I don’t have much VM experience and I didn’t think of them for this. I didn’t know you can do suspend to disk. Does it work reliably? Would I be correct in guessing each “saved session” would be no greater in size than your available RAM?
Interface-wise would it be similar to a remote session where you open a window and it has a full second desktop inside it?
Isn’t nix mostly for multi-system install? I did the nix thing a few years ago, spent a month on the config, and then never needed it again. Personally, I don’t see a use-case for single desktop installation ;)
I use multiple systems and even I feel NixOS is overkill, especially with their confusing and sometimes incomplete documentation.
On the other hand, Nix the package manager has been fantastic - especially if you’re on an immutable OS, or running some ancient “stable” distro - you can get all the packages you want, without breaking your system - and no need to learn the Nix language and write convoluted config files.
I’m running nix on my PC turned server, and there’s definitely a lot of advantages…I highly recommend it for people who can pick up languages easily and prefer fixing a problem once by brute force trial and error.
Doing easy things is much harder, but doing hard things can be laughably easy
I probably wouldn’t pick it as-is for my primary PC, but for a server? Amazing.
I remember when I did the switch in 2008 and never looked back. I had a similar experience where across a few years I have been trying different distributions and finally settled on Lubuntu. Years have passed and different machines as well. Now my main driver is a Steam Deck with his Arch based OS and a secondary pure Arch on a sd card for more specific tasks.
Linux made my life more comfortable and relaxed, without even mentioning secure. My family uses Linux now, Windows is long dead.
I actually set up Linux on my family machine 1 year ago and they don’t even notice since all they need is a browser and vlc. So they have been daily driving Linux longer than me :)
This is the way. Dealing with the significantly fewer problems they have is easier too. Most things I can ssh in without even touching the computer and fix the issue from my laptop.
I remember when I did the switch in 2008 and never looked back.
I wasn’t far behind you. My first laptop around that time came with Vista installed. Didn’t take long for me to switch Ubuntu after that, haven’t been back to Windows since.
When I type, it does what you expect (going to the file/folder in the current directory by what you type).
Some time ago the others started doing some annoying search thing when you type, and I can’t find how to turn that off. Anyway thunar is simper and gets the job done faster
It’s rather slow, for example the window decorations appear before the window content. I also like just some simple animatons to make the desktop feel more modern and fluid.
If you’re after fluid yet lightweight animations then you should definitely check out Wayfire. Yes it’s Wayland and a WM not a DE, but you can get a distro/spin with Wayfire and all the stuff you need for a DE all pre-installed and pre-configured. Wayblue (based on Fedora uBlue) is one such option you can try. And because Wayblue is immutable and has reliable atomic updates, it’d make a great option for you as a school-goer as stuff rarely breaks and you can always rollback to a previous image before the update.
I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.
I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.
By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.
Flatpak with Fedora 39 must have come a long way. Almost every tutorial with workarounds or discussion of broken features you can find online is now obsolete. It just works out of the box, especially under KDE. Mostly. That makes searching for actual issues extremely hard because I find myself chasing down paths of issues that have long been resolved.
Agreed. the only “workarounds” I’ve needed to do (on arch) is install gtk-desktop-portal-{gtk,kde} because it’s not included with kde-plasma5 for some reason.
I didnt want to hate snap either, until I found out its proprietary technology… on a foss OS… since then I‘m pretty over it - and ubuntu for that matter. I‘ll probably switch to debian once ubuntu 23.10 runs out of support.
Well… Flatpak ships Propietary Software too. And at this point Propietary Software is almost avoidable (unless you have a LibreBoot. I want one too). But it’s reasonable to be frustrated that an operating system as influential as Ubuntu has ended up falling so down in its technology, and that it has the support of a company like Chanonical.
Edit: Thank you for the comments. I didn’t noticed Snap itself is propietary.
Not sure if I understand you correctly. Flatpak itself is not proprietary afaik and while people might make flatpaks of proprietary software, the problem with snap is that the snap system itself is proprietary afaik.
So every open source software packaged in snap gets this proprietary stain added to it. Thats what actually bothers me.
