I use silverblue myself, but I think “cloud nativ” is a terrible name. “Immutable” is IMO better.
Also installing cli tools via toolbox/distrobox is not ideal. I hope for a better solution. Maybe someday i can install htop via flathub.
I agree “cloud native” is not great, I won’t be using that term.
Why are cli tools generally not available as flatpaks? There’s nothing about how flatpak works afaik which distinguishes gui and cli. I get that the original motivation for flatpak was guis, but considering how long it’s been touted as a “universal” package manager for linux, I don’t understand how there could be so few clis.
I’ve heard people say the name for packages from flathub is awkward (which it is), and aliasing everything you install would be annoying (which it would), but that sounds like such a simple problem to solve.
I’ve also heard people say that flatpak clis would be useless because clis tend to be systadmin tools, and thus need to be not sandboxed. But this strikes me as a non sequitur. Gui tools can be used for sysadmin, and there are tons of cli tools which have nothing to do with sysadmin, they’re just userspace programs.
What does your workflow look like with toolbox/distrobox?
Hi! I made the video and also happen to volunteer with flathub. The reason I’ve called it “cloud native” is because that’s the common term used in the industry already and server people know what that means. “Immutable” is a terrible term that is neither technically accurate or something users need to care about.
As for the CLI thing. Shoving CLIs into flatpaks could be a thing but that wouldn’t really solve a problem, it would just mean adding one more ocean to boil and someone would have to volunteer to package htop for the 30th time. There’s no need to do that, distros already have htop!
It’s a better time investment to fix the UX for containers on the desktop, especially since Mac and Windows are already there. :-/ There’s a few options that people are exploring that are worth discussing.
- podmansh has awesome potential, you just define a system-level container that has init and all the stuff people expect, then it would behave like the distro people are coming from. I suspect this is where CoreOS/Fedora will end up.
- exo - we have a spec over at ublue to just add container support directly to the terminal, like how WSL/windows terminal does it. This is the approach Canonical is taking with workshops
- Direct package management in your home dir - also an option, you can just install homebrew, nix, or tea or whatever install packages in your home directory and then it’s totally decoupled from the system.
I personally use distrobox with the assemble pattern to have what I need on all my machines, but hopefully as time progresses distros will do a better job integrating all this stuff. I hope this helps answer some of your questions!
