I get what you’re saying, but at the same time if every developer released software as pre-compiled binaries on their website, installing stuff on Linux would become such a PITA. (This is different from how Windows works because apps for Windows are distributed using installers like xxx.msi, and Linux does not have a unified installation system across distros)
I’ve had the opposite experience, and started using Flatpaks after running into dependency conflicts once or twice when updating my system. Though I admit I’ve run into bugs with Flatpaks as well, just nothing as painful as a dependency conflict.
It’s impossible to know for sure whether you are tracked or not, but even the most basic fingerprinting mechanisms check browser version, and Reddit has advanced fingerprinting mechanisms to detect ban evasion. Couple that with the fact that 90% of my searches led me to Reddit, and it’s easy to conclude that Reddit correlated all my visits using my fingerprint, and thus has a history of all the things I have searched and been interested in for the past year, and sold that to Google. And Google has enough data on me from back when I used to use Google services, that they were probably able to link that activity to my real identity.
It sounds as though you were aware of this bug already. How did you find out? Did you notice it yourself or was there a notification somewhere?
You are right I should have linked directly to the workaround, sorry. Glad you got it sorted out though.
Technically rollbacks are possible using regular packages, but in practice multiple packages will share dependencies and prevent you from downgrading just one of them. This is why it’s important that Flatpaks isolate dependencies between apps.
Are you saying that this bug would have been reported there? I don’t think I ever saw it, and I honestly doubt it was ever posted there. Unless you’re talking about the browser update announcements, but I would still need to check the Help > About page of my browser to notice that it didn’t match the latest version. As mentioned in my post, the Flatpak was updating like usual, the updates just weren’t affecting the browser.
Really, the main reason I made the post was to see if anybody else was affected, and see how other people avoided the bug. And aside from one other user, it really seems like nobody else was affected, which is surprising to me. The only reasons I can come up with are:
Based on the comments I suspect #1 is the main cause. Which makes me lose trust in Flatpaks quite a bit. After all, if nobody is using them, then maintainers have less incentive to maintain them, and the worse they get.
Wow nice. Still not really friendly to beginners, since this is something they would have to dig into documentation to find, but it’s good to know
switch to the old.reddit.com site (onion version tends to work more often), and if that doesn’t work, switch Tor circuits (the option is under Tor Browser menu bar, I have it pinned to the top-bar for convenience)
Not to mention:
This was an official Flatpak from Tor Browser, so there’s no reason why it should be less reliable than the packages from distribution maintainers. Not to mention for atomic distros, flatpaks are the official way to install software.
You can check the Tor Project blog to figure out the latest release, and go to your Tor Browser’s menu > Help > About Tor Browser to see if it matches. It should be version 14.0.7. If it is not, the fix is detailed in the Github issue I linked in the post
This seems like something that Flatpak should be able to handle though. Afaik Mullvad Browser never had this issue. Flatpaks also have numerous advantages, like automatically handling desktop shortcuts.
I hope so, Flatpaks are becoming the default way of installing packages, especially with the rise of atomic distros.
Done, reposted to [email protected] and [email protected]. Though maybe [email protected] was unnecessary because this post is already on the lemmy.ml instance…
Ah my mistake, yes a social media post or blog post would have been nice