KDE Connect is amazing. Also works without KDE.

Thanks for the interesting point! I learned something today. I guess it all depends on your use-case, whether flatpaks make sense or not.

A floss project’s success is not necessarily marked by its market share but often by the absolute benefit it gives to its users. A project with one happy user and developer can be a success.

I’m not against probabilistic models and the like. I merely try to capture part of the reason they are not always well received in the floss community.

I use LLMs regularly, and there is nothing rivalling them in many use cases.

Flatpaks won’t get their libs updated all at once by just updating a library. This can be very bad in cases like bugs in openssl. Instead of just updating one library and all other software benefiting from the fix, with flatpaks, you need to deal with updating everything manually and waiting for the vendor to actually create an update package.

I’m not 100% sure about this. Flatpak has some mechanisms that would allow to manage dependencies in a common fashion.

This and on top of being inexact, it’s not understandable and un-transparent. These are two of the top reasons to push for free software. Even if the engine executing and teaching models are free, the model itself can’t really be considered free because of its lack of transparency.

I think it’s a short term vs long term debate. In the short term snaps are nice. They might help you get that software you want right now. In the long term though, it will only take away some of your rights and make you into a product.

There are also some interesting things to say about wording. Specifically consumer vs user. Software is not consumed, it’s used and depending on the specific software, the user might be abused by the people producing and controlling the software.

Why in Louvre though?

Source?

FreeCAD is really good nowadays. You need a bit of time to get into it but then it comes with everything needed also for complex multi-part assemblies.

You’re both right!

You’re welcome!

https://lemmy.world/post/9437528

Not sure I really understand the issue here. Is it about installing or modifying parts of existing config files? I try to use config.d facilities as much as possible for this problem.

Not sure I understand your criticism. Debs definitely help compared to how I was doing things before. Adding some form of parameters (eg. the hostname used by some web application) to the package is necessary and I’d rather have in the form of debconf than having to edit a config after installation.

Do you have an alternative?

What about using standard shell or bash? I know they are not easy to use correctly, but at least they won’t break every few years.

Makes sense. I imagine the push model of Ansible had a lot to do with the speed issues? I can imagine how a solid .deb would be much more performant.

It’s part of the problem, but the other part is that you have to re-do the package building all the time. Alternatively you fiddle with tags and only run part of your roles (which is a hassle anyways because ansible does not really have good abstractions that help encapsulation).

Professional sysadmin here who has been trying to create ansible roles and playbooks to re-create all his VMs.

I have spent a lot of time “packaging” custom web applications (and other stuff) for ubuntu systems and building complex configurations for a system of interacting hosts. Once I had finished writing a role to deploy or update one of those applications, I often found it very hard to use them for maintenance. The biggest problem being that I couldn’t remember how to invoke the roles or playbooks to get my desired outcome and what state my systems were in. Another problem with ansible for my usecase is it’s slowness. Installing a rather complex package might take minutes on one host.

All in all, I found that I had been doing things the wrong way. Off course, it’s nice having all the procedures documented somehow, but if you don’t remember what state your machines are in and what tags and roles to apply, it wont be of practical help in your day to day work. My workload is maintaing a bunch of VMs with mostly different sets of packages and config installed, so ansible doesn’t play out it strengths of being able to execute things on multiple machines in parallel.

I’m now switching over to a model where I only use ansible to manage installation and configuration tying machines together and where I use debian packaging for, well, packaging. Although it’s pretty tough to get into, once you have taken the first hurdles, things fall into place easily. You can do so many things with debian packaging, including installation of custom systemd service units, depend on other packages, distribute customized config files, install custom management scripts. There is even a way to ask questions during installation in an interactive and non interactive way (debconf). Since you target your package for a specific OS and version, you can rely on files being in their usual places (FHS), which makes configuration easy. The nice thing about this model is that I can now use the tools I’ve been using since ages, to install, update, uninstall, inspect and configure things. On top of that, I could easily distribute our weird to install software to third parties now instead of relying on a broken and long installation procedure.

Sometimes we should just stop reinventing the wheel and just try to understand what previous generations have built (.deb, sql, unix, etc). Sure, the old ways are bad in many ways but they often get the work done.

This being said, I’m happy for people to work on things like nix, guix, ansible etc. They are just not the right tool for my set of skills and problems.

That doesn’t look good :(

Uhh, very nice. I didn’t know about xdg-ninja.