The terms of use appear that they handle your data. If you wamt to avoid a thirdparty. i would suggest KDE connect, can combine with tailscale for cross network sends. Syncthing is also good. or Croc for single transfers either local or across networks.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
There’s a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can’t be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it’s about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I’m not a fan.
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).
They’re designed to be upgraded and repaired over time so they’re super modular. You can also save some money if you’re not afraid to put it together yourself.
The true year of linux is not any specific year or a userbase percentage but when linux is widely preinstalled on consumer hardware without nerds needing to recommend to people to install it themselves
In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.
In any case, as an old-timer, it’s very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the “Year of Linux Desktop” is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.
The reddit API debacle sent me down a Lemmy, FOSS, Linux, privacy, hacker rabbit hole that I will hopefully and happily never have to leave. My eyes are opened to a better future. I’ll probably be duel booting windows for awhile still to keep up for my job, but I have been able to start transitioning away pretty easily thanks to the hard work of linux desktop devs. I am so grateful for the FOSS community and hope to contribute myself someday.
It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. The problem with replacing things that work with something “better” is that “better” is subjective, so you end up with a new “better” way every few years, and maintaining existing systems becomes a god awful slog. See the JavaScript ecosystem.
The bash I wrote 10 years ago still works today, and it will still work in 10 more years. The same bash will very likely work on your computer, on a remote server, etc. This is the power of not chasing “better” all the time.
Try running a Ruby or Node program from 10 years ago today on your computer. Now, try running it on a random Linux server.
Please do not take this as a slight against Ruby or Node, or any other high level programming language. Bash compared to those is simply apples and oranges, they are not the same thing.
By all means, if you have a project that requires a Ruby runtime anyway, write operational scripts with Ruby, run them with Rake, etc.
Want a portable script that doesn’t depend on a complex runtime? Use bash.
If bash is too limiting, use Perl. No, seriously. Perl is fine. It is about as ubiquitously available as bash, and the standard library likely has what you need to get the job done. People blindly dismiss Perl because some blog post told them to, usually in the context of writing application code. You’re not writing application code, you’re writing scripts. Would you write an application with bash? No.
There already are Linux standards, its just that there are lots of people developing their own distros. Asking people who are developing in their free time to contribute to a collective solution if they don’t want to is forcing them to do something they don’t want to do in their free time.
Linux will become big in countries that encourage their governments and companies not to use Windows, and eventually there will be a few major players for desktop beyond the big 3 for enterprise (Suse, Ubuntu, Redhat)
Astra Linux in Russia is becoming the mass adopted Linux, the longer the war goes, the more companies that won’t be able to renew Microsoft licenses, the more adoption of Linux will increase.
Deepin Linux (China UOS) gets about 500 posts on it’s forums in Chinese per day. That version of Linux will likely become the dominant desktop OS in China by ~2030 if the USA continues sanctions.
Linux Mint has incrementally been growing a user base and donations every month. 5 years ago they were getting 7,000 euros on average per month, today they get 12,000 euros on average per month.
I’m not worried about Linux Desktop anymore, it’s a permanently established common good even if the majors like Red Hat and Ubuntu fold. And just like Lemmy and Mastodon popped up, at some point in the future Microsoft will do something greedy with Windows and people will flock to a few distros and it’ll all be over then.
That’s your chance to turn away from rpm/RHEL distros and run without looking back. As last 20 years history shows, that branch of linux OS is either dying off on hands, leaving you without suport, either makes migration path complicated by a need to change distro. Like it was with centos +5…10 years, oh no … -> maybe fedora -> oh no … -> whatever whocares rpm pop/rocky/alma name it … Thats it, beat it, no more this shit.
A smaller scale anecdote of mine — I have been using Linux for more than a decade as a second daily driver. I need to make the switch. Everything I need now is on Linux except Visual Studio. So I planned to change my main programming language. It is slow and painful, but I think I am on the right path. Windows 10 is truly the last Windows, for me.
Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we're getting close to having at least one that's usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.
A fully working Linux Phone with good battery life that supports a good matrix client with e2 encryption. GrapheneOS is good, but we need initiatives independent from Google.
At risk of sounding like an Arch shill, I've had the best experience with Hyprland on Arch. I first tried to get it working on Garuda but couldn't get it to work without weird issues, then found it wasn't available on Linux Mint (might be available now? Not sure). Worked pretty much out of the box on Arch with Sddm, and havent run into issues since.
That being said I tend to not install many packages, which reduces the chance of things breaking, so your miles may vary.
I think Hyprland might be available on Pop!_OS, might be worth checking that out.
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