It doesn’t really feel like Linux if you ask me. It’s not even open source, since Google controls everything. You could run Linux apps on it with a special mode I guess, but what bugs me is that they call Linux a “feature” when it’s absolutely not that at all.
But really, not a single soul in Morocco has even heard of Chrome OS. And even then, they’re gonna hate it.
this sandbox craze is slowly pushing things back to the point where we used cartridges and booted off from them straight to the program. who needs an OS at this point? it’s bundled with the app anyway 😆
I don’t think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It’s an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I’m back to good ol’ Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
Please tell me more about Spiral Linux. I’m not a huge Debian fan personally(at least for desktop), but I often install Linux on other people’s machines. And Mint/ Debian is great for them.
Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I’ve personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven’t done side-by-side comparisons, so I’m not sure exactly what that means.
Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637 , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there’s a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
Well for one thing their driver support is apparently “harrowing”. 😊
I will never understand why people choose distributions that will brick themselves when the wind blows, so they add snapshot support as a band-aid, and then they celebrate “woo hoo, it takes pre and post snapshots after every package install!”
How about using a distro where you never have to restore a snapshot…
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn’t set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I’m not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it’s no big deal.
And my point is that it’s not normal to fear updates. Any updates, but especially updates to essential packages like the kernel or graphics driver.
If you’re using the experimental branch of a distro or experimental versions of packages on purpose then snapshots are a good tool. But if you’re using a normal distro and its normal packages you should not have to resort to such measures.
KDE plasma has a tiling feature and there’s the System76 shell for Gnome. They both work, but I’ve always felt like they feel like an afterthought.
But System76 is currently working on their Cosmic Desktop, which promises cool tiling features with a desktop feel to it. Many people are quite excited for i. :)
I believe some BSDs use it too, and WSL2 will make Linux applications automatically appear on Windows, so editing desktop files may be useful there too. Plus, you don’t need to deal with different architectures (aarch vs amd64).
Alright, but maybe take a look into something like Zenity. The task done by your tool doesn’t really justify installing a huge JRE, when a simple bash script would suffice.
I didn’t make the tool, I merely answered a question.
Had I wanted to develop such a tool myself I probably would’ve gone Python + Qt6 or used some Rust GTK wrapper, or maybe dust off Gambas if all I want it a a few buttons and text fields.
Because that’s what I learned from Uni, didn’t want that skill to go to waste. I was thinking about how it would be easier to make the apps (plain applications that use executables and shell to run) .desktop file without any hassle (for new Linux users).
Also, Python was two semesters ago, so I forgot all about it.
Adding to sleepyTonia’s comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it’ll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.
Game and media preservation, for one. But I’m sure part of it is the technical challenge. There’s still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.
Exactly. Flash was hugely popular, there’s a wealth of content, media, projects and entire websites made with Flash (not just games) that would otherwise be lost and this unbelievable effort brings all that content back to life.
Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.
The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.
From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn’t support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
In November 2011, about a year after Jobs’ open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5.
You can see why someone might think it was ten years ago based off this.
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
Seems one of the main reasons is to use Rust’s thread safety to enable “concurrent mode”. Anyone with the knowledge able to explain what advantages that would yield for an end fish user?
will have to wait for the first while loop to complete, which takes 0.5s, and then run the second.
So it takes 0.5s until you get the first output and a full second until you get all of it.
Making this concurrent means you get the first line immediately and all of it in 0.5s.
While this is an egregious example, it makes all builtin | builtin pipelines slower.
Other shells solve this via subshells - they fork off a process for the middle part of the pipeline at least. That has some downsides in that it’s annoyingly leaky - you can’t set variables or create a background job in those sections and then wait for them outside, because it’s a new process and so the outer shell never sees them.
While I agree, most people shouldn’t have to be concerned with it, you can’t deny the resource impacts of various languages, libraries and frameworks, like compare the memory usage of Discord or Teams with those of FOSS chat applications, and you’ll notice those two consistently eating much more memory. You can also compare compute speeds of a higher level language like Python vs lower level languages like Rust and you’ll find that Rust is quite a bit faster (though generally takes more dev time). So yes, users shouldn’t have to be concerned with involved languages, but if you’re running something on a low-resource device, such as a Raspberry Pi, those little details can make all the difference.
PL can have a large impact on features, bugs, bug reports, troubleshooting, performance and documentation. Particularly when dev resources are limited.
It’s hard to see how this opinion holds any water.
Rust is a great choice for a shell built as an interactive shell that doesn’t have to be core to the OS. Over C++ this also makes development more accessible to young programmers.
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