You Can't Contain Me, You Can Only Hope to Stop Me

Robert W. Gehl, 09 November 2025

Installing a new flavor of Linux used to be fun.

But today? I'm going to admit I'm getting a bit disheartened. I really felt it yesterday. My partner's laptop, which was running Manjaro with KDE, was experiencing some problems. For some reason, LibreOffice's spellcheck stopped working. While the computer had all the dictionaries installed, LibreOffice Writer simply wouldn't load them. Then, as I worked on that (and I think I fixed it), Zotero would no longer communicate with LibreOffice, even though the two were working together flawlessly for at least a year.

I decided, in the end, that the problem was Manjaro. I like Manjaro and the idea of rolling releases, but over time they get very buggy. I've talked to other folks and they've said the same: eventually, rolling releases pile up so many changes to their underlying packages that they start to have serious bugs. My partner's Manjaro install was simply showing its age.

So I decided to install a new OS on my partner's laptop. Normally, I get pumped when I get to install a fresh version of Linux.

But this time? This time, I felt trepidation.

This post is a reflection on a pretty big shift in the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream: a shift away from when Linux was fun to a time when its nerve-wracking. Warning, it gets really whiny and weedy. Sorry. But I gotta vent sometimes, yeah?

I see three main reasons why I am now far less excited about installing Linux on a machine:

• The proliferation of containers
• The transition to Wayland
• Microsoft's Secure Boot

Containers

Let me give my positive take on Snaps and Flatpaks: in certain cases, they're great. For example, both my partner and I have to use Zoom. It sucks, I know, but we need it for work. So when I see Zoom is available on Linux distros as a Snap or a Flatpak, I gladly take that version. I don't really want Zoom interacting with my system all that much, so having it in a Snap is perfectly great.

However, Snaps and Flatpaks are really, really starting to grate on me in other situations.

I'll offer a somewhat weedy, but illustrative, example. This blog uses SASS to handle CSS processing. I do that because SASS supports variables, so changing my CSS is very simple. But when I rewrote my static site generator in Python, I ran into a Snap-related problem. On both my office desktop and laptop computers, the only way I can run a SASS processor is via the Dart SASS snap. It's not provided as an APT package (I'm using KDE Neon, which is downstream from Ubuntu).

Ok, no big deal. Just use a Python OS call to run a 'dart-sass' Bash command to process my .SCSS files. But... the Dart SASS snap won't work on files outside my Home directory. That's because it's containerized -- it does not have permission to do so. That might not seem like a big deal, except I keep my website files on a separate partition. All my other programs -- text editors, browsers -- can work with the files, but a low-level SASS processor application can't do it!

Ok, again, no big deal: just give the Dart SASS snap permission to read files outside the Home directory. That breaks containerization, but so be it; I have work to do.

And yet, there is no way to modify the Dart SASS snap to read outside of ~/home. Many Snaps (and Flatpaks) have a means to add such permissions, but this one... doesn't. I should be able to give the snap permission with

sudo snap connect dart-sass:removable-media

but it appears that this isn't such a 'plug' available.

So, I had to write a convoluted section of my Python site processor that moves my .SCSS files to a temporary folder on my ~/home directory, processes them there, moves them back into my working directory (on the partition), and then deletes the temporary directory. It works, but can you imagine how nervous I am about scripting something that deletes files from my home directory? And what about my other computers, ones where my HTML and SCSS files are in my ~/home directory? On them, the section of Python that moves files around adds pointless complexity.

That's a bit of an extreme example. Not to just pick on Snaps -- I've had milder headache with Flatpaks, as well. For example, these days Zotero is often distributed as a Flatpak, which makes connecting it to LibreOffice for cite-while-you-write functionality a lot more complicated. I've turned to this guide a few times for help, and while it works, it's a lot more complicated than it used to be a few years ago.

Snaps and Flatpaks also have other pain points: the update system for Snaps does not respect my system's notifications. The Signal Snap often interrupts me to announce that it needs to be closed to be updated (in 13 days -- it's an emergency!), and the notification just won't go away. It stays there until I click on it. That's completely unlike all other system notifications.

Flatpaks got the nickname "Fatpacks" because they are huge. They take up a great deal of disk space. For those of us interested in preventing old computers from going to landfills, that's a problem: the assumption that we have oodles of gigs of storage space may not hold true.

And none of this is to mention that these containerized apps often look very different from my desktop environment. Some of them don't respect the scaling of the desktop, and most don't have the same windows.

So now, when I install a new Linux OS, I am very, very careful about Snaps and Flatpaks: do I really want the headaches of dealing with these? Do I want to dig through countless folders to find that one config file I need to edit to get this thing to work with other applications? Do I want to install other tools (e.g., Flatseal) to make these things work? Is there any point in all this pain if I'm just going to have to give these apps so many permissions it negates the original idea of containerization?

The Transition to Wayland Does Not Go Well, Enterprise

I am in no way devoted to the X11 desktop. My understanding is that it is showing its age, hence the efforts to build Wayland as a graphical display server.

I am also vaguely aware of the political disputes happening in this area, with an alt-right group making their own X11 fork to keep their desktops with X and, somehow, stop DEI. (Yeah, no. As soon as I hear someone bemoaning DEI I want to have nothing to do with them.)

The history and politics of X/Wayland is interesting, but I don't know enough about it to comment. All I know is that many of the desktop environments I've been using are increasingly relying on Wayland, and stuff is breaking. I suspect the issue is Wayland, though I can't be sure.

Some days, it's the clipboard -- things won't cut and paste. Some days, its Plasma shell, which crashed. Other days I have to dig into Flatseal to switch things from Wayland to X to keep an application from instantly crashing.

I've seen so many graphics papercuts recently it seems clear to me that it's going to take a while to work out the bugs in Wayland. I'm confident this will happen, but it's starting to feel a bit like the late 2000s when I was struggling to get various wi-fi chips to work with Linux: am I going to have to research a problem and solve it when I switch OSes? What's going to break on my partner's computer?

Microsoft, c'mon already

The other factor leading to my stress about new Linux installs is Microsoft.

A couple years ago, my partner started volunteering at a foodbank, and I volunteered to fix up old computers to give to the patrons of the foodbank. I would receive old laptops from colleagues, wipe their file systems, and install Linux (usually Ubuntu).

But one computer gave me fits. It was an HP laptop. Normally, installing Linux on such a system is no problem. But this one? I could not turn off Secure Boot, even after getting into the BIOS. I've done this dozens of times, but in this case, I simply could not.

With the Windows 11 shift happening, I suspect I will get a lot of used laptops to fix up from colleagues. But how many of them are going to be insta-bricks because of Secure Boot being completely locked down?

And if I want to buy a new computer and put Linux on it, am I going to run into the same problem?

The Good Old Days

I'm starting to wonder if the period of roughly 2013-2020 was the high point of Linux distro-hoppin' and fun. There was a chunk of time when I felt completely confident I could get a great OS running flawlessly on any hardware. I was gleefully jumping from Ubuntu to Mint to Manjaro to Fedora and back again, just for fun.

Now? Now I feel a lot of anxiety. What's going to break? Can I get the applications I need in the form I need them, or are they going to be containerized and prevent me from using them in the way I need to? Can I even get the BIOS to boot from a USB?

Have no worries, folks. The FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream is going to continue. There's no way in hell I'm switching back to Microsoft. And Apple? No, no, no. I'm going to keep using as much FOSS as I can to do my academic work. And it could be that Linux can really help divert a lot of Win10 machines from landfills. That's the future I want.

I guess the price of FALD is eternal anxiety over containers and BIOSes.

Post Tags

• FALD
• containers