Controller by Microsoft? You mean a GitHub repository with the entire list of packages? A simple list of yaml files that simply point to whatever the developers decided to point them at?

Definitely worse than the BS that flathub is :)

Even Microsoft’s Winget repository is easier to deal with than Flathub.

It’s a fun exercise for you to see how convoluted and problematic it becomes.

How do I know all of this? Well I happen to work with WordPress professionally as the lead developer for an agency where I manage literally hundreds of WordPress sites and host all of them myself on servers I manage for them (not shared hosting reselling).

I used to have the same role and before that I managed a shared hosting provider. At that job the majority of websites hosted there were WordPress and customers would pay us to develop or fix stuff sometimes.

The vast majority of those “extensions” (plugins) are horribly made and are security nightmares,

Yes, this is true and a problem, but at the same time the WordPress ecosystem, as you know, gets shit done.

I also had some experiences with PrestaShop/Magento and they are even worse than WordPress. You still have the performance issues, the 3rd party poorly developed themes and plugins and a convoluted API.

WooCommerce powers 38% of the online stores out there…

WordPress’s data structure is not properly suited for an e-commerce site

To be fair WordPress’ data structure is not properly suited for anything, not even posts and pages, let alone block structures and whatever but the truth is that it works and delivers results. Same goes for WooCommerce, if you don’t want to be hostage of Shopify and your objective actually selling shit instead of spending all your time developing store software then WooCommerce is the way to go.

WooCommerce also has an extensive extension list, integrations with all the payment providers out there and it’s easy to get help / support be it free or paid.

and it’s a resource hog.

Did you ever they Magento or PrestaShop? Doesn’t seem like you did as those are store-first solutions and they’re all slower and more of a resource hog than WP can ever be.

Because…

• Universities might want to locally host a mirror in order to waste less bandwidth and provide faster downloads;
• Large companies usually like to host internal mirrors for the same reasons as above and also so they can audit and pick what packages will be available for their end users;
• Flathub is slow af for some people;
• Local country-specific mirrors are always faster;
• In some countries not everyone can access the official flathub;
• One might be dealing with airgapped networks and systems for sensitive work and you want to have ways for your end users to install flatpaks;
• Fastly, their CDN might go down at any point (like Cloudflare sometimes does) and you’ll end up with nothing;
• Flathub itself may be subject to a cyberattack and their service might get crippled for a days or weeks and you’ll have nothing as well;

For what’s worth Debian archive repositories are about 5 TB and people actively mirror then in universities, companies, cloud providers etc.

The question here isn’t “why would you” but rather “why would I be unable to do it”. Their actively gatekeeping their repository in a futile attempt to be the single and central point of flatpak distribution - much like what Apple does with the App Store.

I agree with everything you said, however there are a few details.

it is technically possible to just launch your own [repo]

The ability to create repositories ≠ from mirror existing ones.

Unlike apt repositories Flatpak ones aren’t simply a directory tree with a bunch of files that can get mirrored using rysnc or other efficient means, it’s a clusterfuck of HTTP-only requests that need to be backed by specific metadata and there aren’t tools to manage those.

flatpak create-usb may be promising but the name says its all - the priority wasn’t to create a way to mirror repositories but a quick and dirty hack for some situation.

theoretically you could open your own repo and throw all dependency related packages in there or am I getting something wrong here

Theoretically yes, in practice things are bit more nuanced. That tools only considers your current architecture, it’s a pain to get dependencies in an automated way and most of the time you’ll end up with broken archives. You’ll also need to hack things a lot.

Oh no, this is Flatpaks’ fault because they made this twisted repository system instead of doing sane things and then it is Flathub’s fault as well because they aren’t opening their storage to rsync or other sane syncing methods.

Did you ever try doing that with public packages?

Yeah sure, just try to mirror Flathub into your repo.

Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally?

The issue is that… there aren’t enough “core features”. It doesn’t even handle different architectures and their dependencies correctly. It wasn’t made to be mirrored, nor decentralized.

Apt for instance was designed in a much better way, it becomes trivial to mirror the entire thing or parts and for the end tool it doesn’t even matter if the source is a server on the internet, a local machine, a flash drive or a local folder, all work the same.

Unmirrorable

Yes, unlike apt repositories, it wasn’t designed to be mirrored around, run isolated servers etc.

Touche. Centralized and un-mirrorable.

Still no proper way to mirror the thing and have it working offline / on internal networks. Great job self-hosters and sovereign citizens ;)

lol

• https://borncity.com/win/2022/03/22/firefox-installer-weist-dem-browser-eine-eindeutige-kennung-zu/
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1093955
• https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1276793
• https://github.com/mozilla/addons/issues/3145

and so many others…

since I already have a Mac for work I was wondering how suitable a Mac Mini M1/M2 would be for a homelab?

Suitable yes, if you want to do it… maybe or maybe not. Here’s a few pointers:

• Debian can be installed on those machines, however I’m not sure how power management works properly:
• Installation isn’t as straightforward and as easy as in another systems because Apple decided to keep pushing the usual ARM bullshit of not including a proper UEFI with the system;
• Some stuff will be broker, but you most likely don’t need it for self-hosting;
• If you keep macOS around you may have good luck with virtualizing Debian using UTM or VMware. Debian’s arm64 images will run at optimal performance on that hardware.

If you’re about to spend money I would grab an HP Mini unit with a “T” CPU, those will downclock really hard and you can get a i5-10500T (on ebay) for around 250€… and everything will work fine out of the box. An i7-8500T model also sells for 150€ or something like that.

Have a look at those CPU benchmarks (last one is probably yours):

If you’re looking for power efficiency the newer CPUs are always better. Those mini units will downclock and idle at around 9-12W depending on hardware configuration but Apple should be able to do better - at least assuming you’ve power management working.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4104vs4922vs3768vs3231vs1287/Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MHz-vs-Apple-M2-8-Core-3500-MHz-vs-Intel-i5-10500T-vs-Intel-i5-8500T-vs-Intel-Xeon-X3430

Yes… https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1

Well, Apple is, Apple.

Maybe a Logitech StreamCam will deliver better results for you? I don’t have complaints about my C920 but I don’t push it so far like you seem to do.

I’m using a C920 on Debian and I don’t have focus issues. I remember that once it was permanently stuck out of focus but unplugging and plugging again fixed the issue. Never had any other issues in years.

Here’s typical Mozilla not being the all mighty savior people think of them.