Investigate more user friendly application installs for Crostini
Reported by
edurmac...@gmail.com,
Nov 18
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Issue descriptionUserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 11151.29.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.49 Safari/537.36 Platform: 11151.29.0 (Official Build) beta-channel eve Steps to reproduce the problem: As a user, I want do download a Linux Application, make it executable, and run! As simple as that. And it is possible. What is the expected behavior? .AppImage files can be downloaded and run without installation or the need for root rights nor additional dependencies. What went wrong? https://appimage.org/ Apparently there is no fuse support inside the linux container. Did this work before? N/A Chrome version: 71.0.3578.49 Channel: beta OS Version: 11151.29.0 Flash Version: 31.0.0.148 Linux support inside ChromeOS is a huge step to bring powerfull desktop applications to the ChromeOS ecosystem. But installing some of the most useful applications is still a pain. Installing apps like InkScape, Scribus, DarkTable and other requires the user to install software via terminal, to resolve dependencies and to use different package installers. AppImage would be a great addition to ChromeOS since it is just a matter of Download & Execute. The package has all dependencies. It requires fuse(which I believe will be supported soon).
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Nov 19
not sure the format has hit critical mass yet. prob want to focus on more popular formats first like flatpak.
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Nov 19
Just my 2 cents: I agree AppImage perhaps is not so popular as flatpak YET. In the other hand, it is much simpler for the user to Run linux applications. It would be the equivalent to the DMG and EXE formats. Please see some comparatives among Flatpak, Snap and AppImage (attached).
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Nov 19
Can the motivation for supporting AppImage or Flatpak be explained more thoroughly (here or in a doc)? I'm happy to say that we already have support for .deb files which can be installed from the Files App without entering anything into the command line. BTW We have some kind of FUSE support.
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Nov 21
it's discussed in the Crostini PRD, and we've had long discussions in meetings on the topic. supporting a specific distro (Debian's .deb) is not equiv to supporting a standalone format like flatpak. you can read "why flatpak" on its wikipedia & homepage. i'm not sure what you're referring to wrt FUSE. we don't support it in containers (yet), and even if we did, it's not really relevant to this topic as it's not an application format. it'd be like saying "since Windows supports NTFS, it doesn't need the MSI format for installing apps".
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Nov 21
My main point was making it very simple for the average user of a Chromebook to use Linux Apps. Most users don't have a clue of how to use linux, specially in terminal mode. To me, the idea of adopting linux was a strategical action to give Chrome OS the ability to execute full-fledged linux apps(including Android Studio which I loved), filling the gap of more powerfull tools running locally. But 99% of the chromebook users don't know how to use linux. Expecting them to use apt-get and flatpak is actually restricting linux to people with linux experience. .deb is interesting, but 4 out of 5 .deb files I have tried to install just didn't work.
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Nov 22
Sorry I misunderstood the state of FUSE on Crostini. I was responding to the above "It requires fuse(which I believe will be supported soon)." I was under the impression that our file mounting code used FUSE. The PRD is fairly brief on Flatpak, I look forward to hearing specifics.
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Nov 29
<triage>Renaming and assigning to tom</triage> |
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Comment 1 by dtapu...@chromium.org
, Nov 19