On Fri, 2020-11-27 at 14:49 -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dario Faggioli <dfaggioli@suse.com> wrote:
So now the user is happy, because he/she can install GNOME extensions right away, but is also mad, because he/she needs two Firefox-es installed, if wanting to watch Netflix. :-(
I personally am all but sure about what we should do about all this.
So, again, thoughts? :-)
My perspective would be to ship Firefox as an RPM. Unfortunately, the pitfall we have right now is that we don't have a good mechanism for someone to add codecs to the system. This is a general problem we have to solve at some point, but the particularly nasty issue with Firefox is that we only have one option: Packman.
Yes, that is true. In the specific case of MicroOS Desktop though, adding codecs to the system may very well not be necessary. For instance, it has not been for me, and it's now quite a while that I use it as my daily driver. Now, of course it's not like every user is/will be me and is/will be doing the same things I do, but thanks to the fact that the Firefox flatpak has codecs already, a good chunk of them may very well be in this situation that they will never need to add Packamn for anything. And considering that one of the main selling point of this thing (at least one of my main selling points :-)) is that you don't need external repositories that, once added, makes the base OS different from what is developed and tested with OpenQA and hence less reliable, etc, etc, I'm super reluctant to give up on this! Sure, if there would be a package in the main repos that I should include in the GNOME Desktop pattern and, with it, h264 & friends would work out of the box on RPM Firefox, that would be a no-brainer. But that, 1) is not the case, and 2) is not something I can work on trying to make it the case right now. :-(
I think this might have been easier to solve if we had a similar arrangement with Cisco[0] to ship OpenH264 codecs to openSUSE users and preload the repo configuration for that on openSUSE systems.
Eheh, indeed!
We could then have YaST pull it in at install-time. That would fix Firefox for H.264. And combined with fdk-aac-free[1], that would be sufficient to solve this dilemma. Firefox can use both of these to support WebRTC and other web video playback.
[0]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264 [1]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fdk-aac-free
Yes, in fact, I have now checked and confirmed, in my VM, that the RPM Firefox that come preinstalled with Silverblue can indeed play Netflix. :-) Thanks for the feedback and for the links. I knew that the situation was kind of like that on Fedora, but this gave me the excuse for going and actually trying it first hand. :-D So, they can install GNOME extensions and watch video streaming out of the box. Us, currently, we need to: flatpak install org.mozilla.Firefox to watch videos and: transactional-update pkg install <browser_of_choice_but_beware_that_if_its_Firefox_you_will_have_two_instances_of_them> && \ systemctl reboot to instal extensions. I'm fine with users having to do the former (until we manage to add flatpaks during install, but that's another story). I'm not fine with the user having to do both. Therefore, I'm leaning toward preventing them to have to do the latter, by doing it ourself... At least for now, as a short term solution. Of course, that does not mean that seeking a better solution is not important! Quite the opposite. But I believe we need a step-gap. Thanks and Regards -- Dario Faggioli, Ph.D http://about.me/dario.faggioli Virtualization Software Engineer SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- <<This happens because _I_ choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)