Column Widths in Flatpak Installation

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1

On my laptop I am running MX Linux 23 which is based on Debian 12. The repositories only have Gramps 5.1.6 so I decided to install the Gramps 5.2.2 flatpak. The install went fine and I have been able to run the installation without difficulty, but I notice that in all views I am unable to modify the column widths; the usual double arrow when you hover over the header dividers is not there. The only message when running Gramps from a terminal is Failed to load module “canberra-gtk-module” which I understand is something to do with sound so not relevant. Am I missing something or is this a known problem with the gramps flatpak or flatpaks generally?

Regards
Tony

2

The libcanberra module provides an interface for playing event sounds. I doubt that it is related to your column resizing issue.

Can you resize any columns?

3

I never use flatpaks, and I suggest that you replace it with one of the .deb files available here:

4

No. None of the column widths in any of the views (People, Families, Events, etc.) can be changed.

Regards
Tony

5

How about in the editors and gramplets?

6

No. None of them that I have looked at.

Regards
Tony

7

I’ll test this when I get time.

Maybe @S.Mackay can help.

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8

I just checked the Gramps 5.2.2 flatpak from flathub on both Debian 12 Mate and Fedora 40 Gnome, and the columns are adjustable at the headers at the top for People, Events, Families, etc on both systems. The double arrows show up for me.

A couple things to check would be

  1. whether the system monitor shows high CPU or RAM usage. The ‘top’ command in terminal would work too. If the system is using swap memory, or RAM or CPU is maxed out, reboot the system and check again. Linux systems can get glitchy once swap gets used, even after RAM use returns to normal.
  2. make sure the pointer theme has a double arrow equivalent
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9

Thanks for trying these.

I have no problem with the double arrows as I can see them and alter column widths ‘normally’ in other applications, including other flatpaks also installed on the same laptop. Prior to installing Gramps 5.2.2 I was using Gramps 5.1.6 from the Debian backports repository and that worked as expected. The behaviour where I cannot alter the column widths is only in the Gramps flatpak.

No problem with RAM. I do have a swap but it is all free when running Gramps.

I tried installing the Gramps flatpak in an MX Linux install in a VM on another computer and the same behaviour was noted. If the behaviour doesn’t show in Debian 12 Mate, it appears to be MX Linux specific.

Regards
Tony

10

I just looked up MX Linux and noticed it uses antiX. Since flatpaks are in a sandbox, a hole has to be made in the sandbox for using things outside the sandbox. For example, Gramps is built to allow a sandbox hole (socket in flatpak terms) to use Wayland, but has the option to fallback to use the Xorg/X11 socket if Wayland is not available. There is no option that I could find in flatpak manifests for using an antiX socket. From what I could find, flatpaks are supposed to run on antiX anyway. However, I would not be surprised if some flatpaks on antix get occasional graphical glitches like not being able to resize columns. This is my current untested theory.

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11

If this is true, and I trust you on that, shouldn’t it then be a reason to advise users that they should not upgrade from a system package to a flatpak at all, and/or only install flatpaks when they’re fully aware of their limitations?

When I search for Gramps in my software manager, on LMDE 6, it shows a system package for version 5.1.5, and a flatpak for 5.2.2, and if I didn’t know beter, it would be quite logical to choose the latter. And that is, because there is no information about possible limitations of the flatpak version, and maybe the maintainers of the Debian repo don’t even know about these. And I bet that many programs run quite well in a sandbox, so there is probably no reason to give a general warning. And AFAIK, flatpaks are often easier to install, because they bring their own dependencies, isn’t that right?

For Gramps, we know that there are limitations, like in the sense of access to hidden folders like ~/.gramps, and maybe some others too. I read about those, in other threads, but since I never use flatpaks myself, I don’t know what they actually are, and this graphic thing is completely new to me.

And in this case, the system packages are available, and the .deb files labeled as fit for ubuntu can also be installed on Debian, and LMDE 6, and MX 23, because they’re all based on Debian 12 a.k.a. bookworm.

And of course, if users prefer flatpaks, it helps if we can provide information about where they store files, and what they can and can’t do in other areas, like GUI, and maybe networking too.

