ZephrC

Authoritarianism is all about concentrating power around fewer people. That what authoritarianism IS. Giving more power to the least powerful people is always anti-authoritarian. Yes, there are always trade-offs, no they’re not always as obvious as this one, but more power to more people is never authoritarian.

The short simple version is that if galaxies happen to be close enough to each other they fall toward each other faster than the space between them expands. That’s what “gravitationally bound” means.

I don’t know why people keep saying that flatpaks don’t support cli apps. They do. I know it’s awkward to type out flatpak run io.github.zyedidia.micro or whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.

It’s really only more secure in the sense that in general more complicated programs have more things that can go wrong with them. Either bugs, or just user error.

That is a valid concern, and most people don’t need or use any of sudo’s extra features, so it’s completely reasonable to switch to doas because of that, but it’s not like there’s some glaring security flaw in sudo that most people really need to worry about. Especially if they’re not doing weird things in the config, which would mostly be the same people who could easily switch to doas anyway.

How exactly do you update the github of a flathub package with no one actively maintaining it? Not sarcastic. That is an actual question.

And I’m not worried about big officially supported apps. A better example of the kind of thing I’m talking about is older open source games. Flatpak could be great for games. No distro out there is maintaining a current version of every open source game that has ever been released, but Flathub can, and it could be great. Unfortunately anything that’s not being actively maintained is rapidly going to become a 200MB download that whines about security every time you update your flatpaks, even if it doesn’t connect to the internet at all. Even if it’s possible for any random person to update it, who will?

Of course, this doesn’t just have to be about games. There are lots of open source programs out there that just kind of get completed and abandoned. And that’s not even bringing up all the closed source software on flathub that definitely won’t be updated eventually. These aren’t unsolvable problems, of course, but I don’t even think anybody working on flatpak even cares.

Sure, they can, and yeah it is pretty easy, but people have lives. They move on. A distro always has someone checking to make sure things aren’t broken. On Flathub it won’t even break. It’ll just waste drive space and start giving users annoying error messages, and there if the maintainer isn’t interested in maintaining it anymore the only option for doing anything about it is to fork the whole project, and who’s going to do that for something that isn’t even really broken?

Not really. It’s actually pretty common for simpler, unmaintained apps to get small changes in each distro made by the distro maintainers to stay compatible with their current library versions. There’s nobody doing that on Flathub.

I don’t even like flatpak very much, I’m not currently using it at all, and I already agreed it was flawed right at the very start of the quote you cut off there. I was just trying to be helpful. Sorry. Won’t happen again. If you want to make things hard for yourself and no one else as a weird self-defeating protest then don’t let me stop you. Don’t pretend I didn’t do the thing I just did and you had to edit out of the quote though. That’s a real dick move, frankly.

Well okay. I agree that it’s a flaw in Flatpak, but if you think adding a single line to your .bashrc is some kind of unbearable burden that you shouldn’t have to endure and you’re willing to make your own experience far worse just to avoid it, then I think you’re being a bit silly. I mean, be as silly as you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do. You are being silly though.

If you’re going to use flatpak from the command line you’re definitely going to need to start aliasing those flatpak run commands. It’s still annoying, but at least that way it’s only annoying once.

I still prefer traditional packages, but I get why devs of complicated graphical apps with lots of dependencies hate them. As for Flatpak specifically, I’m not super impressed. It’s just going to get more annoying over time having more old versions of all their libraries and more and more apps that aren’t updating to the latest version so they eat up a ton of drive space and give constant notices to harass the devs, but out of all the major distro agnostic options they suck the least and they’re getting better the fastest, which is why I think they’ve pretty much won at this point. I’m not currently using them, but it’s pretty much inevitable that I’ll have to at some point, and overall that’s probably more good than bad. I think AppImages could have been better if the lead dev wasn’t a walking, talking collection of weird hills to die on, but I’m afraid that ship has already sailed.

Being the first major distro to force the adoption of new technologies is kinda Fedora’s whole thing, so it’s not really surprising. It’s annoying for people on Fedora who use features Wayland doesn’t have yet, but they can jump through a few hoops to get X11 back, or better yet switch to a distro that cares more about giving users options than they do about beta testing new technologies for their corporate overlords.

Still, somebody has be first, and it’s past time to get serious about this whole transition, so I can hardly try to claim this is a bad thing.

You think Xfce has been “faster to the fight” on what exactly? It’s famously slow to do anything. It still doesn’t even have Wayland support at all, let alone support as good as Plasma.

Plasma vs Gnome is a lot more subjective depending on your priorities, and Gnome was certainly faster to get to Wayland as it’s primary display protocol. I’m not quite sure about what else you might think Gnome is faster at though. It’s actually way behind in things like gaming support and HDR.

Plasma 6 was specifically planned to focus on a polished release and reduction in technical debt, not introducing flashy new features. I haven’t tried it yet, but I LIKE those priorities for a major porting effort. I’m looking forward to trying it when it comes to my distro.

Yeah, I know, but I like starting with fresh dotfiles. It gets rid of all the weird settings changes I’ve made and makes the install really feel clean and fresh. I do have important stuff backed up. I’m just overly aggressive about removing unimportant stuff.

I’m generally pretty much in agreement with the idea that online services are crap because you don’t really own the things you buy, but honestly I’ve been buying physical media since the 80s and pirating since the 90s, and the oldest games I currently have easy access to are ones I bought on Steam. I’m not a collector or an archivist or anything. Those just aren’t hobbies that interest me, and I move a lot, and don’t always take care of my stuff, and freely lend things to unreliable friends, and frequently wipe my drives to try out new Linux distros, so at this point even if Valve probably won’t be around forever I still expect my Steam games to last longer than anything else I could get. Steam is really the only reason I ever buy games at all anymore.

To be more clear, it uses a weird combination of your system libraries, installing its own libraries into your system on its own without informing your primary package manager, and using some specific library versions separate from your system libraries for some apps.

If you want to call that more “elegant” than other solutions… Well, I can’t tell you how to feel about something. It still doesn’t actually solve the problem that universal package formats are trying to solve unless the package dev explicitly requires so many specific library versions that the whole thing just ends up being an AppImage with extra steps though.

By not being a universal packaging format. It uses your system libraries, which completely eliminates the main reason devs are pushing for things like Flatpak, Snap, or Appimage.

I’m not elitist. I’m a weirdo who likes weird things. If we get a bunch of normies in here normying up the place I’ll just end up having to switch to FreeBSD.

Well it’s a good thing no one is doing that then, isn’t it? Why does everyone feel the need to make up problems to whine about?

For crying out loud I live in a small town and need a car. Do you think I don’t deserve access to decent public transportation?

Honestly, I’m part of that 15%, and I feel more excluded by people pretending we can’t have mass transit just because my neighbors like big trucks than I am by people in cities not bringing me and my concerns up every time cars are mention.

Rural communities got along just fine before the invention of the automobile. In fact, most of the people who have ever lived have been rural people without cars. The idea that we can’t have small walkable towns connected to decent mass transit is just incredibly stupid, and it pisses me off when everybody just assumes it’s unsolvable, moreso when it’s people who actually live here and should know better.