I’ve had no problems with the Discord flatpak and updates. I use a KDE variant of UBlue and the package manager prompts me to update all flatpaks when I start the computer (whenever there are updates available), which I do with one click.

For a new user, i would think that individually managing package updates is probably not a desired workflow.

Oh, that’s very interesting. I knew about flak in the military context, but never realized it was the same word used in the idiom. The idiom actually makes a lot more sense now.

You’re getting a lot of flack in these comments, but you are absolutely right. All the concerns people have raised about “AI” and the recent wave of machine learning tech are (mostly) valid, but that doesn’t mean AI isn’t incredibly effective in certain use cases. Rather than hating on the technology or ignoring it, the FOSS community should try to find ways of implementing AI that mitigate the problems, while continuing to educate users about the limitations of LLMs, etc.

What instructions or guides do you recommend?

You need to use amdgpu-pro, according to the page here. I tried installing the pro drivers on Linux Mint a few weeks ago and still couldn’t get hardware acceleration in Handbrake to work, but it might be worth a shot.

The project linked is a fork of the version on F-Driod. You can download the APK directly from the Github and use it just fine.

Does WhatsApp not work at all on Graphene OS or do you just need to enable Google Play services for it to work? (I do understand why you personally may not want to enable the Play services, but I’m just curious about the potential capabilities).

Thanks for the additional reading and information. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I hear about a security vulnerability in “processor microcode” or packages or other software basically every day. As a relatively non-technical user, it’s always very difficult to tell how much these things actually matter for normal users. Flatpaks are incredibly convenient because they “just work” and are easily compatible with immutable distributions. For better or worse, I suspect many people are not going to be dissuaded from using them by hypothetical/abstract security risks.

Can you say more or provide a source on why you shouldn’t use a browser as a Flatpak? Is it just because the sandboxing is potentially weaker?

It’s hard to explain until you’ve used it, but in my experience I think this is much different than a traditional Linux distro. Every other distro I’ve tried has (to some extent) dependencies that can get out of whack, configuration drift that makes it hard to get things to work sometimes, random codecs or drivers or other things you need to install to get a system working as it should, etc. In the “cloud native” model, all the packages, drivers, etc. are built and tested in the cloud. So when they arrive on your machine, they “just work” and updates are handled automatically - it’s great. Maybe not great for tinkerers, but great for regular users who just want to use their computer.

They need to work on their branding. “Cloud Native” triggers images of subscription services and data mining. But the idea here is that the whole OS and its components are all sort of containerized, so you can just pull pre-configured “cloud” images that are guaranteed to work out of the box to your machine.

I guess so. I hit the grub menu when booting and I see the image version changing there as well.

I think Ublue is only set to automatically check for updates once per day. If there were only a few updates available, it’s possible your system just didn’t check yet that day.

See if your /etc/rpm-ostreed.conf has automatic updates set to “stage.” I think that should be the default.

See update section in this FAQ, which tells you what config disables automatic updates.