121–130 of 339 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies It's funny, from your point of view having a centralized repository with a (usually) single (usually) latest version of a lib…
I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.
Also, personally I've stuck with Arch Linux for 6-7 years now because it's the first distribution I found that consistently works for me, so I don't know that anecdotes will get us very far either way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies It's funny, from your point of view having a centralized repository with a (usually) single (usually) latest version of a lib…
I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.
To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and breaks constantly, which is why I stopped using it.
"brake" makes it sound like one would have to reinstall the whole thing. I don't think I've ever had that happen in the 10 years since I started using it for nearly everything. I've had my drive fail, but that was the drive's fault, and even in that case I also didn't need to reinstall everything. I just copied the good files and reinstalled only the packages whose files got corrupted.
If I sit down in front of my PC and can't do work, it's broken. That I can spend an hour or two fixing it rather than reinstalling is irrelevant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you run graphical applications inside a BSD jail?
You can with SSH and X11 forwarding. Whether that's practical is a different question and may vary according to the application and user
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.
This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.
> It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; __complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs__.
Even their wiki is very clear to inform you that you're at the whims of the package upgrades.
But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute, but I ran arch for probably 10+ years until I finally got tired of it and moved to Ubuntu. The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. In the 2-3 years since I moved to Ubuntu I've never once sat down at my PC and had something stop working that was working before.
This defense of your favorite distro is especially silly when you think about it logically. Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. The sensible response isn't "it never breaks!", but is instead "that's the nature of rolling release, you opt into it when you choose Arch".
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
The downvotes in this section clearly show the real state of browser technologies and the few choice one will have if they use an alternative OS. Brave and Vivaldi are still forks of Chromium, Waterfox is a fork of Firefox. Thus you are not going to find any updated alternatives like those on the BSDs anytime soon. Meanwhile, WebKit-based browsers doesn't seem to suffer from the overuse of dependencies and multiple l…
why is that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant small as in code size. In a stable branch you want the size of changes to be small and targeted despite how severe the issue is. You don't want to take on new bugs from patches that aren't related to issues you want to see fixed.
If the change is so small, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to backport the fix? Don't upgrade firefox (and any dependencies), just fix the bug. It would be a lot harder if the actual fix was more complicated and a much more complicated diff. Possible that master has diverged sufficiently from their version that backporting the fix would be unreasonable.
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
Also broken is maintaining multiple packages that package multiple versions of the same package with combinations of external, frequently changing platform packages like rubygems that are packaged manually. Multiple versions of the same package should share common recipe declarations as much possible and be managed more cleanly. Native extensions should be built automatically in CI/CD using polling or notifications rather than manual methods that too often lead to outdated, vulnerable dependencies and create too much pointless, repetitious busywork.