Size isn’t an issue imo. Applications are bulky for many more reasons than their packaging formats.
Size isn’t an issue imo. Applications are bulky for many more reasons than their packaging formats.
Interesting, didn’t know it was feasible to make the distribution open.
That doesn’t give me much to complain about in theory, but canonical has lost way too much good faith to give people a reason to keep open snap distribution going for free. They should definitely consider hosting an open store just to get people on board again.
Nothing in theory makes that an issue of flatpaks and snap, just that both rely on different means to interact with the host system that have been woefully slow to implement. If enough protocols are developed a flatpak or snap should be as capable as a native app with the safety benefits for free.
Honestly if not for the convoluted Linux FS layout, debs would be pretty serviceable and aren’t really different to the Windows solution. The fs layout makes installations way too fickle to clashing with other applications.
That and dependency hell, which distros should have never been allowed to touch beyond the core dependencies required to get your desktop running.
Nothing necessarily at the tech level. They’re more capable than Appimages or flatpaks to the point that you can use it to build a reproducible system hardened against tampering or defective updates.
The downside is that it’s controlled entirely by canonical, has limited abilities (if any?) for hosting storefronts/packages outside of their ecosystem, and said ecosystem is insecure and has already allowed multiple waves of malicious apps to reach end users because of poor moderation of listings masquerading as legitimate versions.
Canonical has also been increasingly hostile to flatpaks - removing it from Ubuntu and derivatives by default to push users towards snap.
The whole loopfs thing is just an annoyance, but the aggressive posturing by canonical as well as the closed nature of the storefront that has led to malicious attacks on end users is enough to give it more than a few haters.
I much prefer our modern package format solutions:
Yup. Some are pretty advanced now.
China has announced a ban on Gacha game mechanics (and lootboxes, predatory discounts, and gambling) which should hopefully ripple out to Europe and the US soon.
A lot of these mechanics were adapted from the Chinese gaming market and I think the same will likely happen in the reverse.
We had to convince my brother in law (13yo) to not spend his birthday money of £85 on Genshin impact skins. Kids are fucked by advertising man
rust Vs c drama getting out of hand
I’m joining the war on us Vs them
on the side of them
Probably in relation to the Chinese govt. banning these practices too. We’ll see a lot of governments following shit soon hopefully.
If consoles want to remain relevant in the age of the gaming PC, they have to try harder than being locked-down gaming PCs.
Free and simple multiplayer, subsidised hardware, and physical game ownership were staples of most consoles for years but now the urge to turn every device into an “everything machine” has kneecapped the very purpose of these devices.
At best, these are slightly less hassle and slightly more social than a gaming PC. At worst, they’re as anti-social and user-hostile without the cost benefit that once made them genuinely preferable.
I think (aka speculate) that the fact that Windows is the largest OS plays into the fact that Linux-Mac compatibility isn’t more developed.
I bet some 90% of desktop software is available on Windows (even many core KDE are on Windows!) so targeting them brings most Apple apps onto Linux “for free”. Especially since Apple’s insistence on trying to make Metal a thing hurts gaming support, which is a big driver behind Linux compatibility development.
The few applications that MacOS has over both Linux and Windows are usually so embedded into the Apple ecosystem that you’re not getting much by porting them anyway. iTunes? The App Store? Garage Band? Probably doesn’t help that many of those apps also use Apple’s own UI framework which isn’t really portable.
However, stuff not designed to live in Apple land like Teams for Mac or Adobe CC might be more possible. But still far too few applications to necessitate the effort to bring them over.
Pop is the only one that really ever makes any reference to windows in its marketing. I’m more talking about distros like Zorin which are targeting public sector orgs and windows users by bundling windows compatibility apps and features into the ISO.
The other examples definitely do also target “new users” which of course means Windows users too, but they aren’t explicitly tying their distros to Windows software compatibility the same way some are.
I did some reading in AV1 and it’s derivative formats - are they any more accessible to Linux than HEVC/H265? Fedora IIRC removed support for them and a few other codecs out of the box over some patent concerns or something.
Fucking hell you could cut the Reddit-tier snark with a knife.
BSD is more binary compatible than Windows. The fact there’s less MacOS ports on Linux seems to me like a lack of resources, but if you have a reason beyond 🤓☝️ then I’m genuinely interested.
MacOS still ships x86 builds, and most software either provides binaries for both platforms or some kind of universal/hybrid binary. Still a few years before that becomes an issue.
At some point an ARM->x86 translation layer is going to be needed too, regardless. It’s not long until ARM becomes popular enough to make it necessary to translate both ways.
Yup. Same issue will plague all Windows-alternative distros. Unless serious work is done to fix Microsoft 365 and Adobe creative cloud, there’s genuinely little benefit trying to claim Linux is an alternative for all but a minority of people.
That, or we can work on improving the alternatives to those apps. GIMP, Inkscape, and OnlyOffice are on a spectrum of laughably bad to just-about-comparable to their proprietary counterparts.
I don’t think it’s an insurmountable issue: I think there’s more we could do to bring Apple software to Linux (using a BSD-based kernel means a lot less complexity!) and with it the few applications that currently don’t play well with WINE.
Spotube uses the Spotify API for playlists but YouTube PipeAPI and other sources for music streaming.