91–100 of 112 posts
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I’m a long time Debian user but I have recently fallen down the rabbit hole that is NixOS. I’m still ways away from moving my entire dev environment to NixOS, but I definitely see it’s appeal.
Why not nix on Debian? So you have the benefit of both.
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My comment was too harsh to Debian. Debian has been good to me, and is the best distro I've used. But their adoption of systemd is something that makes me worried for the future. It's still avoidable for now, but the writing is on the wall.
systemd is great
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Debs work really well when they are shipped as part of the distribution deb archive itself. They work really badly when third parties try to use them to provide add-on software to an existing distribution release. The main problem that Snaps solve is this latter case: when third parties are trying to ship directly into someone's distribution installation[1]. Often third party debs appear to work OK, but then break fu…
> Nix only partially solves the problem by better supporting concurrent installation of multiple versions of those dependencies. But those concurrent versions would still each have to be maintained How so? Every dependency of every dependency is in the nix store and they’re all immutable. A nix package installed will work forever because its environment can’t change. Am I not right?
Bugs and security issues are found from time to time. When that happens, every occurrence in use needs an update. If ten different incompatible versions of a package are in use, they all need to be replaced. That's more work than one per traditional distribution release.
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Debian Testing is the least secure Debian distribution: - "Please note that security updates for 'testing' distribution are not yet managed by the security team. Hence, 'testing' does not get security updates in a timely manner."[1] - "Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern."[2] - "[Testing's] security updates are irregul…
Yes. I know. For a desktop, bluntly, no, security is not a primary concern (I've also turned off spectre mitigations and so forth), and stable is waaaay too stable for desktop usage. Frankly, this kind of purist ideology--to the point of suggesting people use a different distribution--is simply ridiculous. For servers I'm running on the open internet, yes, you are absolutely right. But in that case I just run stable.
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It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks. (Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
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It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks. (Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
> It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). It is, but I also actively don't want every package to run in its own container. I'd rather containerize select applications that I choose.
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It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks. (Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
Your other data, in other sandboxes, is protected though.
So why does Ubuntu push Snaps so hard? They've been doing this for year and I still have no idea, since pretty much everyone I know would rather a deb file (myself included). What's their gain?
Debs work really well when they are shipped as part of the distribution deb archive itself. They work really badly when third parties try to use them to provide add-on software to an existing distribution release. The main problem that Snaps solve is this latter case: when third parties are trying to ship directly into someone's distribution installation[1]. Often third party debs appear to work OK, but then break fu…
(What I'm getting at is: why does it make sense for Canonical to define its own sandboxed application format when another one already exists?)
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The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
> The sandbox is not going to protect users from ... bad security for the application itself Your other data, in other sandboxes, is protected though.
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The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
Yes, but right now my smartphone is more secure wrt apps than my desktop, which is odd.