I remember asking in one of their articles if they had planned to reign over (or partner up) the project over to Valve once it was ready and said they had no plans.
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.
my take is that you really cant get big compnies to port to linux in the way he describes, and a lot of linux users wont use it anyway cuz its not foss
also afaik cosmic isnt just gnome in rust? its more like a realised knome (mix of kde and gnome, april fools 202x)
big companies will move with userbase, and cosmic being developed wont hurt the userbase growth of desktop linux. jeez that last part about foss evangelists just like no
honestly this man just seems a bit fustrated by not having a latest popos release?
also : people create clones of software all the time, not just in foss projects
overall, id say i dont really agree with him. imo cosmic is fine and the big companies really arent that interested anyway, i don’t think giving them money will help tbh, id much prefer foss alternatives being given funding
Lol, saaaaaame! I’ve run plenty of Linux servers over the past 30 years with only occasional attempts at desktop Linux, but never got it to graduate past a secondary box or dual-boot. All of the happy Linux desktop users I’ve run across on Lemmy convinced me to give it another go. I tried Ubuntu for a month under the mistaken assumption that it was still a relevant, stable, easy distro (10-15 years ago, it was the distro to use if you just wanted a no-fuss Linux desktop). Snaps made me want to end myself, but not quite give up on Linux altogether, so I pivoted and now I’m on month 3 of happily maining Arch!
Same thing happened to me. Moved to pop!_os.I have zero regrets. I’ve learned a ton. I use tons of apps off f-droid and foss Ubuntu apps. I have degoogled most of my life. I’m also developing an Firefox addon for lemmy. It’s usable as a user script addon now. It’s called lemmytools. It’s my small contribution. All because Reddit got stupid. I don’t even browse reddit for answers usually about tech/programming stuff anymore because they block my VPN.
There are literally dozens of us! I’m running Zorin. The Reddit debacle really hit home for me that free alternatives to commercial projects work best when everyone pitches in a little.
Ubuntu used to get a lot of undeserved hate but lately the hate feels deserved. Ubuntu has been the face of the usable desktop Linux for a long time and they just keep tripping over themselves every time they try to move forward.
Their intentions are usually good. A lot of things they propose usually end up being adopted by the community at large (just not their implementation). They seem to just yank everyone’s chain a little too hard in the direction we’re eventually going to go and we all resent them for that.
Off the top of my head, there was Upstart (init system), there was unity (desktop), and now snaps (containerized packaging). All of these were good ideas but implemented poorly and with a general lack of support from the community. In almost each case in the past what’s happened is that once they run out of developers who champion the tech, they eventually get onboard with whatever Debian and Rhel are doing once they were caught up and settled.
Valve’s lack of interest in maintaining the snap makes sense. The development on the Ubuntu platform is very opinionated in a way where the developers of the software (valve) really want nothing to do with Canonicals snaps.
On another note: my favorite thing about the Ubuntu server was LXD + ZFS integration. Both have been snapified. It was incredibly useful and stable. Stephane Graber has forked the project now into INCUS. It looks very promising.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I really don’t get this trend of wanting to containerized just about everything, it feels like a FOTM rather than doing something that makes sense.
I mean, containers are fantastic tools and can help solve compatibility problems and make things more secure, especially on servers, but putting everything into containers on the desktop doesn’t make any sense to me.
One of the big advantages Linux always had over Windows is shared components, so packages are much smaller and updating the whole system is way faster, if every single application comes with its own stuff (like it does on Windows) you lose that advantage.
Ubuntu’s obsession with snaps is one of the reasons I stopped using it years ago, I don’t want containers forced upon me, I want to be free to decide if/when to use them (I prefer flatpack and appimage).
Debian derivatives that don’t “reinvent the wheel” is the way to go for me, I’ve been using Linux MX on my gaming desktop and LMDE on laptop for years and I couldn’t be happier, no problem whatsoever with Steam either.
Shared components work brilliantly in a fantasy world where nothing uses new features of a library or depends on bug fixes in new versions of a library, and no library ever has releases with regressions or updates that change the API. That’s not the case, though, so often there’ll exist no single version of a dependency that makes all the software on your machine actually compile and be minimally buggy. If you’re lucky, downstream packagers will make different packages for different versions of things they know cause this kind of problem so they can be installed side by side, or maintain a collection of patches to create a version that makes everything work even though no actual release would, but sometimes they do things like remove version range checks from CMake so things build, but don’t even end up running.
