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Why is there only one Snap Store?

merlijn.sebrechts.be

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Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#271

Post by likeclockwork »

yqot wrote: post #220
julienfr112 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example : take an Intel nuc : Ubuntu, everything works out of box. Win10 ? Let's download a WiFi driver on Intel site ! Let's hope you have Ethernet or a windows 10 supported wifi device. And no, the wifi dongle lying around is too old, windows 7 only... What is your example ?

Here's a counter example. Buy a thinkpad and try to put whatever distro you want on it.

Have an X1 Yoga here with Arch on it, it was painless.

Bought an X390 for my mom last year, tossed Ubuntu on it after putting in a larger NVMe. (she prefers to use a more 'mainstream' distro so she can follow tutorials to setup new dev environments for things she's tinkering with) Her Macbook Air is weighing down paper now.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#272

Post by pmontra »

kunai wrote: post #217
the_af wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a moving goalpost to me. First, it wasn't usable. Then, it didn't have drivers. Then, it crashed a lot. Now it doesn't have Autodesk stuff? For the record, my mom doesn't know what Autodesk is. A "desktop" for me is where you can play movies, edit documents, browse the net and check email.

And Linux is fantastic for that, until you come across a use case that is outside those typical bounds. Say your mom decides she likes photography one day and decides to buy a camera and take some lessons. Say her teacher says "we use lightroom and photoshop so you'll need to have these because they're industry standard" and she has no idea what to do and why the Adobe CC launcher won't load on Linux. Then she'll cal…

If she gets seriously into photography the cost of a Windows machine is the least of the expenses she's heading into, but I understand that a main machine running Windows is a good insurance. And yet I didn't have one, even a backup, since 2009. I won't be too worried.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#273

Post by unixhero »

danshick wrote: post #150
unixhero wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally you don't want to have xorg installed on a server. If you do have it installed then yes, you would have dbus.

You can certainly have D-Bus without Xorg or wayland present.

Hmm okaym I stand corrected.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#274

Post by unixhero »

School-Cotton wrote: post #231
unixhero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What year is this? Linux desktop experience is fantastic in 2020. It has been for several years. That's bordering FUD you're spreading.

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out. This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

Install Linux Mint and be done with it

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#275

Post by unixhero »

m4rtink wrote: post #241
School-Cotton wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out. This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

Well, thats mostly due to Ubuntu still defaulting to X. Fedora switched to Wayland by default back in 2016 and even RHEL 8 (released 2019) defaults to Wayland.

This guy isn't looking for solutions.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#276

Post by unixhero »

yqot wrote: post #220
julienfr112 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example : take an Intel nuc : Ubuntu, everything works out of box. Win10 ? Let's download a WiFi driver on Intel site ! Let's hope you have Ethernet or a windows 10 supported wifi device. And no, the wifi dongle lying around is too old, windows 7 only... What is your example ?

Here's a counter example. Buy a thinkpad and try to put whatever distro you want on it.

I just did. 202p Lenovo T490. Installed Linux Mint on all three of them, one for me and the rest for family members.

Everything works out of the box

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#277

Post by vladvasiliu »

kunai wrote: post #212
sevensor wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my money, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2008. It's just that nobody noticed. Since 2008, Linux has had the best combination of performance and hardware support on older machines, and the advantage has only grown since then. Windows and MacOS keep falling further behind in usability on machines older than four years, and that's the only hardware I would purchase for personal use. Why throw your money away on p…

In terms of usability, yes, but the problem with Linux in recent years has rarely been usability, it's the lack of workstation-level applications that are readily available on Windows and MacOS. As long as Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc. and dozens of other niche programs by ISVs it will never approach the mainstream with any sort of widespread appeal. Current…

> As long as Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc. and dozens of other niche programs by ISVs it will never approach the mainstream with any sort of widespread appeal.

Meh, I think it's not an all or nothing situation. My client uses exclusively Windows on the desktop but basically the most "advanced" applications they use are Excel and Outlook. Practically all their line of business software is web-based. Most run on Windows for some reason, but as far as the user is concerned, it's just a web app.