12

Everybody has their own preferences in their packages. It is fine for you to prefer system installs, but you shouldn’t push your preferences on others without a valid reason. For most people, especially on stable distros like Debian stable in which apps like Gramps will not likely get new versions from their repositories due to the nature of stable distros, I do believe that using the Gramps flatpak is a good choice for most users.

I grant that not all dependencies for every single add-on can be packaged into the Gramps flatpak, and so some users who know how to find the add-on’s dependency names for their distro will be better off using system installations if their favorite add-on is not available in the flatpak. This is a valid complaint about flatpaks. Less common complaints might be download size for slow or limited internet connections, the extra space used on root partitions for those with that setup, or slower start times due to loading the sandbox runtimes first before the app. These are not serious issues that will affect most users, but they can be enough of a problem in certain situations for some users to not use the flatpak. I would agree that having more installation options for different users is a good thing. The Gramps flatpak is just another option, and not meant to replace any of the other options. Live and let live.

However, there are some misunderstandings here…

Since very few linux users use something other than X11 or Wayland, and most of those users who look for a distro without X11 or Wayland have their own reasons to work around any resulting issues that might come from that choice, I think you are really reaching with that conclusion.

That issue has already been resolved in the Gramps 5.2 flatpak at flathub by restoring full home directory access in March of 2024. Comments were made about this fix in the relevant threads that I knew about here, so I am surprised at this misunderstanding. I have also made notes in the Gramps flatpak manifest and at the Gramps github for flathub that home directory access must remain until changes are made in flathub rules, so that no one in the future will try following flatpak recommendations on file access and inadvertently cause this directory access problem again.

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13

According to the Quick System Info application:
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 compositor: xfwm v: 4.18.0 driver: X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: crocus gpu: i915 …
I think this means that the system is running on X11.

I don’t know if this helps or not.

Regards
Tony

14

I wondered if this may have something to do with Xfce so I installed Fedora 40 Xfce in a VM and installed the Gramps flatpak. It worked fine, so it doesn’t look like it’s an Xfce problem.

Regards
Tony

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15

Please keep in mind that I only have general knowledge and a little experience with window managers vs desktop environments, and that the X11 was just an untested theory I made after a little research into MX and antix. The issue could be something else. For example, antix has been against systemd in the past. Or it could be from the Mepis branch (in MX the M is for Mepis and the X is for antix from what I saw). I played around with Simple Mepis twenty years ago, but I was new to the linux world at the time and can not say what was unique about it.

Having said that, your system info lists XFWM instead of XFCE. From what I see, the XFWM compositing window manager is used by the XFCE desktop environment but with the compositing turned off when XFWM is used as a component of XFCE. xfce:xfwm4:introduction [Xfce Docs] So one possibility is that the Fedora XFCE uses the full desktop environment with compositing inactive while MX uses XFWM with compositing active. If you look at the chart at wikipedia on “X Window Manager” you will see a chart on the right.

The blue box for display servers (ie Xorg) has two branches. The main branch is for Graphical Interfaces (desktop environments like XFCE, Gnome, KDE, etc) which use X11 and Wayland. However, the other branch is represented by a light blue box on the right for Window Managers (which include OpenBox and XFWM). That indicates to me that a window manager like XFWM might not use X11 or Wayland in the way that the Gramps flatpak requires. Since some flatpaks work on MX Linux, I could research if an appropriate setting (if available) in the flatpak manifest might resolve this, once the cause is found.

So some troubleshooting steps to look for the cause…

  1. compositing windows – use neofetch or some method to make sure whether you have compositing enabled on MX Linux. If you are using XFWM with compositing on MX Linux but XFCE without compositing on Fedora, then more steps should be taken on this line of troubleshooting.
  2. Since the Gramps flatpak defaults to Wayland but MX might have poor Wayland support – try these commands on MX Linux and see if the column width can be adjusted in Gramps for each command. These commands will force the Gramps flatpak to use either X11 or Wayland. (Please note that there is an underscore instead of an hyphen for gramps-project, since flatpaks won’t use hyphens in commands.)
    flatpak run --socket=x11 org.gramps_project.Gramps
    flatpak run --socket=wayland org.gramps_project.Gramps
  3. checking a similar flatpak – Even though Libreoffice runs on Java instead of Python like Gramps, both Libreoffice and Gramps are complex apps that default to Wayland but go to X11 as a fallback. I am curious as to whether flathub’s LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet allows columns to be resized in your MX Linux system when run as a flatpak.
  4. checking for systemd – I don’t know if this is an issue for the Gramps flatpak, but I would like to know whether systemd is installed on your MX Linux. Use the help tag in terminal to see if systemd is installed.
    systemctl --help
    If you get the help screen, then systemd is installed (press ‘q’ to exit) and probably not the problem here. If you get an error, then systemd is not installed and can not be dismissed as a possible cause yet.
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16