Shared containers work beautifully for a lot of things, though, many programs aren’t all that sensitive either. Making snaps for the tricky ones makes sense. Having snaps for all of them is ridiculous.
I can count the software requiring repo-pins on one hand on my desktop. For those, snaps make sense, replacing the need for any pins. Snaps are less confusing than pins. IMO.
It reminds me of Python programming, with requirements pinned to version ranges. Some dev-teams forget, and their apps won’t work out of the box. Sometimes, software still works ten years later, if they only use the most common arguments and commands from the packages.
I agree with a lot of your points but I do think containers a great solution.
I’ve been a really big fan of Universal Blue lately. It presents a strong argument for containerizing everything. Your core is immutable and atomic which makes upgrades seamless. User land lives in a container and just gets layered back on top afterwards.
I do think the idea behind snap isn’t all about pushing the Linux platform as such forward, but to specifically gain a market advantage to Ubuntu.
Why else is finding documentation for changing the default store so difficult? And I don’t think you can even have multiple “repositories” there–quite unlike all other Linux packaging systems out there. (Corrections welcome!)
Snaps are a relatively recent way of packaging application installations in certain flavors of Linux. Steam is Valve’s game distribution platform (amongst other things).
There’s an unofficial Snap package to install Steam and it apparently doesn’t work so good
Snap is a sandboxed environment to install applications in.
Flatpak is a more portable implementation of the same broad idea, it downloads a chroot and runs applications from within using a separate program called bubblewrap (one could, in theory, use chroot to run apps from within the downloaded flatpak images, bubblewrap offers further isolation through things like namespaces and cgroups etc. )
Snap, unlike flatpak, is a Canonical specific implementation that has a reputation for breaking a lot of things.
It’s perfectly possible to isolate a steam install, NixOS does that by default to even get it running (on NixOS nothing is where any binary blob expects it to be). There was a very brief issue with experimental steam when they tightened up their own sandboxing and doing sandbox-in-sandbox broke stuff but that was fixed before release as Valve is, indeed, responsive, even if the distribution isn’t officially supported. But you gotta have some professionalism and have institutional continuity, they don’t want to deal with J. Random Hacker doing a one-off packaging job. Or distros trying to be smart and replace the steam runtime with their own library versions. Basically, assume that the whole thing runs directly on the kernel, make sure to have graphics drivers, and you’ll be fine running it as-is.
Snap is Canonical’s (developers of Ubuntu) attempt at their own containerized software package format, conceptually similar to Flatpak in some ways but differing in details of implementation. One major note is the back end is kept closed source so you cannot host your own Snap repo, which ruffles some feathers.
Apparently distributing Steam (Valve’s video game store/launcher) in Snap format is causing some problems.
That sounds kinda like my journey, although without the Marxist part.
Clueless about tech, bought an iMac
These ads are annoying. [Installs adblock Plus]. There. Except for fricking Taboola, they can DIAF. And the cookie popup banners. Why do they love cookies if they’re not playing cookie clicker?
It’s the MacOS Catalina Update!! It Thanos snapped my iPod music library. This taught me to avoid MacOS and realize that updates often just make things worse. Set up a dual boot with Windows.
I start browsing r/asshole_design too much. Teaches me to never trust a corporation. I also realize how phones keep dropping useful features. I finally realize uBlock origin blocks much more than ads.
Oh boy, this is where the rabbit hole starts. I’m sick of how slow my Mac is, addicted to discovering new cool apps on my phone, and discover FOSS. I install Linux for the first time, and it runs quite well on a laptop from 2009. Also YouTube goes full greed mode.
Get my new Windows gaming laptop, try to balance privacy with convenience. But I’m irked at how slow it is for some basic tasks. Everything is stable, except when the laptop’s SSD borked.
Uh oh. Discord, YouTube, and Reddit all make massively greedy decisions, and I don’t want to support those platforms anymore. I discover Lemmy. I try to focus extra hard on FOSS and donate $150 over the course of the year. I think this tells me I’ve became radicalized. Proprietary platforms keep getting worse and worse.
Linux resurgence. Tired of Windows, and one of my classes needs a UNIX terminal. Sounds like it’s time to dual boot (on 2 SSDs), with Ubuntu being the default. Also I buy a year of Nebula to support creators and stick it to Google.
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