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Aaruni Kaushik

@mcc I agree that as an end user you shouldn't have to care about the philosophy of native v/s namespace v/s whatever snap does, you should just be able to trust the OS default to JustWork(tm).

but this is kind of why I have been against this whole snap and flatpak business. I trust my distro, and by extension, the native packages the maintainers have put in the repos to work well in concert with each other.

10 comments
mcc

@double_a_runi Well, my experience is that the distro maintainers are very, very conservative and always have very old versions of things, and that Homebrew is very high quality and always has new versions of things, so I'm in principle interested in a software distribution system that looks more like Homebrew than apt

Aaruni Kaushik

@mcc wait we have brew on Linux?

anyway yeah, you are describing why I slowly moved from ubuntu -> mint -> arch . ubuntu got annoying, and mint packages were always old. I know arch is a meme, but its been working for me, and I will move to something else when it stops working for me?

mcc

@double_a_runi I was using OS X locally and linux only on servers until quite recently! Then I rapidly abandoned Mac for Windows and then rapidly abandoned Windows for Linux.

But also, yeah, you can use Homebrew on Linux, if you're feeling adventurous… docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux

Aaruni Kaushik replied to mcc

@mcc curl to bash to install, looks promising.

sorry I have nothing useful to reply, I've used brew to install lima on macos, so I can have linux in there, but not beyond that. I don't know how it works, and what kind of conflicts it can have.

Yegor Wienski

@mcc if you prefer newer versions, you may want to try Arch (or Endeavour OS, which is basically Arch, but with a more user-friendly installation process, and even more shiny new things). In the last couple of years, I barely did any maintenance to make it work for me, and I'm on Wayland and all.

Also, in my experience, KDE is much more sensible than Gnome. I love it. It's still nice even when compared to OS X, and a lot better than Windows 11.

Michael Kohne

@wienski @mcc I've always found KDE a better environment than GNOME, just because the GNOME devs have very particular opinions about things, which differ from my own, and which they over time keep removing the ability to change.

arcayr

@mcc @double_a_runi apologies if you already know this: ubuntu cuts from debian's "testing" repositories twice a year (for 04 and 10), and packages aren't really updated beyond that except for browsers and a few other bits.

distros with "fresher" packages exist: fedora is great for this, it has a solid testing process too before packages hit live.

ubuntu (and debian) have a long history of... kinda hacking packages up a bit. debian does it predominantly to split them out, ubuntu adds more to do "ubuntu-centric" things to them sometimes. occasionally this collides with upstream a bit.

like with package age, distros with "more vanilla" packages exist (again, fedora, incidentally).

@mcc @double_a_runi apologies if you already know this: ubuntu cuts from debian's "testing" repositories twice a year (for 04 and 10), and packages aren't really updated beyond that except for browsers and a few other bits.

distros with "fresher" packages exist: fedora is great for this, it has a solid testing process too before packages hit live.

RAOF

@double_a_runi @mcc It might be worth pointing out that Snap is the result of more than a decade of on-and-off work by the package maintainers you trust.

Like, “we need to develop something like Snap” was a topic at one of the first Ubuntu Developers' Summit I attended (back when those were big 6 monthly community events).

Snap and Flatpak are not some weird technology imposed on distro maintainers from outside. They are distro maintainer technology, built by distro maintainers to solve problems that distro maintainers have¹!

¹: And, by extension, solve problems that users have.

@double_a_runi @mcc It might be worth pointing out that Snap is the result of more than a decade of on-and-off work by the package maintainers you trust.

Like, “we need to develop something like Snap” was a topic at one of the first Ubuntu Developers' Summit I attended (back when those were big 6 monthly community events).

Garrett Wollman

@RAOF Or create problems for users that they otherwise wouldn't have, like no longer being able to upload files from where they happen to be stored.

RAOF

@wollman Absolutely! This is one of the reasons it's taken more than a decade from “we should do this” to “this is a thing that substantially exists”.

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