I bet that the situation is similar for most companies, and the other tools you mentioned aren't all that widespread. Of course, for the companies that use them to make money they're important. But I would say that's "specialized use" territory. I bet most of the people working for my client (> 3000 employees) have no idea what Pro Tools are, and they are more or less in the media sector.

I personally use the Adobe CC photography suite as a hobby. And although for the moment only lightroom is concerned, I get the feeling that adobe is looking to move the products to the cloud. Microsoft has already done this with Office 365.

For my (admittedly limited) use case, installed Office is dead. It's a pain to install, takes forever to update, and most importantly, works way, way worse than the online version. Outlook online doesn't lag and the messages scroll while I move the slider instead of waiting for me to let it go. Just like it used to before they switch to the new interface around 2013 or 2016 with all the white space. The online version even works on Firefox on Linux. Teams works on Linux too. Remoting to windows servers is way more practical on Linux (Remmina) than windows. So I would say that for my client, the reason they still use windows is basically inertia. I'm using Linux full time and never had an issue interfacing with the other people working there.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#278

Post by simion314 »

vetinari wrote: post #193
simion314 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want something like a PPA? Is flatpack promoting each app will have it's own repo(Skype.Dropbox,Slack,Discord?) Seems to me that you want a way to have applications and updates installed by people and bypass the review process? If you are a distro maintainer you can change the hardcoded values before you build(distros always change this stuff) but if you are not a distro then you should either submit the app f…

> Is flatpack promoting each app will have it's own repo(Skype.Dropbox,Slack,Discord?) Flatpak CAN support the scenario, where each app can have it's own repo. It's an option, not forced down your throat. Or you can self-host your private repo (e.g. applications used inside your network) IN ADDITION to public repos. > Seems to me that you want a way to have applications and updates installed by people and bypass the…

if you are a user then you use a distribution, say Debian,Arch. This distro could setup whatever store, repo and keys they want and Canonical is not forcing themselves on other distributions (it is not systemd).

I am looking at this from a dev point of view, you are asking to prioritize a feature that almost nobody will use over other high priority tasks. The article mentions Canonical did this mistake in the past with Launchpad and it was for nothing. The store code seems to be a mess and you can't just drop the code and GitHub and you are done, it is a lot of work to refactor the code. Same for the client, it is a of work to correctly add the feature to support multiple repositories, if it was only 1 day work somebody would have forked the client, patch it and published it already.

After you work as a developer and see many bugs or problems you look at things differently, for example as a dev I could allow access to an advanced feature in my app, it seems to be just a few lines of extra code. But the reality is that this costs more

- maintenance cost as the software evolves and things under the hood change

- this new feature needs to be documented, someone needs to write documentation, maybe record videos so the minimum number of people contacts support for help

- people don't read documentation so people will contact support and complain that the feature is not working as they expected or that is should have more X or Y

- since is an advanced feature some people might break their stuff and then complain and make a lot of noise and as a dev I need to go and add many checks in the code to prevent people breaking their shit.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#279

Post by glglwty »

boogies wrote: post #19
spanhandler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pollute your mount list and make your software start way slower and take up more space. Also sometimes break or require intervention for basic operation due to security restrictions on it. The benefits are supposed to be that they're more secure, more portable, and don't junk up your system with files strewn everywhere. Personally I'm waiting for a better solution than anything we've seen so far for the first of thos…

I'm curious to try GNU Guix, does it sufffer from the same problems as Nix? (Edit: looking at https://guix.gnu.org/en/videos/everyday-use-of-gnu-guix,-par... from the top of https://guix.gnu.org/ , basic installation and removal of packages looks exactly like apt, literally the same command line with 'apt' replaced with 'guix' and 'sudo' unnecessary because you can install packages per user.)

You may find guile easier to read (I don't). In terms of packages and features it's way less useful than nixpkgs.
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