The same MFs on here that rush to tell someone that Linux is easy and intuitive are the same ones that can’t keep a small talk conversation for more than 5 mins, a social activity that humans have been doing for thousands of years.
My words might be a little broad, harsh, and even hurtful, but just a reminder that not all of us are good at learning the same things.
We didn’t all come out of the womb knowing how to socialize or use Linux, but if we look back far enough, we can all relate to the struggles it takes to learn something new, and how much it sucks when someone treats you like you’re stupid just because things sometimes don’t click
My thoughts on this? I think people should care less about what software other people use.
Man, display servers look hard to develop and I’m glad we have two amazing/successful projects to choose between! I think the devs who work on X are doing an amazing job and it’s amazing to see how passionate the devs/users are for Wayland.
If bobby tables likes to use x because they know how it works and are comfortable with it, let them work with x! If you think it’s okay to judge/pester/shame people because some software they choose to use, shame on you! In the end, does it really matter what you use.
There aren’t any Devs working on X. That’s the whole problem. Xorg is the most modern and most popular implementation of X, was started in 2004, it no longer has any permanent maintainers, and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Nobody alive fully understands the whole codebase, it is an unholy mess of multiple forks and multiple versions of many different projects all smushed together. There is no more room for innovation on Xorg because any time anybody fixes a bug or adds a feature, it breaks something totally unrelated. All of the big players who used to pay developers to maintain it, no longer do. Partly because they can’t find anyone willing to do it.
I’m not saying Wayland is the answer to the problem. Building a new display server protocol does not fix the problems with Xorg, and it has its own slew of problems. It really is a “rock and a hard place” situation. You’re a future-hating troglodyte who shuns innovation if you continue to use Xorg, and you’re a risk-taking early-adopter who forfeits functionality for shiny new toys, if you use Wayland.
Don’t know anything avout xorg development although I’m profitting for years off it now. Just wanted to chime in and say that the Arch maintainers put out updates pretty constantly. If the code isn’t worked on anymore then what’s happening there?
Edit: There is definitely happening stuff with the xorg-server code.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre user here. On paper, GNU Guix System looks exactly what I want from an operating system. The problem I have with it is the software repository full of severely outdated packages. Heck, last time I checked GNOME was three major versions behind. This is a deal breaker for me. It’s a downside that I don’t see coming up often in discussions.
This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to “critical mass” as we’ve got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I’d probably enjoy Guix more.
I’ve found that the unstable branch of nixos has almost all the packages that I want / need at the bleeding edge. For more obscure packages I build from source.
Interested to hear what packages you were chasing that are outdated / not present.
It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’d argue there’s more than one critical mass, and NixOS is already there for the purposes of tinkerers and some early adopters. General Linux people are next, and it’s probably not quite there, which is I think what you’re getting at.
Since it’s the frontrunner as you point out, I have high hopes it will make it.
Keeping a community going is a beast all on it’s own, which is probably what’s missing. Lemmy was pretty dead before Reddit refugees arrived too, or so I hear.
As others have mentionned downloading the .deb and running it will also work, but I feel nobody gave your a tldr of why you may want to follow those instructions instead, so here it is:
Those instructions configure your package manager (apt) with a new repository for this application.
The upside to that is that anytime you will look for updates, this app will also get updated.
It’s a bit more work up front, but it can pay off when you have dozens of app updating as part of normal system operations.
Imagine a world where windows updates would also update all your software, that’s what this is.
Also, no, this is not an ideal way to do this. Ideally every package you want is in your distro’s repos so you’d just need to do “apt install [package]”.
The reason this one isn’t is because mullvad wants to make sure you use their tested, secure, and updated version and they don’t want to maintain that for every distro. So they have you configure your package manager to use their repos.
This is relatively uncommon to come across in Debian. You’ll normally only find it in security applications or very niche ones. The Debian repos aren’t the most comprehensive but they’ll contain the vast majority of common softwares.
I reason it this way. If like they say in the video email is one of the most critical parts of privacy (I 100% agree with that) then why don’t they support the only privacy currency? Also why pay for email well simple I both want the features that paying gives you but anything free either you are the product or others are indirectly paying for me. I want my email provider to not spy on me and sell my data so why not give my money to a provider that proves that they protect it? I chose Tuta.com instead of proton because of this. And to make it clear Tuta.com doesn’t allow monero payments but their official reseller proxysto.re does allow monero! Also it’s not hard to add monero as a payment option :)
This seems interesting and it seems like a big update. Has anyone used this for print media formatting? Can you speak to how well it works, how easy it is to use, and what it’s like to switch if you’re coming from Publisher or InDesign?
