Snapcraft have one. However, AppImage never put a focus on that, and I do wonder if this was a missed opportunity. And no, appimage.github.io/apps is not a store.

Another difference to the other tools is that AppImage always focused on the Open Source tools. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it – but open source tools like Digikam were available on every distribution anyway. If AppImage would have focused to reach out to closed source software vendors as well, together with marketing this aggressively, maybe things would have turned out differently. You do not only need to make software easily available to users, you also need to make software available the people want.

Last but not least, AppImage always tried to provide as many features as possible, while it might have benefited from focusing on some and marketing them stronger. As an example, AppImage advertises that it can run with and without sandboxing. However, sandboxing is a large benefit of using such a solution to begin with. Another thing is integrated updates: there is a way to automatically update all appimages on a system, but it is not built in. If both would have been default and not optional, things maybe would have been different.

But again, these are just ideas, attempts to find explanations. I’d be happy if someone has better ideas.

Disadvantages of the Flatpak approach

There are some disadvantages with the Flatpak approach – or the Snapcraft one, or in general with any container approach. Most notably: libraries and dependencies.

The basic argument here is: all dependencies are kept in each package. This means:

• Multiple copies of the same libraries on the system, leading to larger disk consumption
• Multiple copies of the same library in the RAM during execution, leading to larger memory consumption
• And probably most important: if a library has a security problem, each and every package has to be updated

Especially the last part is crucial: in case of a serious library security problem the user has to rely on each and every package vendor that they update the library in the package and release an updated version. With a dependency based system this is usually not the case.

People often compare this problem to the Windows or Java world were a similar situation exists. However, while the underlying problem is existent and serious, with Flatpak at least there is a sandbox and a permission system something which was not the case in former Windows versions.

There needs to be made a trade off between the advanced security through permissions and sandboxing vs the risk of having not-updated libraries in those packages. That trade off is not easily done.

But do we even need something like Flatpak?

This question might be strange, given the needs I identified in the past and my obvious enthusiasm for it. However, these days more and more apps are created as web applications – the importance of the desktop is shrinking. The dominant platform for users these days are mobile phones and tablets anyway. I would even go so far to say that in the future desktops will still be there but mainly to launch a web browser

But we are not there yet and today there is still the need for easy consumption of software on Linux desktops. I would have hoped though to see this technology and this much traction and distribution and vendor support 10 years ago.

Conclusion

Well – as I mentioned early on, I can get somewhat obsessed with the topic. And this much too long blog post shows this for sure 😉

But as a conclusion I say that the days of difficult-to-install-software on Linux desktops are gone. I am not sure if Snapcraft or Flatpak will “win” the race, we have to see that.

At the same time we have to face that desktops in general are just not that important anymore.  But until then, I am very happy that it became so much easier for me to install certain pieces of software in up2date versions on my machine.

Ansible package moved from EPEL to extras

A few days ago the Ansible package was removed from EPEL and many ask why that happened. The background is that Ansible is now provided in certain Red Hat channels.

What happened?

In the past (pre-2017-10) most people who were on RHEL or CentOS or similar RHEL based systems used to install Ansible from the EPEL repository. This way the package was updates regularly and it was ensured that it met the quite high packaging standards of the EPEL project.

However, a few days ago someone noticed that the EPEL repositories no longer contain an Ansible rpm package:

I'm running RHEL 7.3, and have installed the latest epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm. However, I'm unable to install ansible from this repo.

This caused some confusion and questions about the reasons behind that move.

EPEL repository policy

To better understand what happened it is important to understand EPEL’s package policy:

EPEL strives to never replace or interfere with packages shipped by Enterprise Linux.

While the idea of EPEL is to provide cool additional packages for RHEL, they will never replace anything that is shipped.

Change at Red Hat Enterprise Linux

That philosophy regularly requires that the EPEL project removes packages: each time when RHEL adds a package EPEL needs to check if they are providing it, and removes it.

And a few weeks ago exactly that happened: Ansible was included in RHELs extras repository.

The reasons behind that move is that the newest incarnation of RHEL now comes along with so called system roles – which require Ansible to execute them.

But where to get it now?

Ansible is now directly available to RHEL users as mentioned above. Also, CentOS picked up Ansible in their extras repository, and there are plenty of other ways available.

The only case where something actually changes for people is when the EPEL repository is activated – but the extras repository is not.