yes, it’s a rant. I don’t care.
Back in the days drag and drop was working perfectly fine, but now it’s a pain to use. I just installed mkvtoolnix dropped two files into it and it worked. Wanted to add another one and it didn’t. Guess it’s because it’s in a network share and for some reason that matters. Adding the file via the menu works though wtf? Reinstalled mkvtoolnix. Now natively instead of flatpack and now dropping from the network share works, too. Guess it’s some sandbox permission thing and who doesn’t love fiddling with permissions on a weekend.
Btw dropping a file into the file open dialog window also does not work when the program is installed as flatpack. Try explaining that to your mom and then think about why most people think linux is to complicated.
Also remember how you could drop a file instead of pasting its path? I just tried that to add the path of a video into a text file and it inserted the video into the text. Of course it froze the text editor. Great.
Also way too many times firefox opens a file then I drop it in instead of uploading it to the cloud storage I have opened and unzipping files by dragging them out of the archive manager is not possible for the last couple of years.
Honestly I don’t care about workarounds or if it’s a wayland, grnome or flatpack problem. These are basic functionality that I expect to just work
Funny I have the opposite experience.
I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!
I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.
Yeah I dont even use it. I open a terminal at my destination and do it through the cli. Though admittedly I don’t have any real use cases for dragging and dropping that can’t be worked around “easily”.
Yeah it’s always sucked and tbh the only place drag and drop has ever worked close to predictably is on the mac.
As someone who uses linux, mac and windows, if you rely on drag and drop working right you’re probably best served by using macos. Windows is a distant second but if you get familiar with its eccentricities then it’s doable too.
no
Op one of the reasons it’s frustrating for me to see so much focus put on flat packs, snaps, docker images and the like is that they manage to excel at doing their one expected thing, but throw everything else out by the wayside.
Frankly I think their prominence is a direct result of the way their goal is structured: make sure the “🚀getting started” section of the git/wiki works 100% of the time.
It’s a distillation of the poison ethos of technology companies dripping into the open source world. We are now moving fast and breaking things. Oh, the things we broke are the users environment? Well, it just so happens that we sell a premium product that integrates properly for a small subscription fee.
OFC somene who favors macos doesn’t understand dependency hell or general IT frustrations…
There’s a reason containers and immutable/atomic linux flavors have become popular… In fact, several. Good ones.
Static linked libraries shipped with software exchange dependency hell for environment inconsistency.
Extensive handlers and api calls can work around that, but then you start building the windows nt system all over again.
The reason atomic/immutable became popular is because two generations looked out upon the plains and wept because there were no more useful programming problems to solve but had to suck it up and manufacture some so they could solve them to pad their resumes in order to get faang internships.
Yep, just full-throatedly out here yelling how you don’t understand the problems being addresed…
I’m gonna go out on a very stable limb here and recognize that containers, immutability and atomic(ism?) are solutions to wildly different problems and the set of circumstances that allowed them to be viewed as acceptable approaches stem from the costs and reliability of storage and bandwidth and not from some form of correctness.
Now that at the very least storage and the memory required to page it are getting expensive, you can expect people to become more vocal about how badly implemented these solutions are, weather or not they’re able to actually articulate it in the face of you stamping your feet and saying “nuh-uh”, as I have, or not.
I can tee you up, holy warrior of containerization, immutability and atomicisation: any vague gestures towards security from the aforementioned technologies are made redundant by two frameworks and invalidated by the compromised web of trust our entire world relies upon using identity as authentication.
lol your ability to shit out words and demonstrate how deep your assumptions are is … hilarious.
The overhead on storage is hardly of consequence, especially for corporations. Otherwise even windows apps wouldn’t bundle so many dll’s next to the exe’s.
It’s not always about security. In larger deployed environments, even dependencies among the corporation’s own apps that they develop, let alone all apps they might need to use, might have different versions of dependencies to use. They might work with entirely different languages and frameworks.
Instead of loading up raw servers or VM’s with twenty external dependencies of potentially varying versions, which would quickly become a nightmare to administer, they just ship containers. Each app can do what ever the hell the team wants with what ever the hell versions of dependencies they want. It quickly becomes very important for ease of IT administration to just have little black boxes that have their defined ins and outs.
It’s usually much less important for an individual’s personally used computer, but it should still be easily understandable that some people do not like having to install several dependencies for one app (even when the package manager handles it 99% of the time these days). Especially if those dependencies create a lot of files here and there, or potentially interfere with other things installed. Maybe it’s as simple as an app they like requires Java 11, and they don’t want to install it across the entire OS.
Again, you’d have to be an absolute idiot to fail to realize that these problems and wants do exist for others.
dragon dragon
drop the dragon
drag and drop
now it’s in your head too
Flatpak:
Sucks
User:
Comes to linux community to complain
Maybe try submitting an issue to flatpak devs, contribute to it, or stop using it if it doesn’t work for you?
I never used flatpak and have no issues with drag and drop.
Don’t rule out Wayland potentially being part of þe problem. Wayland’s security model comes wiþ trade-offs. Maybe someday all þe kinks will be worked out, but þe Wayland security-first design decision has caused many issues for Wayland users wiþ functions like screen savers and clipboards over þe years, and any inter-app or global service process communication is a potential area for quirky behavior.
Wayland’s security model comes wiþ trade-offs.
I try not to be too quick to blame the security nerds, because I’m afraid they will shut off my access. (I joke. I love you all…and please don’t shut off my access.)
