Halsin noises in the distance

Here here, have some Chai. Take a break and everything.should.be.ok

Edit: I’ve been free from web dev too long and it shows. Don’t even know my assertions anymore.

that’s more of a web design distinction

I think that was the point of “someone rescue me from frontend dev” - if they’re doing so much frontend design work that they instinctively get pedantic about padding vs. margin, they need help.

rizz is also used to mean flirt. So “I like you” “Are you flirting with me?”

Can we have both? A concise textual description and a video exemplifying the features?

I stuck with the ~mozillateam PPA for quite a while, regularly trying the snap and reporting bugs to Mozilla

Mad respect. I wouldn’t have had that amount of time or patience due to personal circumstances, nor the ideological drive to see it work well, but it is people like you that compensate for those of us that can’t or don’t want to contribute to that same extent. All other preferences aside, I appreciate that contribution to a better ecosystem.

The alternative (not providing a Firefox deb in their repos any more, resulting in users with the firefox deb suddenly being abandoned) is a whole lot worse.

You’re right, that would have been the worst “solution” - none at all.

What you’re suggesting is, IMO, a move that simply confuses new users. “Firefox updates automatically. Why is it suddenly asking if this update is okay? clicks no, has an unmaintained Firefox”

Between my experiences with supporting users and corporate lingo, I don’t think so. Provide a concise, maybe slightly propagandised ad about how snap is better and more secure, then provide the users with a highlighted button “Yes, I want to continue automatic security updates” and a subdued “No, I want to maintain it myself” along with a help pop-up for a slightly more technical “What’s the difference”.

Most casual users I know that just want things to work - myself included, in some cases - will just skim it, see the appealing buzzwords, click “Yeah whatever, I don’t care”. The more technical ones would probably google it, read the ensuing arguments and recommendations, and either decide like you did to give it a shot or end up responsible for their own thing (which is both the liberty and the jeopardy of Linux in general: you can do your own thing, but if it breaks, that’s on you).

A Pin-Priority of 1 would have been the “correct” way to do it IMO, as that blocks automatic installation as a dependency, but still allows automatic upgrades if the user manually installs the package. But instead, Linux Mint took a hostile approach of choosing a negative number, which actually tells apt to remove the package even if the user has manually installed it. This is overriding user choice in a way that neither Ubuntu nor KDE Neon did.

I wasn’t aware of that detail (given I never cared about snap anyway, I never would have run into the issue). Paired with the unwillingness to remedy resulting problems, that is indeed a shitty move. I’d consider it on par with suddenly replacing my firefox with a version that worked very poorly*, which also caused me confusion and frustration, but unlike the firefox case, I don’t see any graceful way of handling that transition in a user friendly manner.

*It just occurred to me that some of the issues may have been exacerbated by running on an HDD as opposed to an SSD. Prior to tossing Windows entirely, my SSD held my Win7 installation, while Ubuntu got its own partition on the HDD. I never migrated it to the SSD, instead using its limited 256GB to hold whatever games I was playing at the time.

Re: Linux Mint hostility, apathy about resulting problems, misinformation, paternalism

Those are all good points.

Being hardliners about their philosophy is a common phenomenon in the Linux sphere. While I agree that it’s not particularly user-friendly (and generally value open debate), I also feel that a distributor is within their rights to do what they feel is right rather than caving to users. Conversely, that’s a philosophy I wouldn’t want to endorse either.

The charge of paternalism is one I would level at Canonical too, given the concerns I expressed about pushing towards a monolithic, corporate controlled system. Good intentions notwithstanding, I worry it may pave the path to hell. They’re more subtle about it, but that’s no more of a redeeming quality to me than MS slowly creeping in new bullshit. (I’d gladly be wrong about that, of course - even if I may not want to use it, options are a good thing.)

But misinformation is an problem and I concede that I may well have fallen prey to it myself. I did try to search for info about open source options like what you mention, but my results and interpretations may have been biased, and I didn’t spend enough time for a comprehensive understanding. I could make excuses, but that won’t change the fact of my error.

I’m just elaborating on the one thing since you didn’t seem to get why it’s a problem.

I didn’t. Thank you for taking the time.

There were bugs about a decade ago about unattended upgrades not obeying pins correctly, but those were bugs and, AFAIK, have long since been resolved.

It can’t have been more than a few years ago, given that the snap move happened with 22.04 which released about 2.5y ago and I encountered that error. But I was, for all intents and purposes, a noob, so I can’t exclude the possibility of user error. I’ll take your word that this no longer happens.

nix, immutable distros / building blocks, Android comparison

I’ve never tried either nix or immutable distros. The idea of an immutable base, vetted for compatibility issues between what you refer to as the “building blocks”, seems appealing from a “I don’t want to worry about the details” perspective for casual use.

Android is convenient for another reason where I’m not sure how relevant it is to our context. It offers a unified version with a common set of features and interfaces, allowing app development relying on that version.

Exchangeable blocks can introduce complication in the same way that, for an example I’m familiar with, node package dependencies will feature a whole set of “at least this version” or occasionally “exactly this (major) version” specifications to ensure the individual parts all meet the requirements.

