LeFantome

What did maximum even mean when you have a “virtual desktop” that was 4x times the size of your actual display. Because that is the kind of nonsense we used to do on Linux (because you you could and the other guys could not).

Linux was exciting but time consuming and not all that useful.

I used to bike into University, spend half the night downloading disk images of SLS, spend hours more installing, and spend hours more getting the X config timings working for my monitor. But when I was finally able to use the same window manager config as the Sun workstations at school I felt like King of the World! But what was I actually doing with it? Xterm and an ancient version of GCC.

That said, I created my own basic Shell in the early days and a few little utilities. So I learned a lot. I do not think I would even have attempted many things without the technical confidence that just being a Linux user brought. There was the feeling that you could do anything even though you were hardly doing anything. And new capabilities were constantly arriving so that feeling lasted years.

To understand how to interpret these complaints, we need to understand that Flatpak works by essentially installing a second set of libraries for your apps to run on. The apps run in a container (much like Docker) on top of these libraries. Flatpak uses the kernel and display server from your main distro but otherwise Flatpak is like a second distro unto itself.

So, if you only install a Flatpak app or two, it is very true that they will require quite a large number of support libraries to run (just like running one app on your distro is more distro than app space wise). However, as you add more apps, they they resuse the libraries that the first apps installed.

Because Flatpak installs all its own support libraries, the apps run the same on all distros (which is the point).

So, Flatapak does duplicate the libraries on your system out of necessity. Because your Flatpak apps does not use any of the libraries from your host system. However, they are only installed once inside the Flatpak environment.

The comments about vulnerabilities are neither here nor there. You have to trust your distro. You have to trust Flatpak (as a second distro). Both are subject to vulnerabilities and supply chain attacks but neither more than the other. Flatpaks are technically after as the container environment they run in “sandboxes” your Flatpak apps. In practice though, they require enough permissions that the sandbox is trivial to escape. So not much difference.

Flatpak is literally installing a second Linux distribution on your machine, just without a kernel. All the dependencies right down to the C library are installed in the Flatpak environment. This why you can run a Glibc Flatpak on a musl distro.

Microsoft could support Flatpak “natively” on Windows. It could use the same kernel and GUI glue that WSL uses but you have no need of specifying a distro or getting to the command-line. The experience could just be that you go into Flathub, install and remove apps, and everything would just work.

Apple could do the same with macOS.

If they did that, Flatpak could be a universal app distribution method on all three systems. Devs would only have to create and maintain a single version if they wanted.

Microsoft will not do that of course. If it really was a brainlessly simple alternative application store, they could OS/2 themselves and loose control of the platform.

Too bad though. It would be cool. No reason it could not be done independent of Microsoft of course but it would never be as popular if it was not built in.

Don’t confuse intelligence with knowledge. He blindly believed everything they taught him in engineering as well.

I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.

But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.

And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.

So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.

They all use the same switches.

I am not advocating. However, we should all understand that there are many countries with mandatory military service that do not use them in war.

In addition to military preparedness and defence, it can be an opportunity for greater citizen engagement and to significantly invest in training and skills. This has social and economic benefits beyond war.

Sweden has mandatory military service. How many wars have they started in your lifetime.

Again, not taking a position. Just pointing out that mandatory military service does not have to translate into young men in body bags.

That happens to the commercial folks too. It is just the nature of the adoption curve.

It is the same with price. A few will say that your product is already worth 10x the price. Most will say it’s too expensive. If you drop the price, a few more will see the value. Lots won’t.

More users is more users though. It is not something to get discouraged about. The advantage with Open Source is that, as long as it is useful to some, we have almost an infinite amount of time to expand it to new audiences. Baby steps pay off for Open Source.

Agreed. At the cost of Adobe software, it is amazing that we cannot get a Kickstarter to fund software that closes the gap.

$250 one time from 4000 people would be a million dollars. Isn’t it $300 a year for Photoshop?

A bit ironic given that Git was created by and for Linux.

For sure not. It built Microsoft.