There’s a misunderstanding here. What we mean is that the Snap system itself is proprietary. The server side is proprietary and there’s no way to add repos other than Canonical’s.
Flatpak is open, and anybody can create/add a remote.
Both can be used to package and distribute proprietary software. But the same could be said of .deb or .rpm
The thing with AppImages is: it requires FUSE2 which doesn’t really get packaged/included by default anymore in a lot of places and the recommendation is “build on the most old and crusty distro you want to support” which just sounds like a nightmare in multiple ways :)
And with snaps the sandboxing only really works on Ubuntu and nowhere else last time I looked into it (then there is also the entire problem if you want to host your own repository/“storefront”).
So really the only universal sandboxing method that effectivly makes sense is Flatpak.
Which is why I phrased my above comment in the very precise and deliberate way I did.
You don’t need to interface with canonical’s server to use snaps, you only need to do so if you want snaps that have been approved by and signed by canonical. Anyone can create a snap and privately distribute and install it, and every part of that process is open source.
APK isn’t a closed source format just because Google operates the main store.
If there was community effort someone could spin up their own snap store, this person did it forum.snapcraft.io/t/…/27109 - problem is, it would serve no benefit because you would have to create your own signing authority and patch snapd to use those assertions instead - and then you are still relying on a central authority to vet and sign releases and frankly I would rather have my software signed by canonical than someone random guy operating their own snap store
Again: nobody cares because practically speaking, the only people using snaps are getting them from Ubuntu, and Ubuntu pushing snaps as the default is the only reason they aren’t using flatpaks intead.
Interestingly though unless it has changed recently, you can’t add a third party snap repository. Canonical’s is hard coded, and when people requested alternate repo support, the issue was closed with a response that users seeking third party repos could just edit the string and recompile. Not the most useful solution
Canonical specifically went out of their way to create a closed ecosystem with snaps, and you think that’s not “closed off” because they only allow you to download the open source parts of the snap software?
Personally, I don’t get why devs would elect to package for Snap, in favor of Flatpak or AppImage. I guess, if your toolchain offers Snap packaging out of the box, then might as well. But aside from that, do you not just reach fewer users…?
If you’re on Ubuntu, you can just ask your question in the normal Linux community or in a search engine. You don’t need to go to a special Ubuntu community.
That’s at least, how it makes sense to me. In general, I’ve seen many niche distros have very active communities, because everyone just ruts together and helps each other out.
…which is to say, I don’t think there are accurate marketshare statistics, because no telemetry, but my impression is also that Ubuntu is still popular out in the wild.
If you filter the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2023 by Linux, you can see Arch has a market share of 7.85% (excluding SteamOS on the Deck, which is technically based on Arch and has 40.53%) while Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS - a specific Ubuntu version - already has 7.04% on its own.
But that’s also just Steam users. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that OEMs ship preinstalled and officially support on some of their devices (Dell for example). Another example is Fedora iirc, which Lenovo ships or at least used to ship as an option on some of their ThinkPad notebooks.
I’d assume the Arch community on Reddit is bigger than the Ubuntu community as it’s geared towards tech-savvy people. Going by Reddit community size wouldn’t make much sense though. Even if you add up the member count of the r/windows, r/windows10 and r/windows11 community (which doesn’t make a lot of sense as most users are probably not unique), it’s only like 3-4x the members of r/archlinux, which doesn’t translate to market share whatsoever.
I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry. Should’ve checked first. I guess I just assumed because of the OEM support and being relatively easy to install and maintain for the average guy (in comparison) that it was the leading Linux desktop distro in terms of marketshare. I’m still assuming this is the case for the reasons stated, but can’t tell you with 100% certainty.
It’s impossible to measure since sharing copyleft stuff can’t be tracked like sales of proprietary software can. There’s no need to apologize about not doing the impossible.
Well, most of windows users don’t even know they are using it, they think they are using a “PC” as opposed to Mac
Any Linux desktop user is already very tech savvy, I doubt there are any Ubuntu users that don’t know they are using Ubuntu so the windows commission is not apt
So? The AMD subreddit is larger than either Nvidia’s or Intel’s (in the case of Intel, by a lot). Both of them have a greater market share than AMD in their respective markets.
