Yeah I guess I haven’t really accounted for these atomic versions, so I don’t think the install script would have worked.

I might have to try out fedora atomic myself one day.

You can if you’re interested in any status updates

Yeah I can do that

It is a frontend for standard CLI tools yes, but it comes with many additional features. The focus is especially on integrating standard CLI tools with your desktop environment and other applications that you use like editors or terminals.

For example, of course you can just use the ssh CLI to connect to your server and edit files. But with XPipe you can do the same thing but more comfortably. You can source passwords from your local password manager CLI, automatically launch terminals with the SSH session, edit remote files with your locally installed text editor, and more.

Of course you can do this also with tools like putty, but the difference here is the integration. Other tools ship their own SSH client with its own capabilities, features, and limitations. They also have their own terminal. XPipe preserves full compatibility with your local SSH client and terminal. E.g. all your configuration options are properly applied, your configs are automatically sourced, any advanced authentication features like gpg keys, smartcards, etc. work out of the box.

The same approach is also used for the integrations for docker, podman, LXD, and more, so you can use it for a large variety of use cases.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by your problem with opening multiple terminal windows? I am not aware of such an issue, so maybe you can report it on GitHub with a few more details

Alright, the pricing options and website have been updated. It should now get the point better across about how updates are handled and what you actually get. The fundamental approach has not changed but it should make less of a predatory first impression.

There’s also a lifetime option now, which you can find in the pricing FAQ. It is not put into the spotlight because I think showing very expensive options is a bad business decision, especially when it comes to first impressions.

Yes, the developer can choose a few sandbox permissions, however these options are limited. Even if I grant all permissions, I still can’t spawn a bash process from my flatpak application. Flatseal can grant additional sandbox permissions to allow that, but these options are not exposed for the developer.

Sadly this is not possible due to the flatpatk sandbox, at least without having to rewrite basically the entire application. You can’t open other applications or shells from the sandbox, so nothing would work.

Someone told me that it is possible in theory to reduce the level isolation of the sandbox via flatseal, but that would require the user to perform additional operations to make it even work. If it is not going to work out of the box, a flatpak version would not make a lot of sense.

Yeah there is always the JVM overhead which is unavoidable here. That, plus all the images which are preloaded into memory to reduce any loading time at runtime, sum up to that base amount of RAM being used.

Yes, that is how it is intended to be used. Assuming that you can easily connect to your server via something like SSH, you should have access to all docker containers running on it.

I see you edited your original comment since last time, so I can augment my answer.

I could definitely include a lifetime purchase option for a certain price, but I was skeptical whether people would actually be interested in something like that, mainly due to the potential price difference. I honestly thought that the current model would be better received by potential customers as it is more a pay only what you use model while also keeping access. I did not expect that anyone would actually be interested in a lifetime license. But to be fair, the payment model was designed back when the application was in an earlier development stage and didn’t even work properly for like 50% of users.

I will definitely rework the website to better get the point across on how continuous updates are handled as there is no intention to make it a predatory model. Then I will reevaluate the licensing model.

Maybe I have to improve the wording on that, you are right.

The idea is based on the established model of other applications, where you buy a license for a certain version. If a new major version releases in that case, you will probably not access to that with your old license. Even if you are perfectly happy with the version you bought, the issue of that model is that you will also miss out on important bug fixes , security patches, and normally free enhancements as older versions are no longer supported.

XPipe tries to find a compromise here. There is the same build for everyone, which is receiving continuous updates and support. The are no hard version barriers, it’s a continuous development. The licensing system paywall is therefore very artificial in that the build contains all features but it will not allow for usage of professional-only features released after more than one year after your license date. You can keep using all professional features that were included before forever. The important part is that you will still receive updates as anyone else, you just can’t use new professional-only features that are included in them if more than one year has passed. But you will receive bug fixes and security updates even if you own an ancient license.

Yeah the commercialization model is not perfect yet. Ideally the community edition should include all normal features required for personal use. Would that only be like one machine to connect to or many? I was planning to experiment with allowing a few connections where a license would be required in the community version.

It uses the sudo credentials from the SSH connection, even if you don’t need to provide a password to login. So if you set a password for a SSH connection, it should use that for the sudo elevation.

You can send me feature requests either on GitHub, Discord, or mail, whatever you like.

Your proposed enhancements make sense, I can already think about how to add this the best way. And if you want to open a proper feature request and elaborate more on that, we can make that happen for sure.

As a sole developer I have to prioritize features due to the time constraints. While I would definitely like to implement support for everything you listed, this would be a lot of work. For example with terminals in general, it can be very difficult to get one up to the standards of other comparable terminals. By delegating everything to other terminals, I can make the development easier.

So in the long term future this might be added. But that also depends on the project’s trajectory going forward

Yeah I can understand why some people feel that way. Originally this closed part only concerned a very small part, but due to necessary subclassing of that implementation, that kinda evolved to the whole shell handling interface. I always wanted to refactor that aspect and decouple it such that these parts can be included in this repository, but never got around to it.

Maybe in the future this can be properly addressed because it’s more a matter of a not well thought out structure rather than hiding crazy secret implementation details. The whole project’s vision moved around quite a lot and most stuff was conceptioned before there was even a thought to try to sell it.

Alright that is understandable, everyone has a different attitude towards that matter.

I see your points. In the end it boils down to the fact that there is no clear split between free and paid features in the codebase itself due to the chosen commercialization model. The paywall that is in place right now is mostly artificial because the code is the same for all systems. So even if I wanted to, I could not implement the classic open core model with a fully open source base version. I could have used a different approach to start out, e.g. only locking certain features behind a license and not certain remote systems like it is currently done. That would have probably allowed me to implement the more classic open core model. But the current model also has its advantages in other areas.

You can just ship your own version of the repo if you want due to the apache license. To properly run this the user would however still need the regular xpipe installation which contains some parts that you would still need to properly make use of it. I think the term basic core functionality can be interpreted differently here. So if you are talking about being able to use all the nice features that make xpipe stand out, then yes these non-open-source components are necessary for core functionality. If you are just talking about being able to run the application and do limited things with it, then they are not.

Yeah maybe the term open core is not the best way to describe it as it doesn’t entirely fit the pattern. I’m open for better suggestions where I can still somehow highlight that most of the application is open source (in terms of LOC, it is around 90% in that repo)

The screenshots are just sample connections, you can connect to arbitrary systems via SSH so it is not really a tool intended specifically for AWS.

Obviously if you are using taylor made tools for AWS by amazon itself, XPipe can probably not compete with that in terms of features. This is more of a general purpose application that you can use with any servers, virtual machines, containers, and more.