- cross-posted to:
- lobsters
- cross-posted to:
- lobsters
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The author points out systemic issues with Flathub, why it needs to improve, and then, through some crazy rationale, still recommends it because:
Although Fedora Workstation works well for most users, and although quality and reliability has improved considerably over the past decade, it is still far too easy for inexperienced users to break the operating system
Without stating “how” it is too easy for this to occur. Flathub is not a “fix”, it’s a host of other problems, many of which are in the article itself.
I personally don’t think it’s so much a strike against Fedora for being breakable but Linux in general. And to be perfectly honest it’s better than it’s ever been at not breaking.
For the most part, OSX will not let you do anything breaking. If OSx is going to break on you, it’s going to be because of an update or maybe a keychain and it’s not going to preclude you from getting to a state where you can fix it.
Windows can let you break stuff but also has relatively decent recovery facilities. If you are set up correctly you can roll back a checkpoint and recover from most stupid things. If you allow it it will even overwrite your boot menus and on ceremoniously dump you back in the windows if you f up your boot unless you do something relatively complicated.
There was a time in Linux where we were already to go single user at the drop of a hat and undo a configuration change. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve been sticklers for so long about not using graphical config, You’re not going to get a graphical config from single user mode where you need to be to fix a serious problem. You used to be able to use the GUI to make a problem that took a console to fix.
This is where the declarative nature of NixOS absolutely shines. You screw something up, you reboot, you choose The last working version, you’re right back where you were. Of course it’s still up to you to keep other versions of your text configs but you can get back into your GUI and your full interactive environment and fix whatever hell you hath wrought.
I love the idea of flat packs/hub and honestly, I don’t think storage/memory is as big of a problem as it used to be. Any one of 100 modern games is bigger than the entirety of the waste you’d see from an entire OS full of flat pack.
The problem I have with flat pack isn’t really flat packs problem. I try to install something flat in Nix, can’t do it, need fuse, give it fuse, can’t do it. Instructions are too just decompress it run it, That’s the price of doing Nix, fine. Now I just need to restore my config oh it’s not reading my config from there anymore, I’ll just redo it in the app, fine, now I just need this plugin, well that’s not in the right folder anymore either, can I just place it in my decompressed fuse FS? Nooooo.
If the app was able to read plugins and config from ~/.config and my OS got along with it It would be relatively transparent.
The cross section of applications that don’t have config or plugins but have complicated enough linking that flat pack is advantageous is relatively small. If flat pack was just a zero sum thing, It would probably fly under the radar for most part.
Hey, as an old school linux guy, I am always curious:
How the fuck do y’all seem to manage to fuck Linux up so bad that you seem to be so scared of bricking your systems?
I mean, really. I see this complaint all the time. And in 25+ years of Linux, I can think of maybe once or twice where I meased something up with
ddway back in the day when that was the only tool.for certain jobs.How are y’all managing to mess yourselves up?
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other regarding Flatpak. I am just trying to understand why everyone seems so deathly afraid their linux systems will break when I have literally had way more windows systems just randomly do that to me over the years. How is your lived experience so radically different than mine?
Nvidia drivers… So many times.
If you never broke it, my first guess would be you never actually tried to do anything non-vanilla with it. You never tried to get multi-screen resolutions in the 10’s or factional scaling in the early 20’s. or tried to update an ATI or Nvidia graphics driver back when it was a binary blob every other kernel with it was a bomb waiting to go off.
And the whole “deathly afraid” is straight-up BS. Your tone is not appreciated. If you come back at me with more elitism, I’m just going to block you.
So it is people running beta software at the kernel level?
Edit: I am not trying to be elitist - why would messing with X11 cause your system to be bricked? Come up in run level 3 and fix your issue in the terminal… ?
Why limit it to open source software?
Set a flag date by which any open source software not built from source must be delisted from Flathub.
Why is it ok for proprietary software to not build from source, but for open source it’s not ok?
Because it’s fundamentally different. Open source not following the source is a clear indicator it’s no longer following its published base.
Because it doesn’t matter for proprietary software.
Good actors are punished and bad ones aren’t?
I think you miss the entire point of open source. It’s not that one is good or bad, it’s that one can be verified. Developers are welcome to publish their software however they want, but misrepresenting packages is disingenuous
