431–440 of 538 posts
However, here on HackerNews i've seen many articles about how "flatpak is dangerous" lately. Is there any real concern? If yes, what would be another option? Appimages? I definitely don't want to rely on snaps now...
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~/snap is really just wholly unacceptable, how did that even become a thing? Do the people who develop this software never use their own systems?
I have no nice words about the person who thought that folder is acceptable to use. Seriously, what the fuck even?
With tmux it seems like this is finally possible with version 3.1 or by compiling it yourself but I remember being annoyed about this years ago.
I dislike a home directory cluttered with dotfiles just as much as that snap folder choice because when do we actually ever not list the hidden files?
Snaps are super laggy. GNOME calculator on Ubuntu runs in a snap and it is baffling that whoever made the decision to package it in a snap by default was OK with the fact that it takes 2 seconds to launch a basic calculator on a 2017 laptop (edit: re-tested, it took 5 seconds). To top it off, a couple months ago my calculator disappeared. For some reason I have been having problems with snap applications disappearing…
Sounds like Windows with their UWP apps. Calculator also used to take 5 secs to load. It’s down to about a second now but still baffles me to think that MS management are ok with that
I guess people at MS test and quality departments use I7 with an SSD driver. If so, it's bad. If not it's simply hard to understand, if we leave corporate politics aside.
To me, the calculator has always been more or less OK, but the Image Viewer is a clusterfuck.
With the old viewer, it's almost instantanious opening by clicking a file in windows explorer. The new one is slow as a crawl. The first time may take 5 or 6 seconds (in a 7 year old laptop). The next time is down to 2 or 3. Compare that to milliseconds using the native app. I've never felt the need to use an specific image viewer, but now I'm happy with Irfanview, as fast as the old app, and full of features.
How do such things pass triage stages?
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> Namely that it would be expensive to open source it with little benefit in return. Would you describe exactly what will be expensive in releasing the source code to software that was developed in house? Does it have lots of dependencies on proprietary software? If so, why? > Namely they want one location to find software, and one location to serve software. And this, is the killer. This is exactly what the people a…
> Would you describe exactly what will be expensive in releasing the source code to software that was developed in house? Does it have lots of dependencies on proprietary software? If so, why? If all you're doing is taking an internal repository and hosting it externally, then it takes no time. But if you make sure licenses are being used correctly throughout the code, audit to make sure no internal secrets accidenta…
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Depending on the qualities your after, AppImage is also really great. Advantages over Flatpak are that they are completely portable (you can store them anywhere and run them from anywhere), and they don't require a special runtime or package management infrastructure of any kind.
AppImages are basically (kind of) statically linked binaries. Not my favorite to install software since they're usually huge (500mb is not far out of the norm), but great for things that are hard to install, as they're pretty much guaranteed to work. I just wish there was a command line switch to stop it from wanting to install itself on my system (move the AppImage to /opt).
If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions. Snapcraft is way ahead of Flatpak on this and the current Ubuntu setup works well. On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results. This re…
> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" Why? Desktop computers worked just fine for 35 or so years before app stores showed up. It's completely unnecessary.
I'm not sure that "desktop computers" as we know it were around in the 60s (I certainly wasn't), but in the early 90s software tended to come from floppy disks, before that it was a C90 cassette on a spectrum.
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The main (and better supported) competitor is Flatpak, which at least doesn't have the terrible marketing.
All containerization is just the fever to the sickness that is the futureshock from extremely fast rate of development of major libs like c++$year, glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints), and the like. You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. Containers try to mitigate this problem but like a fever they often end up making things worse.
The best known manager that does allow this is Nix, do you know of any more, maybe ways to get this working with "traditional" package managers (completely transitioning to Nix is would be quite hard, from my limited experience)?
It just another bad move from Canonical in a long list of terrible failures, which weakend Linux fundamentally: * Upstart vs Systemd * Mir vs Wayland * Snap vs. Flatpak * Unity vs. GNOME and Gtk * Ubuntu Phone vs. you should have teamed up with Nokia and Maemo before...
Looks like they don't learn. The fork and fight against the others and always lose.
Nowadays Ubuntu is upstreaming usefull patches to GNOME, again. Thank you! But imagine what GNOME and Gtk could be look like already, when Ubuntu had "helped" them earlier. I could be already a lot of better years ago? Mutter, Gtk, Terminal and Nautilus. GNOME is healthy! But they could so much better years ago.
Forking is good thing, when it aims initially for a merge.
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There is a big user issue on top of the philosophical and maintenance issues - snaps are SLOOOOOOW. I've only experienced them with two applications, and both took forever to startup compared to the apt-get installed versions I quickly replaced them with. OK, "forever" is hyperbole - it was probably about 5 seconds. But it was enough of an annoyance for me to figure out how to install a deb packaged version. And ever…
Sending some encouragement your way: try Debian. I bet money you won't even notice it's not Ubuntu. Or you will, because your software will launch when you ask it to. I'm super happy with Debian lately. I know it used to be the old neck beard slow and steady distro, but honestly these days packages get updates rather timely and it doesn't feel like the Debian of 10 years ago. And you can always run Debian testing wit…
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The main (and better supported) competitor is Flatpak, which at least doesn't have the terrible marketing.
All containerization is just the fever to the sickness that is the futureshock from extremely fast rate of development of major libs like c++$year, glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints), and the like. You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. Containers try to mitigate this problem but like a fever they often end up making things worse.
glibc does have a stable ABI. What they don't have is a frozen ABI so they will all new entry points. But old programs linked against glibc do and will continue to work fine.
> You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago.
You can absolutely write programs today targeting 5 year old ABIs. I agree that the FOSS toolchains could be more helpful there so you can just pass some compiler flag for the oldest glibc version you want to support but it is not impossible to achieve that on your own.