It’s a tradeoff between modularity and reliability, as I see it, and both have their merits. I do tend to favour modularity, which is why I do appreciate the concept of snap as I have now come to understand it. Like I said, my misgivings are with Canonical more than the technology itself.

I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you, because we’re each giving opinions and learning from each other. […] It was, to be entirely honest, entirely different from the type of conversation I was expecting coming into this thread, which began as yet another piling on and telling people not to use snaps specifically because of factoids that are misinformation. Thanks for the very good conversation instead!

Likewise. I’m no fan of the adversarial nature of many conversations in the tech sphere either. Progress thrives on creativity, if tempered by skepticism and scrutiny. If we’re willing to share perspectives, we can catch each other’s blind spots. And if it comes down to personal opinions in the end, at least we can form those consciously and part ways a little wiser than before.

I’d be curious to hear about your other misgivings some time, but this conversation has been going on a while now and I may not have much time to read or respond the next few days. In any event, thanks for taking the time!

I don’t think you trust

For me the Linux Mint developers’ hostility to snaps (which in my experience tend to be the best trade-offs for my needs) is one of the many reasons I won’t use or suggest Mint.

I mean, analogous to firefox example you supplied, you could just delete nosnap.pref and be on your way.

Also, snapd keeps a snapshot of your per-revision configuration from an app for a while after you remove it. You can run snap saved to see all the current snapshots. It doesn’t remove your $SNAP_USER_COMMON directory for that snap (which is where the Firefox snap stores its profiles), so moving from the snapped Firefox to the version from apt is just a matter of moving the .mozilla directory out of ~/snap/firefox/common to ~/

I could have sworn I checked that, but I was a lot less familiar with these things at the time, so maybe I missed it.

I don’t think snaps are a bad thing on principle, my own bad experiences with them notwithstanding. I could also live with a for-profit operating its own curated package repository as part of its service. I’d personally prefer not to use a client locked into one particular package provider, but if that’s the tradeoff for that provider’s security guarantee that your packages are all Canonical-certified safe, I’d accept that. If it were preinstalled with an OS, that’s fine. If they make it the default Software Store, we’re on par with the Microsoft Store and other App Stores and those too provide a utility and convenience, particularly for those less technically minded. The ship on “don’t bundle your browser with your OS because that’s monopoly grabbing” has sailed long ago anyway.

All of these are things I’m fine with, even if I personally would choose not to use them. If that was all, I’d still recommend Ubuntu as a beginner distro, because it was my intro to Linux too and I found it good at the time.

The thing that irks me is when they’re being dishonest about it. You no longer wanna support a deb package in your repos? Fine, let me know, offer me a one-click migration option for installing the snap instead and moving my data over, give me the whole marketing routine of telling me how much better your new solution is, but make it my choice.

Having a transition package for a name change or breaking up a larger project into modular packages is one thing. Using it to instead run an entirely different package manager pulling from a proprietary repo?

Worse still, if you had trouble with one app so you went and found a non-snap repo, you pinned it with higher priority, reinstalled it from the new source and thought you were in the clear because that worked as expected.
But you forgot or didn’t know to also put a negative priority on the snap source because pin priorities seem intuitive enough, only for unattended upgrades to look at the pins and say “That sign can’t stop me, because I can’t read” (pins from repos I don’t know) and reinstall the snap…
I get that automatic upgrades don’t pull from all repos by default for security reasons, but at least look at the priorities and realise “Ope, not gonna touch that, I’ll notify the user to do it manually if they trust the update”.

And that, for me, is the part that takes it from apathy to disdain; the part that goes beyond “each distro has its own preferences, no big deal”; the part that reeks of a profit-oriented company aiming for vendor lock-in.

To close the topic out: All of this is just explaining my stance; I’m not telling anyone what to do or not to do. You gave your point, I gave mine. By all means, if it works best for you, I’m not getting in your way. I just wish there was a better option.

Thanks for that correction then. I wasn’t conscious of that detail.

In any case, the issue remains that, if the vendor’s default repositories push for a type of package I don’t want, I either have to manually find and vet third party repositories I trust or find someone else to rely on for defaults I’m fine with.

The difference between “I want a different source for a single package, so I’ll manually select a different source for that one” and “I don’t trust Canonical to select sources I agree with anymore” is one of scale. I’m fine with manually pinning the transitional package, uninstalling it and the snap (hopefully remembering to back up my profile before realising that it also deletes user data) adding a ppa, reinstalling it and reimporting my profiles just for firefox.

But if I feel like I have to fight my distro vendor over not using their preferred package distribution system, it’s probably better to jump ship - other vendors have beautiful distros too.

(Also, “you can just use a different source” is part of the reason people prefer not to use snap, where you can’t do that)

Correct me there, but wasn’t the “select source” thing intended to be about different deb sources?

The issue is that what you expect to be a deb package manager ends up redirecting to snap anyway. It’s not a different source, it’s a different system. If I have to manually take steps to avoid using the distro vendor’s default sources because they just redirect to a system I don’t want to use, I might as well look for a different vendor.

