Fuck Winget. It’s a GUI-only person’s idea of what a CLI package manager should be. The only positive value I can think of is that it’s better than not having one at all.
I manage about 500 Windows machines in a university. When teachers started complaining that they are unfamiliar with the paid version of an IDE, and we’d have to install the free community edition, I was delighted to learn that it was available through Winget. But privilege escalation on Windows is a fucking joke, so trying to install it remotely through Ansible/WinRM just popped the UAC anyway. I had to VNC into every single machine to click the fucking button. As an additional middle finger, winget.exe was not even in PATH when I tried WinRMing as the local admin.
Winget is the absolute nadir of package managers, and it should be doused in acid, burned, chucked in the dumpster where it belongs, and forgotten. Choco and Scoop all the way.
Having compared snaps in ubuntu 23.10 to flatpaks on opensuse tumbleweed, I can safely say that snaps tend to be faster for me with less weirdness happening during usage. Some programs were the same (obsidian for example) other comparisons were done from the same category (Firefox snap vs chromium flatpak). I genuinely prefer snap and don’t see the issues people often quote. Also, that the backend isn’t open isn’t a big deal to me, as snaps themselves generally still are.
If you’re gonna go though the trouble of installing a browser, why switch Microsoft for Google? They’re both evil and Edge actually performs significantly better than Chrome somehow (they’re basically the same I don’t get it).
Conversely, if they’re both evil, why use Microsoft over Google?
People have their browser set up the way they want it, and downloading and installing Chrome to have everything sync back and work exactly the way they want things to work takes all of two minutes.
Why use Edge and spend time and effort to import bookmarks, import passwords, change settings, install extensions etc. only to have the exact same end result that downloading Chrome would have given them in the first place, but with the added annoyance of Microsoft leveraging Edge to nudge them into the Microsoft ecosystem?
I agree yeah, I’d say in a lot of ways that Edge is much better than Chrome, due to its performance and also very good security, plus some tracking protection (though not a lot) vs. Chrome’s none, etc. Between the 2, I’d probably always pick Edge.
I think lots of people also don’t know how easy it is to migrate all user data between browsers. Also, the added work of changing your phone app is probably too much for the average, comfortable consumer.
I used to get it why people install chrome. It had a specific look and feel. It’s no more, all browsers (except some startups making up the rules) look the same. Its a full page window with tabs on the top. Vanilla FF looks the same.
Honestly i dont think most people do. We’re all in a bubble of atleast somewhat technically minded people, not just on lemmy but im sure most of our friends irl are similar. Ive been in a few officey type areas and out of the vast majority of monitors ive seen, theyve been using edge, sometimes i even see multiple browsers open lmao. Just checked statcounter and edge is the third most used which is fucking nuts when you consider how many options there are.
You know what? I’m gonna fucking say it, GNU is a shitty name and that’s why no one uses it! Most people don’t care about credit or accuracy, Linux is just infinitely better than GNU/anything or even just GNU on its own.
Yeah but sometimes it’s the ESR version which is super slow to get feature updates. Though I suppose that’s fair for distros intended for server or other enterprise applications.
Colleague:
“I need to use Linux and my boyfriend suggested I use Ubuntu, is that right?”
Me (screaming internally, deciding on whether to rant on bloatware, on Canonical, on reproducibility, on monetization, on many things wrong with the world, but not wanting to come off as an elitist, nor scare her off the idea altogether):
“… that, that should be fine.”
I would say use Mint, I think nowadays that’s the better beginner distro. Actually it’s also kind of the pro-user distro. Fiddling around to tweak everything and get it just right is fun in your 20s, but when you need to work, have kids and a wife mint is fine 😛
I think the only reason people really have for calling it GNU/Linux is to raise awareness about the Free Software movement and its agenda.
The line between “kernel” and “the rest of the OS” is and has always been a fuzzy one. I think RMS would consider GCC to be part of the OS, but I’ve never seen an Android device with a compiler installed. (And I’ve sometimes done *GNU/*Linux installations and never gone on to install GCC, though usually I end up installing GCC at some point.)
I don’t think it’s more “correct” to call it “GNU/Linux” than “Linux” per se. (After all, if we’re going down that rabbithole, should I be calling it “Syslinux/Systemd/etc/etc/etc/GNU/Linux?”)
But, if you’re ideologically aligned with the Free Software movement and want to see more awareness of its mission (and full disclosure, that describes me) then by all means, call it “GNU/Linux” if you like.
All that said, I do think a lot of folks who insist on calling it “GNU/Linux” strongly believe not only that it’s good for awareness about Free Software, but also that it’s more “correct” to call it “GNU/Linux.”
And I’ll also say I can kindof understand why people might feel it’s more correct. From RMS’ perspective, he and some other folks were off building an OS and they had it mostly done and people started using the GNU work with a Linux kernel. But still, that historical argument holds less water every year.
I’m more or less philosophically and ideologically aligned with the FSF, but don’t really want to bring attention to them as they seem far more interested in ideological purity than actually doing good work or being actually useful, which is a massive turn off for most people.
They’re also still doggedly aligned with RMS who’s, honestly, a hot mess. At best, he’s embarrassing and off-putting and would rather argue over Linux vs “gu-new slash Linux” (and insisting on pronouncing gnu incorrectly and citing a song that was actually making fun of people pronouncing it that way) than talk about things that actually matter for the cause, and will refuse to work with anyone who doesn’t do things his way (and at worst… Well, there’s all the stuff that got him temporarily kicked out of the FSF, and them bringing him back after that all came out was not good for the community).
Ideological purity is actually harmful to the free sharing of knowledge and ideas, which is what they claim to be for.
Depending what exactly you mean by “ideological purity,” I might somewhat disagree with you.
I definitely want there to (continue to) exist an organization pushing for all software to be FOSS. If the Free Software movement didn’t exist but the OSS movement did, I expect there’d be much less FOSS out there. There are a lot of projects out there that don’t have a good OSS movement reason for existing. Coreboot, for instance. Arguably to a large extent Wine as well. And LineageOS and GrapheneOS. And OpenWRT. Not to mention ~(GNU/)~Linux itself. I don’t imagine most OSS folks to be quite so motivated to want fully-FOSS-from-soup-to-nuts kind of options as Free Software folks are.
There are plenty of software companies publishing more proprietary software for Linux and plenty of OSS folks heralding that as a huge win. For the most part, I see that as unfortunate. And I have reasons why that I can point to that wouldn’t be seen (well… quite as much, at least) as tinfoil-hat levels of paranoia.
And then there’s copyleft. I think that’s a fuckin’ great thing that’s needed more now than ever, but (and I don’t know for sure… correct me if you think I’m wrong, but) I think that’s more of a thing among Free Software folks than among Open Source folks.
And I don’t think any of the above could have come about or at least been quite as prominent today as they are without such an ideologically-motivated movement. The FSF put a very aggressive line in the sand saying “proprietary software shouldn’t exist.” Basically the main thing that distinguishes the OSS movement from the Free Software movement is tolerance of proprietary software.
Also, I don’t really know for sure the extent to which this is actually the case for OSS folks as a whole, but ESR’s “the solution to everything is more capitalism” is pretty fucked up.
That said, I 110% agree the Free Software movement needs to be doing mostly everything it can to distance itself from RMS.
Richard M. Stallman. Origin of the whole idea of “Free Software,” founder of the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project, guy who said some of Epstein’s sex trafficking victims probably enjoyed it.
Oh, and ESR is Eric Raymond, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative and rabid Libertarian.
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