Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AnduinOS

anduinos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 221 posts

Re: AnduinOS

#201

Post by darkwater »

kamranjon wrote: post #84
sangeeth96 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ex-Microsoft engineer: https://anduin.aiursoft.cn/page/about#:~:text=I%20chose%20to...

wow that timeline is a bit of a roller coaster: "In 2022, my project HowToCook became enormously popular on GitHub, causing me to spend significant time maintaining it. Unfortunately, my relationship with Lily changed. Her arrogance and disrespect led to us breaking up. I learned that people change." ... "After moving my account and files to Suzhou, I explored GPU computing, built a Boeing 737 simulator in Suzhou Cen…

He definitely seems to be on the TMI side:

> I unintentionally released Windows 11 screenshots before its GA, which caused significant discomfort and impacted my career.

Re: AnduinOS

#202

Post by darkwater »

pidgeon_lover wrote: post #196
ZaoLahma wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's neat enough, but I still prefer to not have to download stuff, and instead have the available software in a central repository. There's a reason why projects like Homebrew exist for Mac.

Central repositories and package managers are the reason I avoid Linux - I like to keep offline backups of old software. This is extremely difficult on Linux and you have to trust the package managers to keep your software available. I do not trust them to do so, and have faced countless issues at work with package deprecation on industrial Linux boxes. I end up having to manually search for and archive a million DEB…

If you are so worried by that you can setup a private repository. It's just a glorified HTTP server...

Re: AnduinOS

#203

Post by bobajeff »

popol12 wrote: post #195
bobajeff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates. Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

I was scared too and found out that it's actually the opposite ! I'm using Manjaro (derived from Arch), so I can't talk for Arch itself but so far (2 years) it's been way more friendly to me than Ubuntu (which I used for 7 years before).

Long ago manjaro was my favorite distro because it had a lot of great defaults that are rare among distros. The thing I didn't like was always having to be on top of updates or the update system would break and fixing it was a process. However, the thing that made me stop altogether was that one update caused my Keyboard to stop working!

Re: AnduinOS

#204

Post by tombert »

bobajeff wrote: post #191
popol12 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt. Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates. Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

You might look into NixOS unstable.

Its packages are generally pretty up to date, like Arch, but every update/rebuild snapshots the current system.

I find this pretty wonderful; if I am mucking around with packages or boot parameters or whatever, it’s way less scary; if I break something I simply reboot and choose an older generation.

Re: AnduinOS

#205

Post by sgc »

ethersteeds wrote: post #130
sgc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the spirit of conversation I will give you my take on this. Things I hate: Flatpak, Snaps, Docker containers, SystemD (different I know, but worth a mention due to the strong emotions nonetheless). Obviously too big a topic to talk about everything, but one common theme in all of them is they are often presented as the only way to do things by the developers that use them. The projects that use them tend to be har…

Huh. I'm sure there's some projects that release exclusively via docker or snap/flatpak, but in my experience that's pretty uncommon. Far more often I see a release page with a dozen or more options. Binaries for Arm, AMD64, flatpak, snap, a few flavors of Mac, dockerfile, and of course the venerable tarball. The advanced will have deb and rpm as well. I see these options as very much aligning with the spirit of free…

It's becoming more and more common in my experience, hence the long post. Ubuntu's notorious hiding snaps in apt by writing wrappers and making it hard to work around it is the next level of this trend - and it is deplorable. That type of obfuscation and attempted deception is not the spirit of open source.

Re: AnduinOS

#206

Post by dartharva »

dartharva wrote: post #176
rtpg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Yet Another Example of people just refusing to use Plasma despite Plasma being _so much closer_ to Windows. Please people! KDE/Plasma gets you to something Windows-like! You don't have to use GNOME!

Yeah but Plasma is buggy and doesn't have a comparable ecosystem of apps like GNOME does.

edit: please disregard the second half of my comment

Re: AnduinOS

#207

Post by neilv »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #118
neilv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm saying that you are making the advocacy mistake of using the term "free software".

I don't understand this. The software is free. But calling it "free software" is a mistake? And I don't understand the advocacy angle. Is any reference to "free" or "open" in any tech-related conversation automatically advocacy (even if the author did not intend to be an advocate for it)? Genuinely curious. Apologies if it doesn't read like genuine curiosity, I am genuinely curious.

There are specific philosophies and missions behind various kinds of software for which you might have access to the source code.

The most formalized and principled original one, was unfortunately named "free software". (Where RMS expects to be able to explain that it doesn't mean "you don't have to pay money for it" like everyone already thought, but he wants it to actually means "free as in freedom". And he imagines having this conversation, and people being intrigued by the wordplay, etc.)

Of course what happened is that everyone wanted stuff without paying money for it, which is fine, but most people never learned the principles behind the various philosophies, nor why they are that way. Installing a Linux-based software distro is the same as downloading a freebie "community version" of software decidedly not in the same spirit, is the same as downloading a cracked version -- it's all just "free".

A related thing happened with the Internet, in a sense. The early people tended to be egalitarian and principled, and actively onboarded new people into the culture, etc. But when the dotcom gold rush happened, most of that was quickly swept aside. And most of what was already known and taught about cooperative online behavior was never even learned.

Re: AnduinOS

#208

Post by ChocolateGod »

ForHackernews wrote: post #153
sampo wrote: post #13

> AnduinOS, a one-man project from a Chinese Microsoft engineer, is quite a new Ubuntu remix that reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11. > it modifies Canonical's current version of GNOME to look strikingly like Windows 11, using a collection of existing extensions and themes https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/23/anduinos/

> AnduinOS has more than just cosmetic changes, though. It removes Canonical's controversial Snap packaging format and its supporting tools. It replaces it with Flatpak and the GNOME Software app store configured to show only Flatpak apps. AnduinOS uses native .deb packages throughout, including for Mozilla Firefox; it comes with no Flatpaks installed at all. Sounds like a big win for those of us frustrated by Snap.…

VanillaOS?

Re: AnduinOS

#209

Post by ChocolateGod »

wsc981 wrote: post #146
tombert wrote: post #69

This actually looks pretty neat, particularly the integration with Flatpak. One thing that confused me when I first went to Linux a million years ago was the difference in how you install stuff. With Windows you download an exe file, double click it, next next next finish, and you have your app installed. With Linux, every distro is slightly different and it's almost never quite as straightforward to people. I think…

I feel the Mac way is preferable, if possible. Download a package (disk image) - macOS automatically extracts to the desktop. Drag and drop the application from the disk image into the /Applications directory. Done. This is the way, I believe, most software should be installed. I understand some stuff might need to touch system files and for that, perhaps a wizard makes sense.

This is only really possible on MacOS where's there's only one target.

Linux is not a single target.

Re: AnduinOS

#210

Post by cAtte_ »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #132
benreesman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically what people often refer to as "Linux" should more properly be called "GNU slash Linux", or as I've taken to calling it, "GNU plus Linux", GNU being a holistic operating system with multiple kernel... ;)

GNU people would insist so. But Linus Torvalds doesn't use that name and he seems indifferent to the whole GNU thing. The kernel was actually named Linux after Linus by early users and it kind of stuck. The license came later. And the Linux Foundation, the thing that is now probably closest to "owning" Linux (aside from Linus Torvalds) just calls it the "Linux kernel". There is no actual distribution called GNU/Linux…

it's a copypasta
Post reply on HN