But it is probably the security nerd stuff. (Thank you for keeping me safe, security nerds.)
Try explaining that to your mom and then think about why most people think linux is to complicated.
My advice to my mom would be not to use flatpaks, because I know she wouldn’t be able to deal with the issues on her own.
Mmm. Sounds like the kind of thing that might be hard to explain or put someone off!
I don’t know if that’s really the way to go. I don’t even know if it’s a flatpack issue. Maybe it’s just this one program and the developer packaged it wrong. The archive manager is not a flatpack, so maybe it’s a completely different issue there or the same one and it’s unrelated to flatpacks at all. I have now idea and I should not have to, because, as I said, it’s a basic feature that worked for years and should still just do.
Why would you fixate on drag-and-drop specifically like it’s granted? If the software developer developed it, it’s supported; if it wasn’t developed, it doesn’t work. If you’re not happy, open a pull request. You have no right to demand features from open source developers even if you donate.
Portals. Ask app devs to fix stuff
Based on not knowing what your system looks like (OS, DE, how you’re moving files, where you’re moving them, etc), the first place I’d try is getting Flat Seal from the flatpak app store. It’s a permissions manager for flatpaks that might help you out. If you’re trying to move files into a folder that has escalated permissions, it may give you some problems. Try fiddling with the settings in Flat Seal.
I don’t really use flatpaks, so I couldn’t tell you exactly the setting to look at, sorry. Never had an issue with drag/drop myself.
honestly, a rant is a rant and I’d let it go, but the final, entitled “I expect it just to work” is a tad too much.
Steve Jobs vibes.
Software as a whole is getting overly complicated and details are commonly overlooked or missed. It sucks I agree.
This person is the only one who gets it.
OP isn’t looking for answers. They just want to complain. AND THAT’S FAIR! It is problematic. And it’s okay to vent.
It is a mess. There’s no easy solution or fix. We want there to be but we acknowledge that the strengths of Linux can also be weaknesses at times. It’s a heterogeneous ecosystem maintained be a myriad of volunteers and others and idiosyncrasies are a natural consequence.
We pick our battles. Linux brings so much power, but it’s not without some trade-offs. But we can all agree on one thing …
It’s a hell of a lot better than dealing with Windows.
Friends don’t let friends use [flatpak|snap|etc]
True, but for some reason in the software center flatpack often is the only option even when it’s also in the repository. Sure I could install that one using the command line but then we are back at workarounds. On the other hand, not using flatpacks is also just a workaround
Not sure if using the official package repos should count as a “workaround”…
It’s not as black and white as they say. Flatpak is not a bad choice per se but not without tradeoffs and they can come with catches like this because of the security model. There is no one-size-fits-everyone here. If you want all your apps to have access to everything your user does and value convenience over the sandboxing, flatpaks might not be the best choice for your situation. Also like for any repo with external third-party uploads, quality varies a lot between apps and maintainers on flathub. Some are excellent and some are in a sorry state. Before installing from fllathub its a good idea to some basic due diligence on the package and maintainer before jumping in.
I agree with the IanTwenty that the UX has room for improvement in making it more obvious what’s going on and making it easier to manage customizations and overrides. For the time being, getting comfortable with Flatseal and learning more about Flatpaks seems like the best way for a user to make it work for them if defaults don’t work out.
Flatpak has tradeoffs and whatever is on flathub is not guaranteed to always be your best pick. That doesn’t make it Bad. Going as far as calling them harmful in general is hyperbole. It can still be a great option for many users.
Sounds like your issue is mostly flatpak, to me.
Only issue I have with drag and drop is any wine game I am playing assumes the file is for them, and jumps to the foreground if the cursor passes over it while dragging. If I accidentally drop it, dragging stops working in the drag source app. Sure, this wouldn’t be an issue if I were not sharing and moving files mid-game, but that is my wont.
I said it and I’ll say it again.
Flatpack solves the wrong problem for the wrong people, stop recommending it, kill it with fire and spread the word.
Violates ISO as well.
I think it’s a good idea for closed source stuff, but the disadvantages of it are greater than its usefulness when an app can be easily compiled for the distro.
I see this with flatpaks, the solution might be to grant permission to the app to the part of the filesystem your dragging from with flatseal/cmdline.
HOWEVER I do think the desktop is missing a pop-up which offers to do this for you when it happens. This is how android does it when an app needs access outside its own files, you just get a prompt to allow it.
This is the sandbox future - it’s safer and you can trust that apps can’t go snooping around your system but users shouldn’t need to fiddle with perms all the time to get stuff done.
I think Apple has the best sandbox UX. By default sandboxed apps have access to zero of your files. It can’t even see they exist. It’s only granted access to any file/directory the user manually selects through a system UI - opening through file type associations, the open/save dialogs, or drag & drop. This means that access is given seamlessly, there aren’t any prompts, and the user doesn’t even realize there’s a sandbox. If the program wants to manage a project, just have the user select the folder and all the sub-contents are also granted.
Gnome is going through growing pains right now.
I think it discovered it needed to use a different X/Y definition to be true to itself, or something.
KDE seems okay.
Aaah - so this is the reason why Elisa, which I installed through flatpak is like : «I dont know how to play this file, I can only play audio files» when i try to drag&drop wavs/oggs to it. Yes, hundred percent agree - this is unacceptable behaviour when it comes to ux. I hope it will be fixed.