Porsche has over double the subs of Toyota, yet Toyota sells 33x the amount of cars.
Again, my mom is not on the Intel subreddit because she doesn’t know she has an Intel processor. In fact, she used to work for Intel, and she still doesn’t care
Ubuntu is nowhere near popular enough to be a default. I’m just wondering how to count the market share accurately
Do keep in mind that “not installed by default” is not the same as “not available to install at all”. To this end, Flatpak continues to be available in the Ubuntu repos, and users of Ubuntu flavors are free to install Flatpak
Well, yeah, you can enable it. But if it’s not active in their GUI software store by default, then many users will not find / look for it. It’s rather important for a package format that you don’t have to separately install it.
Why do you need to have two package formats that do the same thing installed by default? If you could install snaps and flatpaks both from the same store you could have 2 (or 3 if you also installed the .deb) copies of the same app, like steam etc installed, and user sessions and games set up on one wouldn’t be launchable from the other because they all store their state and config in different locations - the only way to know what config your program is launching with would be to inspect and rename the launcher scripts. If you are intending to support naive users this is the absolute worst case scenario. It would be like debian including pacman by default as well alongside apt for maximum user accessibility confusion.
Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak. I agree that the deduplication is not a trivial problem to solve, even if they might have already solved it for DEBs (I don’t know).
But your entire comment could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place. It might be good for their bank account, if they can somehow monetize part of the cake, but splitting the cake even further, after it’s already split into DEB, RPM, AppImage, Flatpak, Docker, APK etc., that’s maximum user confusion.
Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak.
This reads like speculation to me and is directly contrary to the file counts on flathub and snapcraft. What about CLI apps and server software? How are they supposed to distribute their software if not via snap? (Flatpak doesn’t support this well)
could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place
You are acting like Ubuntu core (and snaps) came after flatpak? Snaps were announced almost a decade ago
Like, I get you don’t like snaps, but your argument is basically “every Linux distribution should ship the same default software, and it should be the software I choose”
I don’t know why you’re trying to interpret all kinds of things into my comment. I did not say any of that. This isn’t some competition to show who’s technically more correct.
Google EOL’d my beloved Asus C302 Chromebook, and now it runs Fedora with KDE. I’m super happy with it ❤️
Now tentatively working on turning my 2009 Mac Mini into a Fedora server/homelab.
So far it’s running Fedora desktop/KDE, and I’m slowly trying to figure out how to get Docker to work so I can run stuff like Audiobookshelf. If I manage to get it working, I’ll try going full Fedora Server instead of the desktop version.
There’s so much waste everywhere, let alone in tech. Being able to both “recycle” old hardware, and find legitimate use for it, should be celebrated.
Now if only I knew what to do about my old phones … I’m pretty good at making them last, so my older ones are very old, and I can’t think of anything useful for them to do that whatever phone I currently have doesn’t do much better 🤔
I started with linux begin 2019. I just use xorg so I don’t know about wayland problems. I think a long time ago nvidia broke once and I switched to nvidia-dkms and it has worked fine since until recently where a mesa update broke xorg but I don’t think that has to do with nvidia. Getting CUDA to work might be trouble though (I think I briefly tried once).
Another problem is that most manufacturers of laptops directed at the Linux crowd, for some reason I will never understand, insist on punching Nvidia hardware instead of AMD/ATI. How does that help?
Unfortunately for those of us that use Cuda features, AMD just really isn’t that viable of an alternative. Anyone who’s had to deal with ROCM can attest to this…
That’s not how it works. The second bare double-quote closes the first one regardless of how it is nested in a string. The middle pair of double-quotes would need to be escaped. Also, single-quotes cannot be escaped in this way.
The only place I can think of where nested double quotes do work is in subshells
This is because the subshell is interpreted before the outer logic, so during interpretation of the outer logic there is never a nested double quote, just the stdout of the subshell.
