Patch

@Patch@feddit.uk

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Patch,

If you want to announce your disapproval or approval of a certain post, there’s this great mechanism built right in to do so. There are a couple of little arrow buttons; just click the down arrow on anything that you don’t enjoy.

Personally I find it dead easy just to not click on any posts that don’t pique my interest, and it’s not like this community has so much content that “high quality” posts are getting buried under the sheer volume.

If you want to start a new community which is just Linux news aggregation, you go right ahead though.

Patch,

I’ve not used that tablet, but I have a Star Labs laptop and it’s an excellent bit of kit. Would heartily recommend them as a company.

Can’t vouch for the Star Lite tablet specifically, though.

Patch, (edited )

ChromeOS is as much Linux as anything else is. It’s controlled by a greedy megacorp, but so is Red Hat (IBM) or, idk, Oracle Linux. Yes it’s based on an unusual immutable design, but immutable distros are now cropping up out of lots of projects (Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, amongst many others, not to mention the Steam Deck). It avoids using the GNU tool chain, but the alternatives that it uses are already used by other Linux distros (like Alpine). It now uses the standard Wayland graphics stack, and is in the process of moving from upstart (a previously widely used Linux init system) to systemd.

It’s hard to come up with a definition of “Linux distro” that excludes ChromeOS without excluding a bunch of unambiguously Linux distros too.

Patch, (edited )

Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin

There’s no basis for calling MacOS Linux. There’s a legitimate basis for calling it BSD, as Darwin was forked from FreeBSD, but BSD and Linux aren’t directly related. Also, Darwin has diverged considerably from FreeBSD, and only a small amount of the stack outside of the kernel shares any code, so it’s not necessarily meaningful to think of it as a “FreeBSD distro” in the same sense as you would ChromeOS a Linux distro (which uses, as I mentioned in my previous comment, a more-or-less standard Linux technology stack).

In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores

ChromeOS lets you install Linux native applications out of the box, although it does so in containers (Crostini, which I believe is based on LXD, another standard Linux technology stack). Once you enable Linux apps, it automatically hooks you up to the Debian repositories, and you can install using apt like you would on any other Debian install.

Whether you consider Crostini to be “sideloading Linux” is a matter of semantics, but fundamentally it’s no different from installing containerised LXD/LXC apps on Ubuntu or whatever, which is a common use case for developers and production servers.

For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world.

I think you’re making an argument for why it’s a bad Linux distro (from a certain perfectly valid point of view), but not that it’s not a Linux distro.

There are few if any other distros which are as locked down ChromeOS out of the box, but all Linux distros can be locked down, and if you’ve ever used a corporate provisioned machine in a workplace or education setting then odds are you won’t have any admin freedoms regardless of the distro chosen. Sudoer privileges is something you might have on your own home machine, but not something that you can expect on every Linux machine. Even on devices you own, there are devices that you might buy (such as wifi routers, DVD players, smart TVs) which run standard Linux but which are as locked down (and more) than a Chromebook; it’s just that most people don’t expect to have unrestricted sudo privileges on their router in the same way as they do a laptop.

For the record, I am not a Chromebook fan. I owned one once for a few years, and thought it was a disappointing, artificially limited experience, and I don’t intend to have one again. ChromeOS is not my idea of a good Linux distro. But I’ll still argue firmly that it is a Linux distro in all ways that matter.

Patch,

ChromeOS can run native Linux apps, so realistically if Adobe wanted to support ChromeOS they’d probably go for a Linux port anyway. A lot less work than trying to reimplement every single UI from the ground up as a web interface.

Patch,

Most of the post is an “argument from authority”: Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!

It’s amazing that he’s so well qualified, even runs his own X fork, but isn’t volunteering to do any actual work to maintain the project.

Because that’s what this ultimately boils down to, isn’t it. Nobody’s forcing anyone to use Wayland or drop X. But, all the X.org developers have moved on to Wayland and aren’t coming back, and all the major DEs are also migrating to Wayland. So if you want to keep using X, you’re going to need to do the work that other people used to do for you.

For most users that’s a fairly empty statement, as most users don’t have the expertise to maintain X and window managers even if they wanted to. But apparently this guy is hot stuff; a highly qualified, highly experienced king of the display server world. So when are we going to see his X.org fork?

Patch,

I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.

All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian (“why are all the packages so old!”), or Fedora (“ew, Red Hat”), or Gentoo (“is that a laptop or a space heater?”) or…er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.

I don’t think arch has it any worse than the rest.

Patch, (edited )

Projects which choose BSD/Apache type licences do so fully in the knowledge that their code may be incorporated into projects with different licences. That’s literally the point: it’s considered a feature of the licence. These projects are explicitly OK with their code going proprietary, for example. If they weren’t OK with it, they’d use a GPL-type copyleft licence instead, as that’s conversely the literal point of those licences.

Being mad about your Apache code being incorporated into a GPL project would make no sense, and certainly wouldn’t garner any sympathy from most people in the FOSS community.

Patch,

No, this is just about the kernel and the installer/images.

You won’t be able to install Debian on an x86-32 computer anymore, but everything you can currently do on an x86-64 install still continue to work.

Patch, (edited )

Yeah, I mean if you want to get picky, the actual i386 processor family hasn’t been supported by the Linux kernel since 2012, and was dropped by Debian in 2007.

Most people were generally not particularly affected by that, seeing as the last i386 chip was released in (I think) 1989!

Debian’s choice to refer to the whole x86-32 line as i386 has always been a weird historical quirk.

Patch,

I’m not enormously bothered by the designs themselves; the new logos look fine, although I preferred the old logo.

But what really bothers me is that they’ve gone with a whole disjointed mess of different designs for each of their sub-projects. Why on earth wouldn’t you take this opportunity to design a coherent family of logos? Bizarre missed opportunity.

Patch,

Canonical have had it in Ubuntu for years, but it’s taken them a while to get it to a point where it could be upstreamed. That’s what this news is: that Canonical’s patch is finally all clear to be merged.

Patch, (edited )

I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.

Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.

When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.

Linux on a 2in1 for Uni (lemmy.world)

Hello linix@lemmy, I got fixed on the idea of replacing my iPad with a 2in1 like the thibkpad X13 for uni since I use the keyboard with my iPad a lot. The only time I need to take handwritten notes is in chemistry, mathematics and to annotate PDFs. Does anyone here have experience with convertibles running Linux? What would be...

Patch, (edited )

Slightly sideways suggestion is the Star Labs Starlite, which is a tablet with detachable keyboard/touchpad stand. This might meet your requirements.

Patch,

Oh, come on. You’re saying that it’s a problem that snaps don’t have immediately obvious performance problems or bugs?

Let’s not get silly about these things…

Patch, (edited )

It’s not a “shitty title”, because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.

Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn’t something the OP can comment on because they didn’t test it.

We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they’re all pretty similar under the covers), but that’s not on the OP.

In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.

Patch,

I legitimately do this every time. I seem to be simply unable to parse it correctly.

Patch,

It’s a typo. It should be “comprised”.

Patch, (edited )

ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.

And I know what you’re going to say: “But ChromeOS isn’t proper Linux”. But it’s a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).

The fact that it doesn’t really resemble any “mainstream” Linux distro is kind of the point. It’s a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that’s exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.

Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we’re in now, we have to accept that that’s never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.

Plenty of Linux distros aren’t just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn’t get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it’s just that their products aren’t targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they’re targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they’re targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There’s a good market there, it’s just a different market.

Patch,

Birdtray sounds like what you’re looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.

Patch,

I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.

Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?

Patch,

I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.

As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.

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