It literally does though. Stable doesn’t mean bug free. It means unchanging. That’s what the term “stable distro” actually means. That the software isn’t being updated except for security patches. When people say stable distro, that is what they are trying to communicate. That means the software will be old. That’s what stable actually means.
ZephrC
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has it. The Fedora 40 beta has it. Its just a result of being bleeding edge. Arch doesn’t have exclusive rights to that.
Meanwhile I’m over here dual booting Mint and Artix. I like fun, bleeding edge hobby distros and reliable boring ones that do everything I really need completely reliably.
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.
Canonical is a profitable corporation trying to convince people to use their actual closed garden software repository but they can’t even be bothered to do even the most basic of sanity checks to prevent obvious scams from appearing on their store. Stop making excuses for them.
I’m guessing this is probably a joke? I can’t actually tell over the internet. Either way I hate you for doing exactly what makes this whole situation impossible though.
I’ve gotta say: My experience using Arch and its derivatives has really made sympathize with vegans. How in the world are you even supposed to respond when a total stranger just walks up to you out of nowhere to tell you that people who do the thing they don’t know you do will never shut up about it. Like, seriously. What is even the appropriate response in that situation?
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.
That’s totally fair. I’m not some weird evangelist or anything. I just like options and think OpenRC is kinda neat. There’s nothing wrong with systemd, and honestly it’s more work using other options. Not for the actual init system, but for some of the other stuff systemd does. I’ve had to learn cron, and that has been… interesting. It feels like all of the documentation around cron just assumes you already know how cron works. I’m still not sure if I’m doing it right, but I’ve had a good time and my computer works, and really that’s good enough for me.
Here’s my hot take: I don’t care what operating system most people use. If people are happy on Windows, let them stay on Windows. That’s not my problem. When you say we need to make Linux less diverse and interesting to make number go up because more biggerer number more gooderer then suddenly that is my problem. You are trying to make my experience worse for the sake of something I do not care about.
There is nothing wrong with systemd. Most people on Linux are using it, and that’s fine. Options are good too though. I specifically like Linux because it’s NOT a bunch of homogeneous lowest common denominator sameyness. That’s the very thing I don’t want.
Sure, that seems pretty reasonable. Here’s the init script for sddm:
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run supervisor=supervise-daemon command="/usr/bin/sddm" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc consolefont modules netmount after ypbind autofs openvpn gpm lircmd after quota keymaps before alsasound want logind use xfs provide xdm display-manager }That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
That’s a pretty simple one though, so here’s Alsa. It’s a more complex one:
code
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run # Copyright 1999-2019 Gentoo Authors # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 alsastatedir=/var/lib/alsa alsascrdir=/etc/alsa.d alsahomedir=/run/alsasound extra_commands="save restore" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc modules isapnp coldplug hotplug } restore() { ebegin "Restoring Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 if [ ! -r "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" ] ; then ewarn "No mixer config in ${alsastatedir}/asound.state, you have to unmute your card!" eend 0 return 0 fi local cards="$(sed -n -e 's/^ *\([[:digit:]]*\) .*/\1/p' /proc/asound/cards)" local CARDNUM for cardnum in ${cards}; do [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -I -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" restore ${cardnum} \ || ewarn "Errors while restoring defaults, ignoring" done for ossfile in "${alsastatedir}"/oss/card*_pcm* ; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue # We use cat because I'm not sure if cp works properly on /proc local procfile=${ossfile##${alsastatedir}/oss} procfile="$(echo "${procfile}" | sed -e 's,_,/,g')" if [ -e /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss ] ; then cat "${ossfile}" > /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss fi done eend 0 } save() { ebegin "Storing ALSA Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}" if ! alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" store; then eerror "Error saving levels." eend 1 return 1 fi for ossfile in /proc/asound/card*/pcm*/oss; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue local device=${ossfile##/proc/asound/} ; device=${device%%/oss} device="$(echo "${device}" | sed -e 's,/,_,g')" mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}/oss/" cp "${ossfile}" "${alsastatedir}/oss/${device}" done eend 0 } start() { if [ "${RESTORE_ON_START}" = "yes" ]; then restore fi return 0 } stop() { if [ "${SAVE_ON_STOP}" = "yes" ]; then save fi return 0 }That’s definitely longer than a systemd service, but you’d have to write an awful lot of them to be more code than all of systemd. Overall the entire /etc/init.d folder on my PC where all the init scripts even for the stuff I’m not using are stored is a grand total of 147.7 KiB. Not exactly an unmanageable amount of code, in my humble opinion.
That might have been true a decade ago. I don’t actually know. I do know that modern init scripts for modern alternatives to systemd are barely longer than systemd service scripts though. So that’s kind of an insane take.
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.microor whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.