These things are sometimes difficult to grok, and even more common, difficult to spot with human eyes. Best to use shellcheck, which will surely help you get better at shell scripting.
Must try distros: Fedora, Mint, Void. But seriously, if you are using Nix to begin with, why use anything else? Nix is as good as it gets. If you really want to do a combo, I would recommend Fedora or Mint using Nix as just the package manager and not the hypervisor. All distros are basically the same nowadays.
Must try desktop environments: Xfce, Cinnamon, Gnome, KDE Plasma
I’ve never really Fedora or Void. Will definitely try those.
Of your DEs, I think KDE is the only one that I’ve not used significantly. I need to fix that. I think MATE deserves a place there too.
ETA: As for why not just Nix or Nix as a package manager? I’ve become accustomed to being in VMs all of the time and really like the way that doing so impacts how I interact with a system and extra capabilities provided.
In short: Nix tracks all installable software and dependencies using a Merkel tree data structure to ensure fully reproducible builds of software. This Merkel tree also provides properties similar to that of a C.O.W. filesystem where you can snapshot and rollback system software build configurations in O(1) time, it just rewrites a fixed number of symbolic links to the root of the desired Merkel tree. In my opinion, it is the most technologically advanced package manager currently in existence.
Every input that goes into building a piece of software on Nix OS (or in the Nix package manager in general) is hashed and placed into a database on the system. These hash IDs become dependencies for everything they are used to build. By tracing the chain of hash IDs you can guarantee that every single bit that goes into the build of the system software is accounted for. If two separate computers with the same ISA are running the same tree of packages verifiable by their hash IDs, you are guaranteed that both computers are running the exact same software. All dynamic libraries, shared libraries, executable files, and even the config files in the package database refer only to other files in the database.
When you use Nix OS, not just the package manager, the C compiler, boot loader, and kernel are themselves build inputs. You can even roll back to a snapshot of a working system from the bootloader menu if you accidentally break your system (as long as the package database is not corrupted).
Finally, the system itself is both built and configured using a declarative programming language. So you install software by declaring that it should exist, and the package manager computes precisely which dependencies must be installed to realize what it is you have declared in the system configuration files. Making a change to what is installed requires simply altering the lines of code in the system configuration file. You can also use these configuration files to easily construct Docker images or Flatpacks.
Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That’s been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.
Well, no, neither approach is better than the other, it’s apples and oranges.
There will always be a place for installing native applications. In the least analysis, the container itself should probably have some dependencies packaged for the target program.
The benefits of containerisation are obvious, but it’s been a lot of work and there are still edge cases to iron out.
FreeBSD has had jails since 2000. Linux, however, only got namespaces in 2008 and the first bubblewrap release on GitHub was 2016.
I’ve been using chroots and containers for development for about 2 years now and it’s been fantastic, however, I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.
I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.
Honestly, I’m on NixOS and it’s not a bother because it saves time down the line when your script would break during a system upgrade which it doesn’t on NixOS as without you telling it to, it will still use all the old dependencies. Also you already have a couple of flake.nix floating around you can just copy and adjust and direnv does the rest.
tbf, flatpaks are problematic shit noobs tend to appreciate because reasons. That said, beside the fact steam ships its own chroot, I’m a happy sid user and I don’t even have this imaginary problem of things being ‘very old’ sooo … but I can confirm you shouldn’t add weird third party repos or shitty flatpaks :)
It’s not just noobs that appreciate flatpak. Flatpak is good all-round.
And the problem of Debian packages being old is very much not imaginary lol. Debian has only just moved beyond Gnome 3.38/Plasma 5.20/kernel version 5.10.
That’s ancient. And that’s not to mention the other software repos, which are often updated at an even slower pace.
