Desktop Portals Changed The Linux Desktop Forever

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desktop portals for spawning a desktop specific filebrowser is an amazing idea and shouldve happened like 20 years ago.
hopefully no more scuffed gtk electron browsers.

I really hope the wlroots keybind portal works similar to sxhkd with a config file.

Holy S**t! This video is very educative!

He turned himself into a portal funniest shit ever

I forgot where I saw it but someone said desktop portals are the desktop api Linux was missing. Flatpak and portals gives developers a single platform to target regardless of distro/desktop and I hope it leads to less apps targeting a specific distro (like Ubuntu LTS) and just ship an official well tested Flatpak for everyone.

Thanks for clearing up some things for me.

Speaking of dbus, I remember at a job I had before where we used skype for business and on linux we used pidgin. Pidgin didn't support notifications when you received a message but it did post a dbus event when it received a message. I just used an application that listens to events that a program posts to find this event.
So to add notifications to pidgin I just created a small 10 line python script that listened to that event and then displayed that message as a notification. Very nice way to add functionality to software without actually having to read the software source code or understand the software itself.
In some ways it feels like linux does software much better than other os' (freedesktop standards, mpris, portals, etc also applies to this).

I love your explanations. Great video, great work! 👏

100th like

ok! and where is the bus taking us? Or should I say: stop the bus and let me off and please do not throw me under the bus.... LOL

People Before 2015: running virtual machine in virtual machine in virtual machine
People After 2015: running sandbox in sandbox in sandbox

So what you've said is that Wayland is becoming a platform for Flatpak bloat - which is good to know and, in my case, one more reason not to use Wayland given that Xorg still works just fine and dandy for me anyway.

Desktop portals for Wayland are great and it would be absolutely awful to just allow apps to do anything, like capturing your keyboard. If the Linux desktop wants to claim it is most secure it definitely has to continue further implanting containerisation and permission management. Right now macOS is leading in that field, especially with the latest macOS Ventura update with apps have to ask for anything and even new USB devices have to be approved first they before they can be activated.
I see the whole portal system as a move in the right direction for sure.

the whiteboard for this episode should read "Thinking with Portals" :)

No, Wayland shouldn't let any app silently capture keyboard or take screenshots willy-nilly. A lot of the functionality of portals does not make sense on a display server protocol. So, I'm glad portals are separate. And that they exist. And work quite well ;)

The more I learn about Flatpaks , the more I like them. I hope to helps to standardized the desktop and make it easier to port apps to all distros, which would mean more developers and more users for Linux on the desktop!!

ok brodie, so riddle you that... is today's whiteboard riddle a result of you recenty playing the classic og lucasfim game 'loom'? because at the end of that game i believe the final musical spell he casts is something like that. and then he turns into a dove and flys away

Interesting

I had to touch some desktop portal stuff because I was using artix Linux and wanted to use something that works on arch with systemd. Definitely great for standardizing permissions

linux: thinking with portals

speaking of flatpaks, how would I even go about using h.264 for OBS 29 right now? I see the 20.08 KDE extra is there but OBS just isn't using it. I'm using GStreamer 264 as the recording tool. No idea if that's going to throw another wrench in.
Result after fix: G-streamer is broken with no encoder but base Navi encoders are no longer crashing my Wayland session. Neat.

I've been using flatpaks for about 3 months but until now I didn't realize that when I click file->open in my Firefox it opens the KDE file chooser. That's awesome!

By the way, use flatseal to give permissions to apps. I give permission to access all files to all open source apps that I use with files to avoid problems.

Flatpaks has made installation of apps on Linux, easier than installation on Windoze.

It would be awesome if Linux had an UI portal as abstraction for different toolkits or some sort of meta GUI toolkit. No more alien looking applications, regardless of desktop choice.

so its like a flutter for multiple linux DEs

great video as always. totally unrelated to it tho, do you know about python-pep517 being removed from the AUR? I have not looked into it but paru said something along the lines it is not found in the AUR last time I did a full upgrade

Thinking ~ I don't know much about portals, but I am learning about flat-pacs, and the size and frequency of updates they can require.

