Category: Linux

tip-toeing into the future of linux package management — flatpak

whbeebe2 Comments

Ever since I started to work with Linux back in the early 1990s, package management was always an important issue, and a number of times, a big hassle. Over the years the various package managers sorted themselves out and consolidate so that the two major ones were deb for Debian based distributions and rpm for Redhat, SuSE, and other distributions that adopted the RPM package management system. The problem, however, is that all the distributions don’t always install the latest major packages.

If you want the latest  you usually pick a bleeding-edge distribution such as Fedora, with the guarantee that as long as you stay with the latest Fedora release you’re guaranteed the latest or very near-latest. Other distributions, such as Linux Mint 21.1, will ship with what the upstream distribution, which is Ubuntu 22.04, shipped with. Case in point is LibreOffice. Linux Mint 21 shipped with LibreOffice version 7.2. The problem with this is two-fold; the current release of LibreOffice is 7.5, and the LibreOffice developers have advised everyone to step up to 7.5, especially if you have 7.4 or earlier. The Linux Mint maintainers won’t do that, and I have no desire to add yet another PPA in order to get the latest LibreOffice version.

To solve this version mismatch I uninstalled everything involved in the original LibreOffice installation, then installed the flatpak package version of LibreOffice. Once installed I opened it and checked the version.

Sure enough I had the latest version, with all the new features and bug fixes. You’ll note that LibreOffice for personal use is now called LibreOffice Community, the version being distributed for free non-commercial (i.e. not within a business) use. LibreOffice has a link ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/ ) for businesses wanting to use LibreOffice, calling it LibreOffice Enterprise. I think it’s a great idea.

Once installed I performed a quick check and discovered I’d lost nothing as far as functionality is concerned. All the individual applications are still in the flatpak, and from what I can tell all the functionality within the applications I am most interested in using (Writer, Calc (spreadsheet) and Impress (presentation)) are still fully functional.

While each individual LibreOffice application is broken out and available as such in the menu, I prefer to just start the overall LibreOffice application and then start from there. It’s just a nice way to keep everything organized.


I’ve been using LibreOffice for some time now, and I have to admit that this is the best looking, best polished version yet. Having the application in a flatpak means I can keep up with the current version, regardless of what version of Linux Mint I use. Because of the way LibreOffice flatpak has worked, I’m looking for flatpak versions of a number of other applications that are installed via apt, and replacing those to keep up with the latest.

what browser should i use on linux?

whbeebe2 Comments

The changes that Google is getting ready to roll out for Chrome, that will effect add blocking via third party extensions, is growing close. I’ve placed links at the bottom to help explain many of these issues in greater detail. Meanwhile, I’ll discuss why I see it effecting my browser choice.

Google Chrome uses the Blink browser engine. So do other browsers, including but not limited to, Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera. I’ve been an almost exclusive user of Vivaldi on macOS, Linux and Windows (while I ran Windows), falling back to Safari (macOS) and Chrome when I needed to check an odd behavior. One browser that does not use Blink, but that I’ve avoided for some time now, has been Firefox. I’ve avoided Firefox because of UI changes it’s made that, to be honest, annoyed the crap out of me. The worst UI change, in my opinion, was from tabs to buttons across the top of the browser. Apple tried this design idea with a beta version of Safari, but got so much grief over that change that they put regular tabs back, and put a toggle in the browser settings page to select that “advanced” feature if that’s what you wanted.

I’m back to considering Firefox because I can no longer trust what will happen to Blink, and by its association, to Vivaldi in particular. I feel Vivaldi is excellent, but if they continue to use Blink (and honestly they couldn’t switch if they wanted to) then I really don’t want to use Vivaldi. That’s why I’m beginning to move back to Firefox on Linux Mint, starting with fixing the one UI feature I can’t stand — new-style button tabs.

There’s a link at the bottom to a question asked about how to fix the button tab issue, followed by a number of answers. I’m going to paraphrase that answer and show what solution I settled on. Here are the steps I took, and what it looked like along the way on my end.

  • Open about:config
  • Search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
  • Double-click the value to set it to true

  • Open about:support
  • Search for Profile Directory
  • Click Open Directory

Opening the path shown will put you immediately into the profile directory. In that directory create a folder called chrome, and then navigate into chrome. Inside the chrome folder create a new file called userChrome.css

Open the empty file, and then copy and paste the following:

.tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) var(--tab-border-radius) 0 0 !important;  margin-top: 1px !important;  margin-bottom: 0 !important;  padding-bottom: 31px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true]:not([selected=true]) .tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) !important;  margin-top: 2px !important;  margin-bottom: 1px !important;  padding-bottom: 29px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[selected=true] .tab-background ,.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true] .tab-background {  background-color: var(--toolbar-bgcolor) !important;  background-image: var(--toolbar-bgimage) !important;}

Save what you just pasted into userChrome.css, then exit and restart Firefox. You’ll then have normal tabs back.

You might well ask yourself why must I go to this much trouble? I don’t have a definitive answer for you, but I can imagine that a singular developer decided to do it this way, and they were in their own little echo chamber/bubble that reinforced that decision. As I wrote earlier Apple tried this and got soundly beaten back, to the point that Safari was released with Plain Old Tabs. But at least you have an ability to actually fix the Firefox tabs issue.

It’s surprising how much better I like Firefox with this one change. Believe it or not I now feel comfortable leaving all other browsers and moving back into using Firefox.

Links