181–190 of 229 posts
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when it's your screensaver, and I can break into your computer using a bug that's been publicized, so every idiot with access to Google knows about it, yes there's something wrong with running old software. that's just my opinion though. btw, where's your office?
why are you arguing with a person you agree with?
> To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to run old, stable software.
This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
Why do they still mingle with sw distributions? Wasn't the sandboxed blob trend born also to try blackbox strategies and have parallel versions without dealing with too much hell? Was that laziness/economical advantage (EOL'd library, no business in porting fixes, upgrade to the latest and greatest) or something else?
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That’s a poor faith comment. I’m a Fedora packager (not for this package). Like many others I have an unrelated day job. If there’s an upstream complaint I might get to it this weekend, maybe next. If I’m busy for a few weeks that doesn’t make me stupid. Have had my share of “discussions” with upstream who want the latest version packaged when this might not be completely in line with our guidelines. Not an uncommon…
Yeah it’s not fair to expect volunteers to show up on weekdays, I agree with you. But equally, I don’t think it’s fair that packagers want to have it both ways. Packagers want to make subtle, possibly breaking changes to software they didn’t author. The end users feel the pain and complain to the author. The author has no control over the situation, and they’re feeling the pain during the working week . So the packag…
I suppose my advice to upstream would be to direct the end user to the Fedora bug tracker, where the bug can land in my queue. Or advise the user to install from a different source.
The upstream that I’ve dealt with have been kind enough to lodge a bug themselves on the package I look after, which is also an option, and much appreciated.
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That’s a poor faith comment. I’m a Fedora packager (not for this package). Like many others I have an unrelated day job. If there’s an upstream complaint I might get to it this weekend, maybe next. If I’m busy for a few weeks that doesn’t make me stupid. Have had my share of “discussions” with upstream who want the latest version packaged when this might not be completely in line with our guidelines. Not an uncommon…
Thanks for being a packager for Fedora. I appreciate your work. About to start playing with Fedora again on my Steam Deck.
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People who actually use Debian and similar distros will disagree. In their view there’s nothing wrong with shipping older, patched versions of open sourced software. The license says they can do it! So they grossly understate the problem, make it seem like it’s the person authoring the software at fault or the one who’s being unreasonable. They’re quick to tell you how great the maintainers are, how much effort they…
when it's your screensaver, and I can break into your computer using a bug that's been publicized, so every idiot with access to Google knows about it, yes there's something wrong with running old software. that's just my opinion though. btw, where's your office?
I personally run on latest, apply all updates zealously within a week or two.
This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
> Debian doesn't just ship upstream updates every 30 minutes. This grossly understates the problem. The debian xscreensaver package was years old, and contained bugs related to screen locking which were an actual security issue. Your comment is in very poor taste.
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That's sort of the difference, isn't it? Debian forked Firefox and changed the code, so they had to rename it. But this doesn't look like changing the code, it's building it with different versions of its dependencies / different wrapping around it. Maybe there's a case here, but it feels pretty tenuous.
That's "changing the code." The main issue that I see, is that OBS doesn't want to be held responsible for the Fedora version, which is different from the "officially-supported" OBS version. They didn't modify anything other than the build, to exclude certain dependencies. But modifying the build, is modifying the code. They are allowed to do that, but they probably aren't allowed to slap the OBS name on the result.
To be clear here: They do modify it further than that by applying a number of patches.
For example, they replace libx264 with OpenH264 which also requires some changes to the UI code since it is (unfortunately) hardcoded to expect x264 to exist. While there have been efforts to upstream those changes, they have not yet been merged.
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I disagree very hard on this. We mostly talk about the problematic cases, but most of the time when I need some software, I just install it through the package manager and it just works. Compare this to Windows, where you often have to search the Internet, download some sketchy .exe or .msi and don't know if you'll get the software, a virus, or both. It got so bad that it was common to have "cleaners", extra tools th…
> putty download was http-only, no HTTPS, and that was just a few years ago HTTP downloads are still fine in 2025 though, putty releases all come with signatures that can be used to check if anything was tampered with. This is how lots of Linux package managers can still use HTTP for downloading from mirrors without worrying about malicious package modifications.
1) People don't check, and 2) the root of trust for those signatures is almost always the same HTTP source as the download!
In contrast, package managers do check, and they have a root of trust at least from install time.
The state of software distribution on Linux has always been catastrophic and it's an incredible miracle that Linux was able to enjoy the success it had despite this
I disagree very hard on this. We mostly talk about the problematic cases, but most of the time when I need some software, I just install it through the package manager and it just works. Compare this to Windows, where you often have to search the Internet, download some sketchy .exe or .msi and don't know if you'll get the software, a virus, or both. It got so bad that it was common to have "cleaners", extra tools th…
It just works if the software you require is not only provided by your speciic distribution but also you require the specific version of the software that is provided by your specific distribution. Good luck if it not the case.
For windows or mac, 1 or 2 files each cover all systems from the last 10 years or more.
It's not by masochism that people regularly try to find solutions for linux by reinventing the wheel like appimages, snaps or flatpaks.
> , download some sketchy .exe or .msi and don't know if you'll get the software, a virus, or both.
You compare hunting for pirated software to installing open source software. You don't have more risk downloading an installer directly from the dev than from your distribution. And probably less once you go outside the main distrib.
> It got so bad that it was common to have "cleaners"
Yes windows has issues of letting remains of software that you desinstall(don't know for mac). But linux has issues too with remains, if only in your local directory.
I'm not saying that the other systems are perfects but the developers don't need to produce binaries/installer for 200 distribution times 10 version for each distribution