Hi Zorin folks,
First of all I want to say thank you for this amazing distro! Just bought the Pro version some weeks ago and I'm beyond happy with Zorin 17
I just noticed some really old Zorin OS APT packages in the store and want to ask for updates / removal for them.
Camera
There is the camera app which got its last release 3 years ago.
This was very confusing when I used it first. Then I checked version , removed Winetricks APT package and installed it directly from GitHub - Winetricks/winetricks: Winetricks is an easy way to work around problems in Wine using its last release from 2 weeks ago. So, can the Zorin team update Winetricks in the app store please to make it more convenient for users to install it? Also note, that there is a bug present in "regular" Wine Tricks from GitHub for Ubuntu based distros. I could only get Wine Tricks to run on Zorin 17 Pro with applying the following fix manually: Wont run in ubuntu 23.04 · Issue #2119 · Winetricks/winetricks · GitHub . However, according to the comments, this fix seems to be included in the Ubuntu APT package. So, updating Zorin APT package for Wine Tricks would also fix this bug.
Thanks again for this amazing distro and cheers
Nadine
To Winetrick I can't say something but with the Camera Program is it simple: If You take a Look to the open/install Button you will see that there stands Zorin OS and Flatpak. And the Flatpak Version is the current Version because it gets continuos Updates from the Developer.
So, the Program is the same. The Difference ist the Package. And with that the Program Version. You can see it in the Description:
The APT Version (Zorin OS): 0.1.0+git20201123
The Flatpak Version: 45.2
If You like the Program itself and it works for You, you could uninstall the APT Version and try the Flatpak Version.
As you can see in the screenshots I already have the flatpak version of Camera installed and it works fine for me. I could also solve the Wine Tricks issue by downloading Wine Tricks directly from GitHub and applying the manual fix for Ubuntu based systems to make it run.
This issue for me was more about providing a more user-friendly experience. So, I just wanted to hint the Zorin team that there are outdated packages in Zorin OS APT. Normally, I would have opened a GitHub issue for this but as there is no respective GitHub repository for Zorin OS APT sources, I posted it here.
Would really appreciate if Wine Tricks gets an update in Zorin OS APT and either Camera gets an update as well or gets removed.
According to GParted's repository tags version 1.3.1 was released 2 years ago and the latest release is 1.5.0 (from 10 months ago), see Tags · GNOME / gparted · GitLab .
You will find more packages that are "outdated" particularly when they are developed by the Gnome Foundation, which is a firm proponent of the Flatpak package format. Thus, the native .deb version is not being developed anymore.
This is a common source of confusion and as you say, frustration to the end user, but not always in the sense that you might think.
Flatpak packages are great in many ways, one of them being that developers are encouraged to push their updates directly to the Flathub repositories, which in turn results in more up to date packages for the end users. But another feature they have is that they run in containerized environments, isolated from the rest of the system, to increase security and other reasons. This often also means reducing the scope of what the program can access, causing it to not work properly.
This design inspired in mobile applications based on permissions, is not very well known to people new to the world of Linux. If you stick around for a bit on these forums you'll see how this package format causes more headaches than it's worth. And it's easy to understand why: people like to click and install things and get on with their day. This lack of awareness has placed the Linux ecosystem in a strange spot where we are offering two, sometimes three and even four different formats for the same application (since there are alternatives to Flatpak that have similar goals and overlapping functionality).
Alas, higher versions of software doesn't necessarily translate to a better experience. New, undiscovered bugs may crawl in undetected, specially when many of the packages in Flatpak are actually not submitted by the original developers. The review process is also not as careful as it is for the native package formats from the upstream repositories. And the containerized sandbox itself has it's own limitations and downsides to consider. Here's a discussion on the topic that you might find interesting:
This is all to say that even if the ZorinGroup could remove those "duplicates", that would most certainly be a bad idea.
This is actually a bit of each.
Ubuntu (canonical) is responsible for their own provided Ubuntu specific products. But the maintainers of the packages are responsible for what is available on the Canonical servers, not Ubuntu.
In the case of Gnome, it is indeed the Gnome developers that are responsible for which package versions are included in the Jammy repo.
This is standard for all developers. When I upload my packages, I must build and specify what repository they are going to be available on; Focal, Jammy, Hirsute, etc.
I did not say, nor mean to imply, that the Gnome Foundation does this. What I meant is that you will often find Flatpak versions of all software developed by them since that's their focus. This is not always the case for other software, particularly in instances where the developers are not the same ones submitting it to Flathub. Thus creating the illusion that something is outdated simply because something more recent exists. And by outdated, I mean "obsolete", since those native packages were tested for stability and compatibility.
