131–140 of 295 posts
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Does Steam work in Wine?
The Steam client works natively on Linux. It ships its own version of Wine, called Proton and many games work well. They are doing lots of work to get the remaining games working in preparation for the launch of Steam Deck. https://www.protondb.com/
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You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak,…
I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up. > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :). I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist…
If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters.
For what its worth I think they date from around the same time.
https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015
The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu.
It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.
After using Ubuntu for a couple years, I switched to Arch and never even think about going back. Ubuntu is great for people new to Linux, but it is like buying a new PC. Some people know very little about computers, so they just get an HP or Dell. Then once you start learning about graphics cards, SSDs, cooling, processors, etc... You either build your own or buy one with the components you actually want. That is why…
What is so great about Arch? Is it just gentoo for the younger generation? I used to use gentoo and build all my own stuff, but I just don't care about that anymore and want it to just work. That's why I use Ubuntu after using Linux for 20 years :)
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> I wonder why Ubuntu/Canonical can never get their upgrade game to work properly. Ubuntu developer here. Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there, and that it's your existing system that has issues. Under these circumstances, I don't think it's reasonable to expect an upgrade to be able to work smoothly. Scripts that handle upgrade paths necessarily need to make assumptions that what they are upgrading f…
Just as another data point, to be honest, I've had nothing but similar issues with Ubuntu. It always found new, weird, sometimes downright bizarre ways to break, often in ways I never could figure out how to fix. Mind you, that was back when I didn't even do anything unusual and didn't know how to really dig into the nuts and bolts of linux... I just installed fairly normal apps from the repository with no custom con…
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> "oh, you used your Linux distribution in a way we said you could in our docs?" Huh? Adding third party repositories has never been a supported path. You're welcome to use them since you own your system, but the future stability of your system is then down to the ability of the third party to not break it. Usually third party apt packagers don't consider future release upgrades.
What do you expect users to do in this case, when apt has old or missing software? Are users expected to limit themselves to the software in the main repositories? Windows and macos don’t have this constraint. Installing applications from the internet never breaks windows update or macos. (Sometimes macos updates break homebrew or kernel extensions, but that’s kind of easier to deal with.)
The third party software providers, however, owe it to their users to provide reliable and responsible mechanisms for users to consume their stuff. Providing a third party apt repository that breaks the user doing a future release upgrade is not it.
Now we have snaps, AppImage, Flatpak. These mechanisms can be used by third party software providers to provide safe and reliable (for the system) software. Any of them are better than providing third party apt repositories.
> Windows and macos don’t have this constraint. Installing applications from the internet never breaks windows update or macos.
That's because it isn't the norm for third party software to hack up the OS in order to install themselves, rather than use the mechanisms provided. It used to be - remember DLL hell? They got away from that, and our ecosystem needs to do the same.
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I'm not sure it's a main reason, but it is indeed a key property of having full control over your own system that you are welcome to do this. But this level of control also comes with a curse: if you break your system, then you get to keep the pieces. I find it quite upsetting to be blamed instead.
You are misassessing how people use Desktop/Laptop computers. Ie you're assuming people will install Ubuntu, and leave it in its default state, or only use package managers.
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You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak,…
I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up. > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :). I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist…
I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced functions with minimalism.
I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.
I think 20.04 LTS with its 10 years support separates it from the crowd. As soon as you’re updating every nine months there are many great alternatives however.
It was a problem on CentOS before it died the death, anything remotely PHPish was always really unhappy.
I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/
I’m a long time Ubuntu user and haven’t really shopped for other distros. Any recommendations besides Debian?
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Seems uncommon that those things would prevent upgrades. It sounds more like Ubuntu is beginning to suffer from an excess of complexity.
I think part of the problem is that third party apt repositories have become normalised as if they're a reasonable way to "add on" to your existing system. In reality they're a hack on a packaging system that was never designed for third party plugability in this way. They very often break future upgrades. Third party apt repositories fundamentally cannot express all the necessary metadata to allow for upgrades to wo…