I installed Debian 12 XFCE and have another hour of waiting for MX Linux 23 XFCE to download. I noticed that in Debian, installing xfwm manually will pull in libwayland client and server libraries. Another potential difference is that Debian uses systemd. I will check for libwayland and systemd after installing MX in Boxes.

I noticed that in Debian 12 XFCE, the double arrows do not appear when trying to resize a column in the Gramps flatpak. However, if you line up the left vertical line of the mouse pointer in the header with the line of the column you want to adjust for the Gramps flatpak, the column will still adjust in both the wayland and x11 socket despite the double arrow pointer not showing. The double arrow shows up in Thunar, so at least in Debian 12 XFCE the problem is not with the Gramps flatpak being able to adjust columns, but rather with the mouse pointer not displaying correctly.

I also tested the LibreOffice flatpak on Debian 12 XFCE. The double pointer appears in the spreadsheet, but if I click File>Open then the double pointer does not appear in the file manager opened by the LibreOffice flatpak. The columns in the File Manager (name, size, type, etc) are still adjustable in the LibreOffice flatpak just like they are adjustable in the Gramps flatpak on Debian 12 XFCE, however the double arrows will not show up in either flatpak in those situations in Debian 12 XFCE.

I do not know if the double arrow issue is with XFCE or flatpak. The double pointers show up in Gnome, but not XFCE under these conditions.

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17

I wonder if this similar to the problem reported on some GUIs where the grabbing handle for resizing the Sidebar or Bottombar was only a single pixel wide?

So by the time the mouse pointer graphic changed to the double-headed dragging pointer, the user had moved beyond the hotspot and it reverted to the standard mouse pointer.

Maybe the handle is actually ZERO pixels wide in this desktop GUI? Or maybe the switch between pointer graphics is so fast that it is not seen?

Where can we change the handle hotspot width in one specific part of the GUI for a test?

18

So I tested MX LInux 23 XFCE, checking flathub’s flatpaks for both Gramps and LibreOffice. Column widths are adjustable for both the Gramps and LibreOffice flatpaks, even though for some reason the mouse pointer does not change to a double arrow in header columns for either Gramps or the LibreOffice open file selection window when using flatpaks in XFCE (both Debian 12 and MX Linux 23 are affected). Since the mouse pointer problem affects more than one flatpak when using XFCE in the Debian stable branch, I believe this is an old XFCE or flatpak bug. I can see how it could be annoying and confusing for XFCE users in the Debian branch though. Since this issue does not appear to occur in Fedora XFCE according to OP, even though XFCE itself has not updated since the 4.18 release in 2022, that would indicate to me that either a newer version of flatpak or a newer library or subcomponent used in XFCE by Fedora 40 vs Debian 12 has already fixed the mouse pointer problem seen in Debian 12 and MX 23.

@emyoulation I did not see any flash, resize, or other change in the pointer for either flatpak for the Debian branch XFCE/flatpak mouse pointer bug. It will probably continue to affect Debian 12 and its branches because of the version freezes that Debian stable uses, but I would expect Canonical will fix it soon (if it is not already fixed in Xubuntu) so Ubuntu and its sub-branches (like LM XFCE) should be ok.

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19

Thank you for working out the you can resize the columns, even if the double arrows don’t show. That helped.
As you have now been able to duplicate the issue in your own installation, I don’t think there is anything more that I can add.

Regards
Tony

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20

Having just written that, I’ve just worked out how to get the double arrows back. Aware that Fedora uses the Adwaita theme by default, I changed the mouse theme to Adwaita from Default (I don’t know what that is), and the double arrows are back in Gramps.

Regards
Tony

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