Don’t assume that just because you want extremely outdated packages, everyone else must want the same.
you normally skip reading half of the comments you reply to, eh? :) ciao ciao from my debian system which does everything, including paying my rent and a bit more, w/o this shit ;)
And you don’t need to be so defensive. Nobody said Debian is bad or that you can’t use it to make money, just that it being severely outdated can be an issue, and it can. Flatpak helps, but it doesn’t completely fix it.
lol I’m not defensive at all hahahaha rest assured my opinions aren’t changed by such a stupid zealot conversation, also this fact you don’t entirely read comments you’re replying about contibute to the lulz. Don’t react too bad to the money thing, one day or another you could also start working in this industry but if I could choose I’d go w/ dog training (I’m speaking for me, I’d really go that way). Cheers my friend
I dunno, it sounds awfully defensive to me. It wasn’t meant to hurt you, it’s just a discussion about software packaging. There’s no personal attacks here.
I did read your comments, and despite trying to change the topic, create strawmen, and shout ad-hominems, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s reasonable to say Debian packages are often very, very old and outdated. Because they are.
That may not be an issue for you, but it is for many.
You shouldn’t let that make you upset, it doesn’t invalidate your use-case.
hahaha I swear to you that seeing you strain so hard to push your fallacies who knows where makes me laugh. Believe it or not, there remains a world of people out there laughing at those who use this garbage, and your social media woes will not, as usual, shift half an ounce of reality :) believe it or not, lemmy is not reality, outside those servers there is a real world :) but please, feel welcomed to keep supporting I don’t know what theory, you’re welcome, at least at this party :PP
I don’t know man, the important thing is that you stay calm while I continue to mind my own business. Say hello to the computer vegans from me, and ofc stay hydrated :P and please, PLEASE, do not mumble 3h again your next response sweetie <3
I don’t mind the old packages (I’m typing from Debian Stable right now). If that’s a bother for other people Debian Stable isn’t the way to go. Even I wouldn’t recommend Stable on a desktop/laptop unless that person knew what they were getting themselves into. I used to run Sid a while back, but didn’t want to have to deal with the mild breakage from time to time. Generally speaking it’s “stable enough” for most people, especially on a daily driver.
That being said, I have a few flatpaks running, but that’s mostly because they’re apps that aren’t packaged for Debian.
Yeah. And if it works for you, it’s good. I have a headless Debian home server running in my house right now.
I’m just saying it’s completely valid to not be into Debian because the packages are ancient, just as it’s also completely valid to not be into Arch because the packages are too bleeding edge.
It’s not about you, it’s about what’s easier for Valve. If Valve is fine packaging, and getting bug reports, from all the different distributions, they’ll keep doing things as is. But as a Linux app developer myself, I exclusively publish to Flatpak because it guarantees everyone has the same system.
you’re at best uninformed about how the process actually works and what’s the role of a distro maintainer, a distro project, upstream authors. Not that every piece of software has enough value to be included in this process so maybe it will make sense to package your stuff by yourself.
Reddit death > installing mint on my second PC > realising I can run most of the games I play and installing mint on my main PC > start learning Rust as a first foray into programming in a long time > realise I want to go back to uni and study info tech to get out of my shitty marketing job > get a shitty second hand laptop off my parents that struggles to run windows and install endeavourOS to try something different.
It really is a slippery slope. When does it end???
The next step, you’re handwriting a fixit code because said ancient one off laptop won’t compile linux from scratch properly and some stupid piece of essential hardware is blocking your efforts to get to the shell first time.
You still have yet to get through some pis, then a couple of OSX boxes, a Windows VM on proxmox or when you find something in particular you want that’s easier in that direction. Then move into kubernetes.
You’ll end up with a couple of everything living their best life.
realise I want to go back to uni and study info tech
I highly recommend it! College as an adult who’s been in the workforce is way better than college as a kid fresh out of highschool. Great opportunity to make some more friends, do some cool college activities, plus there’s lots of good opportunities for student pricing on stuff if you have a .edu email and its a brilliant change of pace.
It ends when you write an AI better at configuring Linux than you are, but is also very good at soothing your pride… The latter is the infamous “alignment problem”
My slippery slope started with buying an old laptop off my company and deciding to install Ubuntu on it. Now all of my devices run Linux, I switched to Android with a FOSS ROM, degoogled myself in almost every way, and I run Nextcloud on an old laptop. Feels great to really own my devices and data.
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