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RE: https://floss.social/@gcmd/116676637742341221
@reflex@retrogaming.social @tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud
It is done.
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Gnome Commander
@gcmd@floss.social
mastodon 4.7.3Gnome Commander is a dual-panel file manager. Wladimir Palant @WPalant@infosec.exchange posting here on behalf of the development team.
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Joined May 02, 2026
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@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud @reflex@retrogaming.social To be honest, I’m not sure about the reasons yet. There are simply too many more pressing issues now. Looking into Flatpak support is on my list of things to do, eventually. Dolphin is on Flathub, so I guess that it is possible.
Of course this doesn’t have to wait for me to find time. If somebody else were willing to look into it that would be great…
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@reflex@retrogaming.social It’s ok for *some* use cases. This just isn’t the one Flatpak was meant for… 🤷
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@reflex@retrogaming.social As you’ve probably noticed, Flatpak support isn’t going to happen any time soon. But at least I’ve solved the issue with libvte – the latest portable build runs on Zirconium out of the box (at the cost of almost trippling the build size), no more “stealing” the library from another application required.
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@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud @reflex@retrogaming.social I now have a better idea of why Flatpak is such a pain: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-commander/-/work_items/93#note_2781693 😅
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Note that for most part it isn’t our theme, it is Gtk’s. And it is possible to switch to Gtk’s theme completely (Settings / Options / Layout / Color scheme / Respect theme’s colors). So the fix wouldn’t have to happen on our end – for some reason Zirconium is setting a light Gtk theme while the system is set to a dark theme. This seems to be a Zirconium bug: if I go into settings and trigger Light Mode switch twice Gnome Commander switches to dark mode – until the next restart.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social These errors seem extremely far away from anything our application does. Are other Gtk apps doing better? Like that Ptyxis app?
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Meanwhile I managed to start up desktop. Turns out it only works with 3D acceleration enabled. So now I can see it for myself. 🥳
I don’t have that vkAcquireNextImageKHR() error. But I do see Gnome Commander starting up maximized, without a window frame.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social It looks like Gnome Commander is behaving quite typically for a Gtk-based application. VLC behaves similarly, and Bless (some random Gtk-based hex editor I downloaded) does as well. Adwaita-based apps like Ptyxis do better – but these are tied to the GNOME ecosystem specifically, something we wanted to avoid.
Doesn’t mean that there is nothing we could do, but it won’t be a very high priority.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Heh, that libvte is too old, older than 0.76.
I expected this issue to be handled more gracefully than just running into an error. But it seems that vte4 crate doesn’t do a version check, good to know…
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@reflex@retrogaming.social You mean the settings directory? There is no settings.ini by default there, it’s created by the application. The default settings are part of the schema, that gschemas.compiled file.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social I filed https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-commander/-/work_items/368 on our code not doing version checks, so we should at least have a meaningful error message in future.
Maybe https://flathub.org/en/apps/app.devsuite.Ptyxis will work for you – it seems current. So if you are still into ugly hacks:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/lib/flatpak/app/app.devsuite.Ptyxis/current/active/files/lib/
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Lol, that’s a high price for that embedded terminal of ours but I’m glad that it worked.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Ah, figured it out. Apparently, Fedora dropped support for the classic BIOS. But it won’t tell you that. Instead, it will happily install, only to fail to boot afterwards. 🤪
On to the next problem: desktop failing to start up…
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@reflex@retrogaming.social I tried installing Zirconium in a VM, I also tried installing Fedora Silverblue. Neither produced a bootable system. 🤔
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@reflex@retrogaming.social It’s the former, libvte 0.76 or higher is required. Gnome-based distributions usually have that already. I’ll write up a brief explainer eventually so that it can be packaged along with these builds.
@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud
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@reflex@retrogaming.social One thing that I hope to get done for the next major release is https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-commander/-/work_items/323 – that will allow “portable” builds where you unpack a ZIP file and the application just works. It will definitely make trying it out easier, especially on distributions where you cannot rely on a package repository to provide you with the newest release.
@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Once it is installed you can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to use its copy of libvte for Gnome Commander. From the command line it looks like this:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/lib/flatpak/app/com.raggesilver.BlackBox/current/active/files/lib/ ./gnome-commander
As I said, an ugly hack. I hope that at some point we will have our own Flatpak, then dependencies won’t be an issue.
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@reflex@retrogaming.social Nah, it’s ok. I need to know what kind of exotic distributions are out there. Either way, I don’t actually need the desktop to see how the system works, command line will do as well.
I can see the issue. The base system is read-only and has no Gtk or anything. But it has GNOME platform installed as Flatpak which *mostly* does the job but it lacks libvte. Which means that one has to resort to ugly hacks like installing this app: https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.raggesilver.BlackBox
