atmur

Same, it’s even better the second time.

100% agree. Snaps are kind of neat for server stuff (easiest setup of Nextcloud I’ve ever done, even though I switched to Docker in the end), but man the desktop experience is god awful.

I had to setup an Ubuntu VM at work to run something I couldn’t do on the Windows host, I tried to open Firefox and it took ages to start. I literally began trying to troubleshoot why it wasn’t opening before it finally started. Completely unusable and I have no idea why Canonical thinks this is an actual competitor to Flatpak.

Having to prefix commands with “flatpak run org.whoever.whatever…” gets old quickly, and setting aliases to get around it isn’t user friendly. It’s certainly possible, it’s just not practical (which may have been a better word to use than “feasable” in my first comment).

I’m in the camp of thinking Flatpaks are definitely the future for GUI applications. While there are definitely cons…

1. CLI applications are not feasible as Flatpaks. This isn’t what Flatpak is designed for, standard package management will still be needed here.

2. Dependency duplication wastes storage space, but I’m personally willing to give up a couple GBs for the benefits I get.

3. Developers might package their application incorrectly. This is possible, but it hasn’t caused any notable issues for me in the 2 years that I’ve been primarily using Flatpaks.

4. As far as I’m aware, Flatpak doesn’t have a way to allow applications to set udev rules. This generally doesn’t matter, but for something like Steam Input, you will need to install the steam-devices package or setup udev rules manually so it can manage your controllers. Google’s Android Flash Tool also doesn’t work out of the box in the Chrome Flatpak last I checked.

…The pros more than outweigh these (in my opinion at least).

1. Non-distro-specific packaging means you can use Flatpaks on whatever distro you want. You can have more up-to-date applications on stable distros like Debian, or on smaller distros that don’t have the resources to package every application possible. Rather than Red Hat spending a significant amount of time packaging LibreOffice for RHEL/Fedora, they can just rely on the Flatpak and spend time on more important elements of the distro itself. There’s also Bottles, which enters dependency hell if packaged incorrectly, they had a blog post about this a while ago.

2. Application files are stored in one place in ~/.var/app. For some apps this doesn’t matter, but it keeps applications like Steam from cluttering up your home directory with random game saves and other garbage. This also makes backups easier since you already know where all applications keep their files.

3. It makes immutable distros actually usable, which I believe will be the future for some use cases.

4. Permissions management. Even if no one is setting privileges for their applications correctly right now, having the groundwork for this in place will be important if more proprietary applications are going to be ported to Linux in the future.

I like the chart idea and while you have excellent taste in racing games, I did make my own with some adjustments, lol

For “Best driving in a non-racing game” I was tempted to put BeamNG, but whether or not that counts as a “racing” game is up for debate. I think ETS2 is a safe bet.

https://i.imgur.com/ktsTMv2.png

Racing games are by far my favorite genre, I don’t think I could pick an absolute favorite, so I’m just gonna ramble for a bit.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 through Carbon are fondly remembered for a reason, they still stand up so well today. Outside of the golden era of NFS, Hot Pursuit (2010), The Run, Most Wanted (2012), Heat, and Unbound (absolute trash update today, nevermind on Unbound) are very good as well. Other games in the series are good too (I’m a strong defender of Rivals despite it being objectively subpar), but I’d consider these to be the highlights.

The Burnout series is excellent, especially Takedown, Revenge, and Paradise.

Forza Motorsport 4 and Forza Horizon 1 are the absolute peak of that franchise, absolutely beautiful games, I love the atmosphere and career pacing.

The PGR series is great as well, and only got better with every title. PGR4 (the last one) is amazing. This team also developed Blur before shutting down, basically Mario Kart with real cars, which is massively underrated.

The Flatout games (1 and 2, we don’t talk about 3 and 4 is eh) are great. Bugbear also developed Wreckfest, which is a spiritual successor that improves on the original in almost every way.

Driver: San Francisco is one of the greatest games ever made, and I’ll never forgive Ubisoft for abandoning the series.

The Motorstorm games are great, and Evolution Studios also worked on the excellent Driveclub before being bought and merged into Codemasters (and later EA…)

Enthusia is another super underrated one, really unique progression system that encourages you to drive interesting cars instead of the fastest.

The DiRT and GRID franchises have some great entries as well, especially DiRT 2/3 and GRID 1/2. Codemasters also developed FUEL, which I think held the title of biggest video game world for a long time (it might still if you don’t count stuff like Flight Simulator).

Split/Second is excellent despite its shitty PC port.

There’s a bunch of great indies as well, Distance, Redout, Inertial Drift, Horizon Chase Turbo.

There are lots more, Midnight Club, Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo, Test Drive, but this comment is way too long as-is… It is also fairly depressing that most of these are dead franchises, and/or aren’t available to purchase anymore due to licensing expiration.