I tried it years ago and it felt more like Quark to me (not a compliment) but should give it another chance. For the past several years I’ve been using Affinity Publisher in a Windows VM.
Edit: just tried it out a bit (ver. 1.5.8 because that’s what’s in the Arch repo) and it’s better than I remembered. Adobe-like shortcuts. I made a new document and created a few text styles.
I’ve previously used versions 1.4.* and 1.5.* quite a bit for print, because I’m a one-man marketing department in a tiny company.
Scribus was (is?) somewhat finicky and cumbersome to work with. It had certain quirks and workarounds you had to learn to deal with. It lacked many creative features you find in bigger suites. I didn’t feel like I worked quickly and efficiently in it. BUT I got my work done in it nevertheless, and I really appreciate that it exists for the people that simply can’t afford the alternatives.
Nowadays I use the Affinity suite, which includes Affinity Publisher, a competitor to InDesign. It’s quite affordable and not subscription-based.
Used Adobe for years, made an effort in the last year to switch to FOSS, mainly Inkscape and Scribus. And yes, as other comments have mentioned these tools have some weird quirks and some things don’t work. But that’s the same for Adobe and most other software. I remember switching from Macromedia Freehand (lol, remember that) to Illustrator back in the day and everything felt just wrong and awful in tge beginning (until you learned to work around the quirks?). It’s super hard to tell how much it’s “Software Bad” vs “Not Used to New Thing” and this will be different for everybody as well. But nobody (including the software) is stopping you from using this professionally, I just finished a 20 page PDF for a client with Scribus, used it to print my 32 page comic etc.
TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.
The author’s argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I’m having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There’s also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.
The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that’s a part of a bigger pattern.
My personal take on what was cited:
I’m grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.
You aired my frustrations really well. He spent a lot more time making claims and discussing his own background than demonstrating Wayland’s alleged issues and showing that they’re egregious. It’s an entertaining rant at best, but that doesn’t make his points valid nor does it make anything actionable.
That is simple. About as simple as it gets. The more complex method involves figuring out what VPN software Mullvad really uses, figuring out your keying material, fighting with NetworkManager…
For better or for worse, the widespread methods are not at all similar to the methods sometimes used in Linux. It’s just a fact that most people are accustomed to different ways
When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!
And if you read a few paragraphs more, there’s a Download and install the app section too, rather than add their repos. Which is what the OP wanted anyway…
It’s not difficult. I’ve installed several apps that way already. I just don’t like blindly following instructions while having zero understanding of what I’m actually doing here. Also, in this case the instructions are unhelpful because nowhere it tells me to install curl first and because of me not having it the first command just comes back with an error.
The way to solve that problem is to read the commands and look up what they do. The installation method they describe is pretty standard and inoffensive. And provides automatic updates. The commands used aren’t complicated and they’re some of the system fundamentals for Debian/Ubuntu systems so it’s a good idea being familiar with them.
In the time it took you to write this shit post and respond to all the comments you could have spent a couple of minutes reading and educating yourself on the process. It’s legit pretty simple especially if you’re willing to do a little research.
cURL is a very commonly used program to download individual files from the command line and worth installing to have it around in the future.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl
The first command tells your package manager to update its list so you ask for the latest version. You can skip it if you’ve already updated today. The second command tells your package manager to install cURL.
This will happen every now and then, especially when building a package from source. You won’t have some common utility that the documentation writer assumed you had, and you will need to find what package provides it and install the package.
Yes people would assume you have curl. Curl is often used to install programs. And curl is definitely one of the things that can do malicius things this way. So you are right to be hesitant to use commands that you don’t understand. Most Linux users have forgotten how hard it is to learn the first stuff with no preaquired knowledge.
If you have googled “what is curl and how is it used” you may have found some relevant info.
I have given up on Linux because installing was hard in the past
There are some tools that make installing software easier. Like “appimage” files that are single files that (after you make executable) are completely self contained.
Flatpacks and snaps have an “store” like experience.
.deb files are also sometimes simple (also need to be made executable) (depends on the distro)
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