And so I did

IIRC, the issue was that - unless you take steps to explicitly prevent it - Ubuntu would occasionally reinstall the snap version. I don’t remember the details, been a while since I had to dance that dance, but I recall it being one of the things that put me off snap in particular, Ubuntu in general and sparked my search for a different distro.

I’m now on Nobara, a Fedora-based gaming-oriented distro maintained by GloriousEgroll (who also maintains the popular Proton-GE)

I see more atheistmemes on All than I do religious stuff.

This is a joke, most likely, given the community and context.

“Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.

Devs be applying like “Hi! I’d like to join your development team! My professional qualifications are that I’ve spent eight years working on a failed game!”

Of course, it won’t be the individual devs’ fault but I don’t have any difficulties imagining that some of them have a harder time finding new jobs than people who were let go after the launch of more popular games.

Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.

I mean, there may also be plenty of non-citizens there at any given time.

There’s a bunch of staff there too. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 764 people.

only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it

The first step to improvement is to acknowledge flaws. We can still admit “This is outside our current capacity to fix.”

pretending “linux is easy now”

This might not always be pretense so much as cognitive bias and a bubble effect: If I look at it from my point of view, it has gotten a lot eas_ier_. I underestimate just how advanced even those things I consider basic are for someone not as versed as I am. I’m nowhere near an expert, but I know enough to have lost sight of the floor.

There are plenty of “fire and forget” distros - If I want to, say, install Ubuntu, I create a bootable flash drive with the base image, reboot, follow the installation prompts, easy.

The layperson will ask “What’s Ubuntu? I thought we’re talkink about Linux?” “What does bootable mean? How do I do that?”

Most crucially, from my own experience trying to sell a family member on Linux, “What do these prompts all mean?” They’re scared of selecting something wrong, because they’re not confident that they understand them correctly.

That may be a public image issue: If you’re predisposed to think it’s complex, the brain may lock itself into not trusting its own understanding of semantics. And the elitists certainly aren’t helping with that: If a hundred people reassure you it’s fine and one person says it’s complex, it’s hard to avoid that seed of doubt. Once it is planted, confirmation bias will do the rest.

I don’t know what the solution is

One part of the solution might be a “transition” package, consisting of first a tool to try cross-platform alternatives to tools people already use, second a ready-made VM to try Linux without installing it, using a transition distro, styled to look and feel “like Windows” and built-in links to the host filesystem, and finally a fully automated installer that includes backing up files, settings etc. and putting them in the equivalent Linux soot after installation so you have as little transitory friction as possible.

Which leads us back to the topic of leftist politics and the split between moderates and progressives: Of course I don’t want to compromise on my principles, but we’re not gonna win people over by demanding drastic change with scary words that make it easy to lump in the “Capitalism fucks us over” progressives with the McCarthyist “They want to install a Russian dictatorship!” rhetorics about the radicals and tankies. Radical change is likely to invite radical backlash.

Our best shot at non-violent and lasting change is to make the transition as low-friction as possible, inching people over policy by policy, shifting the Overton Window the way the regressives have been doing for decades, instead of trying to aggressively shunting it over.

Focus less on identity, ideology and terminology, more on individual issues and solutions. Some movements obviously warrant aggressive countering, but we have to pick our battles, or we’ll be spread out on too many fronts. Ideology alone doesn’t win wars; Strategy does.

We should also project unity of vision and determination instead of public infighting and sabotaging what we all want over the things we disagree on.

Presentation matters.

Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is.

I find that to be an issue with many well-meaning people.

For example, I see it occasionally in the FOSS-bubble: It’s great if a given software is ideologically “pure”, independent from capitalist incentives, open source and freely available. It’s great that there are volunteers doing work for the benefit of others.

Occasionally, when someone lists specific tools running on Windows only as reason for not switching to Linux, they get told to use FOSS alternatives instead that just can’t match the proprietary in terms of features or usability. When you point that out, there will often be the customary vocal minority of twats chastising you “It’s volunteer work, you don’t get to demand anything, go implement it yourself” etc.

I hate to admit it, but I’m generally more comfortable around MS Excel than LO Calc. I’ve used LO Writer and Impress for personal and university stuff, because I rarely need more advanced features (and if I do, I’ll probably use TeX anyway), but when it comes to more complex work with spreadsheets, I just find Excel to be smoother in usage. I don’t have enough experience in the field of UX to put a finger on why, nor would I likely have the skills or time to contribute fixes to LO Calc. I can settle for less out of ideology, but is that what you expect from people at large?

The same applies with the transition to Linux in general: I’m technically versed enough that I’m confident I can probably fix any error I encounter. But until the public perception and tooling of Linux gets to the point that even non-techies can easily do the switch, it’s not going to see widespread adoption.

I love FOSS. I love Linux. I want to see them replace proprietary monopolies as much as possible.

But the presentation matters.

I mean, go ahead and implement it if you think “That’s pretty hard to do, so we opted not to put significant development resources into one feature” is a poor excuse. If the team is working under pressure already, they’ll have to prioritise and I assume this got shoved down the lst.