If you're going to have a sandbox / container running in gnome, that can load and run KDE aps, then that also requires pretty much the complete KDE desktop to be packaged with your ap.
So ~ for example, I have a Mate desktop, and I have about 8 ~ 10 flatpac aps. So I do updates and I get a list of updates for the KDE_flatpac_platform, which is 600 MB, and I get a set of updates for the gnone_flatpac_platform, that are 500 MB, and I get a list of updates for the nVidia driver, not the one I'm running, there are 3 of them, and one is for a 2 year old version, and one is for a one year old version, and one is for the current version, and they total 400MB ~ 500MB and 700MB - all so I can run a flatpac version of tetris. My updates this morning totalled about 1.6 Giga Bytes - mostly for flatpacs I didn't even know I had, and it included 3 different versions of the nVidia driver stack ~ not one. I had downloaded 2 GB and was starting on my 2nd coffee before I opened a browser to check my junk-mail.
I don't know, I'm not saying any of this is a deal breaker, but I have been preaching for 15 years about how wonderful Linux is, and pointing out ways and reasons it's hugely better than Windows, and many of these latest developments seem to be trying as their whole purpose, to break and corrupt and defeat and expunge all those advantages. Everything we have learned over 2 decades, to hate about Microsoft, is now coming to Linux.

Is there a portal that will allow a Flatpak app to access the Flatpak API and manage Flatpaks so that a Flatpak app store frontend can ship as a Flatpak?

Portals are a hack to make Wayland actually work for the desktop, masquerading as a standard communication platform. Flatpaks are fundamentally insecure because their sandbox is fake.

Portals are a solution that is only happening now because the problem didn't exist until they tried to isolate everything and then discovered that some things aren't really meant to be quite that isolated. And they're still far from a comprehensive solution (e.g. will still not solve the problems Firefox has as a Snap).

I've been interested in D-BUS for a while now, and honestly, I've been wondering why the Wayland protocol couldn't just be built on top of it. Loads of GUI processes like taskbar icons and menus were communicated via dbus, and Accessibility feature such as screen readers & UI automation works thru it. Having Wayland be based on dbus just sounds like a natural conclusion. Both of them already work via unix sockets, so why not?

This is my first time hearing about it. I probably don't use them unless my system came with them pre-installed.

So it's not desktop-specific… but it's D-Bus-specific instead. What if you don't want to use D-Bus? </troll> 😀

keep waving those arms around..... you must love looking silly.

Flatpak are not truly sandboxed.

can you zoom-in this background figures? im curious to who they are

i remember that once upon a day, i installed dolphin on ubuntu while using the unity interface, because i dont like nautilus very much (especially the broken zoom-in feature that put one file per line if you try to zoom-in too much to see the thumbnails in a higher resolution, the padding between each file icon and name get so big that it only fits one file per line, its ridiculous that the pading scaling bug took years to be fixed if it ever was...)

anyway, i tried dolphin but it didnt run well, i cant remember what the issue was, but once i uninstalled it i got an bug of firefox.
im used to download stuff then click to show the folder where the file is... but this funcion wasnt working after i installed an second file manager (dolphin) and it didnt stoped working once i uninstalled it.
i couldnt find the solution to this bug "to save my life" (if my life depends on it i would be dead), the only way to solve it was reinstalling the whole system (and it didnt worth it).


now i think i know what the solution was... xdg portals... if i research how to set up it to the default again...

Moved to flatpak apps as my primary method now. Allows my base OS to be A immutable and B much more stable and easy to troubleshoot. (fewer packages that could have been the issue, more standard installation tends to have more online discussed problems, etc).

Brilliant vid, thank you.

I don't know what I am doing here. I just had a tiny problem with my windows pc some time ago... and it went all weird and now I basically build my operating system and stick images of penguins on all of my equipment...wtf...

I really like that we're getting something in the realm of standardization for the Linux Desktop.
I think this is the direction to go, to make the fragmentation aspect of the Linux Desktop not a problem anymore and focus on the great part, that you can choose what you like best and have it still work, like if you choose another desktop, distro, etc.
This creates a system, where one can write software for linux and have it work with everything correctly, by just implementing the correct portals as it puts a common level between applications, so they can easily work together.
An example of something I really liked when moving to Linux from Windows was MPRIS, because you could simply control your different variations of media players from one central hub and see information about what is currently playing. Windows 10 sort of has that, but last time I tried it, it only worked with spotify and the UI wasn't great.

Sandboxes - when you use Arch but KISS gets too boring.

I don't want my processes talking to each other. Its like walking around knocking on doors in the middle of the night asking for money 🤣

Thank you so much! Now all the pieces are finally coming together in my mind regarding what the heck are all these portals about and why Wayland is so helpless without them.