131–140 of 197 posts
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Doing it for the humans is exactly the raison d'etre of software.
Yes and no. The problem is that the magic word "container" obscured what is actually being done (cgroups, namespaces, iptables, etc etc etc). Its one more thing that result in confusion between user and computer about the state of the machine.
As a hardcore Linux user, I'm really torn about Android. On the one hand, it has created a nice software ecosystem by pushing a consistent set of APIs. Linux desktop applications were never remarkable except for a few ones. I think fragmentation into a myriad of frameworks led to this. The only 2 X11 applications I use are firefox and zathura. On the other hand, too much stuff has been redone in Android. It's too for…
I did a quick Google but Zathura is a popular name. Do you mean Zathura the document viewer? Just asking because I've been looking for one.
I want regular Linux on my phone, not Java Linux on my desktop.
Why? Serious question. And what do you mean by "Linux"? Would GNU coreutils and a terminal be sufficient, or is there something else you need?
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I've never liked the traditional unix way of managing a filesystem either; GoboLinux had the right idea.
Well for the most part because it uses what unix offers rather than ignoring it. The basic problem with most package managers is that they ignore the soname mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soname This allows multiple versions of a lib to live side by side, while giving the binaries the version(s) they want. package managers ignore this, and instead is hung up on getting that one "true" version everywhere. Th…
I see you've qualified your statement with "most", so you're not in the wrong, but unless I'm mistaken both Nix[1] (and NixOS) and Guix[2] handle this problem well and do it in a way which scales infinitely.
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I've never liked the traditional unix way of managing a filesystem either; GoboLinux had the right idea.
Well for the most part because it uses what unix offers rather than ignoring it. The basic problem with most package managers is that they ignore the soname mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soname This allows multiple versions of a lib to live side by side, while giving the binaries the version(s) they want. package managers ignore this, and instead is hung up on getting that one "true" version everywhere. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any other good sources for open source Android apps? I love F-Droid, but they plan to drop Firefox, and Chromium will never make it on there.
Do you know why they're planning to drop Firefox? And why would Chromium never make it on there? I don't know much about F-Droid and its limitations. EDIT: Okay I did the Google search that I should've just done in the first place. Apparently they're not dropping Firefox fully, but rather forking it to "remove the proprietary binaries out of the official builds" (Google Play API, etc). I suppose APIs like that are im…
F-Droid has (temporarily?) taken down their Fennec fork, seemingly due to difficulties with development: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/please-do-not-drop-firefox-...
This is presumably why Firefox's removal has been continuously postponed. Reliability is one of the reasons why I would prefer first-party Firefox over a third-party fork.
Though there are good reasons why F-Droid doesn't include Chromium and seeks to remove Firefox, the absence of many open source Android apps from F-Droid's catalog has a direct impact on utility. It's also not uncommon for apps on F-Droid to lag behind the version on Google Play or the latest release direct from the developer. (Again, there are good reasons why they screen apps, but it does impose a delay.)
I appreciate F-Droid's screening process, and I wouldn't want it to go away, but it'd be nice to have an alternative open source Android app catalog that's a little more liberal.
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> I would prefer less app-ification, more package management. I would argue for the opposite: One problem with linux is that you can't run untrusted software without it getting the same access as the user. That's exactly what the appification is. I see package managers as a source of some problems of linux: Package maintainers are a unneeded middleman between the writers of the software and you, package managers inte…
> I would argue for the opposite: One problem with linux is that you can't run untrusted software without it getting the same access as the user. That's exactly what the appification is. > I see package managers as a source of some problems of linux: Package maintainers are a unneeded middleman between the writers of the software and you, package managers interact with the whole system, scattering files around the wh…
Lately I've found myself checking if something is available on F-droid before installing from Google Play. Sometimes it is!
If something is on F-droid, I'm less worried about it being scammy spyware disguised as useful software.
As a hardcore Linux user, I'm really torn about Android. On the one hand, it has created a nice software ecosystem by pushing a consistent set of APIs. Linux desktop applications were never remarkable except for a few ones. I think fragmentation into a myriad of frameworks led to this. The only 2 X11 applications I use are firefox and zathura. On the other hand, too much stuff has been redone in Android. It's too for…
> I would prefer less app-ification, more package management. I would argue for the opposite: One problem with linux is that you can't run untrusted software without it getting the same access as the user. That's exactly what the appification is. I see package managers as a source of some problems of linux: Package maintainers are a unneeded middleman between the writers of the software and you, package managers inte…