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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#481

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

fiatjaf wrote: post #353
pletnes wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just «snap install pycharm» and it shows up ready for work. Never had an issue with a snap. Can’t recall where it’s stored, but that’s easy to determine with «which». This is on ubuntu 1{6,8}.04 fwiw.

Oh, I was talking about AppImage, not Snap. Sorry. I actually tried the Snap thing too, I don't remember how it went but I would say it was bad. I think I couldn't find a way to search for packages from the CLI.

If you're speaking of AppImage, what do you mean by "where are they hiding"? AppImages are quite literally exactly where you put them and nowhere else.

Re: Dotfile madness

#482

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jen729w wrote: post #430
userbinator wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. No no no NO!!!! Think of all the things you can't do on a mobile device that you can do on a PC, or which require ridiculous workarounds like uploading from one app to some server on the Internet and then downloading again into another. Effortless data interchange is what makes computing great, and stops proprietary walled-garden data-silos from becoming the n…

Agreed, and we’re now in serious danger of “Okay button fatigue” or whatever you’d like to call it. If every normal app has to ask for permission to use your disk, you’re just going to click “Okay” when malware asks. Then the whole system was for naught.

So just don't do that. The application needs an "Open" dialog already so you can tell it what files to open, just have that dialog be a process run by the system instead of the application, treat the permission as implicit since the user is the one selecting the file, and pass a handle back to the application.

Re: Dotfile madness

#483

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

fghtr wrote: post #460
sakoht wrote: post #252

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

I solved this problem by switching to Qubes OS.

Problem with QubesOS is how ridiculously heavy it is and that none of your stuff can actually use the GPU.

Re: Dotfile madness

#484

Post by detaro »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #482
jen729w wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and we’re now in serious danger of “Okay button fatigue” or whatever you’d like to call it. If every normal app has to ask for permission to use your disk, you’re just going to click “Okay” when malware asks. Then the whole system was for naught.

So just don't do that. The application needs an "Open" dialog already so you can tell it what files to open, just have that dialog be a process run by the system instead of the application, treat the permission as implicit since the user is the one selecting the file, and pass a handle back to the application.

E.g. Flatpak has the concept of "Portals" for that: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Portals

Re: Dotfile madness

#485

Post by rffn »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #473
int_19h wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the hidden-bit on Windows is really semantically equivalent to dot-prefix on Unix, and people set up their file managers to show such files for similar reasons (I don't even use Explorer, mostly). In Win10, it's even exposed as a setting in Settings | For Developers

What do you use in lieu of Explorer, out of curiosity? 15 year Mac user (re)exploring Windows due to bad hardware...

Compared to 15 years ago I think Explorer is much better now, it could be even called usable.

Nevertheless there are alternatives. One liked by many are Norton Commander alike file managers like Total Commander or even Far. I am not too much in favor of them though.

I like to use Directory Opus. It is powerful and flexible. Costs money though.

Re: Dotfile madness

#486

Post by rffn »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #405
sakoht wrote: post #252

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

It seems like MacOS has been headed in this direction, at least with the App Store apps. But it's a hard problem to elegantly implement without breaking everything. I still see a lot of Mac apps that basically say "disable system protection first."

I am moving away from macOS for this reason. There ar emore issues, but this is a major one for me.

Re: Dotfile madness

#487

Post by zackmorris »

asveikau wrote: post #367
zackmorris wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a bug/feature from the early days of OS X. Apple should have done the work of storing directory metadata in something like ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist but they were too busy getting anything at all to work. This is the type of low hanging fruit that Apple evidently doesn't care about anymore, but would go really far towards improving user sanity. It's like when you go to a restaurant and orde…

Leaving it next to the files means if directories are moved, copied, or renamed, the metadata is still there. So you or I might prefer it to live in a separate file under ~/ but I cannot say littering the whole tree with the metadata buys nothing or can't serve a purpose.

macOS knows when files and directories are moved via inodes:

https://eclecticlight.co/2018/03/03/how-macos-tracks-your-fi...

so I can't see any conceptual reason to keep .DS_Store.

Re: Dotfile madness

#488

Post by CivBase »

The title seems misleading. The problem here isn't dotfiles. The problem is that developers are using $HOME instead of a standard directory for storing user-level config files. I had never even heard of $XDG_DATA_HOME before reading this article.

Re: Dotfile madness

#489

Post by sneak »

amaccuish wrote: post #189
sneak wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you have to “deal with” them? What are the portable tidier alternatives?

Because when you have multiple OSs accessing the same shared folder, they all create their own crap, which is then visible to the other OSs, and fills up directories with stuff that confuses normal users.

Normal users don’t run multiple OSes.

Re: Dotfile madness

#490

Post by tripzilch »

sneak wrote: post #489
amaccuish wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you have multiple OSs accessing the same shared folder, they all create their own crap, which is then visible to the other OSs, and fills up directories with stuff that confuses normal users.

Normal users don’t run multiple OSes.

I don't run multiple OSes, but I do use USB sticks and SD cards on other people's computers and vice versa. I'm pretty sure that is "normal user" behaviour.

It gets annoying real quickly because you see the "crap" files of all the OSes you're not using. And you delete them, you only have to insert the stick and they're back. This happens in different ways for all of Mac, Windows, Android and certain Linuxes.

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