It became a love hate relationship. Today I tested Materialgram and again I can’t make group calls. Two weeks ago it was Telegram, and I was happy to find a working replacement. As much as I like OS, I became afraid to update.
Is there no some vision and direction how to develop or is just an experiment and apps sometimes do work and sometimes not. Sorry, I just feel powerless and this produces anger …
Being on an atomic desktop, that needn’t be the case. You can always pin the deployments you’re happy with (via sudo ostree admin pin <deployment_index>). For Flatpaks there’s a similar command (flatpak mask).
From what I can see though, both Flatpaks mentioned are only available on the flathub remote, so the issues could be unrelated to Fedora.
It is difficult for me to say, I am not a programmer, just a user and since there are many updates (related to OS) it is also hard to say what caused that. Something related to ssl I read somewhere, causes Telegram not to connect. I have the same configuration on my wife’s computer, just not updated for a month, and still everything works …
Don’t need to be. Usually one should be fine with using the existing GUI tools.
However, if you get used to a few basic terminal commands, and get familiar with OSTree concepts as well as the rpm-ostree and ostree CLI utilities, you will be able to keep specific “snapshots” of the system (i.e. pin deployments) that seem to be working for you, and can revert to those if needed. Without pinning deployments, Fedora keeps the last two versions, meaning it deletes the third (oldest) one after deploying and successfully booting into the new deployment (i.e. the one built by a new system update). This is a measure to make sure the user won’t be locked out of the system if an update contains such issues that make the system unbootable.
Besides system updates, Fedora also updates specific applications that are not part of the base system. Here you can get familiar with the concepts of Flatpaks, as well as with the flatpak CLI utility. If you think a new update brought in a regression, you could replace the current version of the app with an older one, that you consider to be working (the command should be flatpak update --commit=<commit> <app> or similar).
There system and Flatpaks update offered every day, but you don’t really need to apply those daily. Only do them once a week, every two week or 3 or 4 depending on when you have time.
Indeed. As linked on another thread, the underlying issue is in a Flatpak runtime: Build srtp with openssl (#1873) · Issues · freedesktop-sdk / freedesktop-sdk · GitLab
Also referenced in the telegram bug that’s closed. Telegram group calls connecting problem · Issue #29349 · telegramdesktop/tdesktop · GitHub
The bug is not closed, it is redirected … still persist.
If you don’t want things to change you probably should not use Fedora that tries to be as “bleeding edge” as possibile AND you should not use flatpaks that are updated by whoever releases them from the “app store”. If you want be in a condition where - if/when - things work and they keep working for years because they don’t change, you should use Debian.
In general, the problem is “linux” is just a collection of software that come from every possibile direction, from big companies to single developers who code as hobby in their free time and anything in between. No, there isn’t any “vision”, or control on who does what and when and how, it is a machine with countless moving parts and each part goes on its own way.
On the plus side, since there isn’t any “vision” or control from above, you aren’t forced to do anything, you don’t have to comply somebody’s else decisions. Nobody does.
Amen to that!
Just a note Fedora has not been “bleeding edge” in quite a while. The updates policy explicitly notes that released versions of Fedora should only include bugfix updates:
Only the “rawhide” (development version) of Fedora gets lots of new bits, but even there, the system now in place ensures that things don’t break randomly—we first run impact checks and so on.
Also not completely true, at least not in Fedora. There’s a vision, and there are guidelines and rules and workflows. People can’t just “come and do what they want”.
The issue is that all software has/will have bugs—no amount of testing catches them all. Sometimes we get unlucky that one breaks something we use. There are various ways around this. At least with Free/Open Source Software there’s a clear way (and opportunity) of reporting/fixing these issues—with proprietary tools, one mostly simply has to wait.
It does say that, but the statement should be read in conjunction with the substantial list of documented exceptions.
For example, during the life of Fedora 41, KDE Plasma has been updated from 6.2 to 6.3 - and that was a significant functional release, not purely bugfixes.
That said, the issue that triggered this thread is in a non-Fedora Flatpak runtime, so no change of Fedora release policy would have prevented it.
Sorry but I don’t get the meaning of your reply that is obviously the opposite of what happens in reality and all you have to do to confirm that is to read the posts in this forum. There are countless reports of issues that come from updates, some are easy, some are quite severe.
On a side note, is it possibile to release a “bugfix” update that fixes one bug and adds two more? If that is the case, it looks like a chain reaction of updates. 
Oh, about “vision” and “guidelines”. The problem is the relation between me and whoever is “upstream”. Lets say I would like Firefox to include a calculator in the tab bar, how can I force Mozilla so they make the change? And what if Mozilla shuts down tomorrow, do I grab Firefox code and keep developing it myself? My “vision” works from me downwards, usually it does not work from me upwards.
There are multiple issues with this deduction: first, only people will issues will be here on the forums—people that have not had issues will not. So, the observation is inherently biased. Next, “updates” is a massive umbrella term—it is not limited to Fedora packages. Updates from third party repositories, FlatHub, and all sorts of other places are all discussed here.
I’m not saying that updates cannot include regressions, but it’s quite a jump from “updates may include issues” to “never update your system”. For every update that may include an issue, there are hundreds that don’t.
It is certainly possible, and it’ll happen with all software, not just Fedora or Linux. Testing/QA is a best effort system—it is well established that “testing can prove the presence of bugs, but not their absence”. This doesn’t mean that testing isn’t useful or that one should not make any changes to code.
You cannot, and why should you be able to force them to do anything—based on what right? That’s not how FOSS works. What you can do is i) convince the people that do the work that it’s a good idea so they want to spend their time on it ii) implement it yourself and ask them to consider adding it iii) forking the tool and modifying it as you wish.
And yes, if Mozilla stops, either you move to a different software, or develop it yourself. I’m not sure why/how you expect anyone—whether a FOSS or paid for project—to do what you want.
Some of this is now going quite off-topic, so if we wish to continue this, let’s take it to the The Water Cooler category.