trevor (he/they)

The owning class is the only minority group that does you any harm.

All those packages, but terrible/lacking documentation and LSP support 😭

I’ve tried to learn Nix multiple times, and even got by okay running NixOS for a year or so, but doing almost anything that isn’t just adding a package to a list in a nix file or flake was like pulling teeth because everything is documented so poorly (or not at all). It would take me hours to do what I could have done in seconds with any other package management tool or configuration management because I’d have to scour hundreds of search results to find someone that did the thing I’m trying to do because there was little-to-no documentation for it.

Nix is a tool with amazing promise that could solve so many problems if they could get their documentation and LSP support up to the standard of something like Rust.

I would say that development is the one thing that can get very annoying on immutable distros.

Flatpaks can only get you so far (as seen by the VS Code Flatpak’s limitations that have to be worked around). I don’t even use VS Code, so I can get around that pretty comfortably, but I have to use Distrobox for a lot of miscellaneous developer tools, and even then, I still run into problems and I can’t install container tools inside of the containers that I’m already working in.

Not to discourage you from trying. I can still get by with some dev work on Bazzite, but it’s waaay easier to do the same dev work on CachyOS (Arch-derivative) because I can just install shit normally and it will work.

Same. If most of my games stopped working, I would be very annoyed, especially because it was entirely preventable.

Thankfully, the Fedora project and community agree.

No. Valve (the biggest offender) will have to make native 64-bit Steam before then, as will the remaining holdouts, so Linux distros will be able to remove 32-bit packages in a timely manner.

Removing then now will break too much to be worth doing.

I highly doubt that those “couple dozen” patches are trivial though. Even Pixel devices can’t run the vanilla mainline kernel without a bunch of added code to make it work with the hardware (see: the Greg KH interview I linked).

And abstracting the hardware is what you do when you make drivers, so this is a distinction without a difference.

I mean, Linux is the driver layer, and you mentioned GNU (userspace) / Linux (hardware layer), and the Linux part of that solid base can’t just be the vanilla Linux kernel that you’d run on a computer.

Sort of. Whatever hardware these are intended to run on require something like 3X the driver code (at least in the case of the Android Linux kernel, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman). Phones tend to have more specialized and proprietary hardware, so you can’t just take the standard Linux kernel, use it there, and call it a day.

But I’d be surprised if the people working on this weren’t aware of that fact, and I hope they are working on abstracting the hardware layers more so that every mobile Linux project doesn’t have to start from scratch every time.

Edit: source (YouTube, sorry) for the claim about how much driver code is required for mobile devices.

This is why I hope to see rule zero get shit-canned. It’s a naive vestige from a time long before we hit late-stage capitalism. Corporate interests have slithered their way into every facet of our lives and we should be working to make software that we write hostile to their practices as much as we can.

If that means that the organizations that have a stranglehold on Open Source™️ don’t like it, so be it. We can follow in the spirit of open source without the naivety or captured interests of organizations that define the arbitrary terms by which we categorize software licenses.

How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I’ve never looked into this.

That’s not what I mean. Yeah, getting the environment variables are simple enough, but if you simply exec something as the root user, whatever you exec will naturally be looking for configs in /root/.config and not your ~/.config dir, so any configurations to things like your text editor won’t be read.

I don’t think it’s that simple. The challenge is that you need to still behave as if it’s invoked as the user so that the editor uses their configurations instead of simply execing it as root.

I could be wrong though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rare Canonical W. The only thing I miss from the original sudo is sudoedit, but I’m pretty sure that’s on the Rust implementation’s TODO list.

Yeah. A lot of the extra nice things about Ghostty come from native macOS features. It’s a very different story on Linux, but still a solid terminal emulator there as well.

Ghostty is amazing on macOS. On Linux, it’s basically another GTK terminal emulation with a lot of nice configuration options, but nothing that special.

You can already sort of hack distrobox-like functionality, but the biggest problem with doing so is that there’s no Wayland or X11 server running on macOS, so GUI applications don’t work unless you install something like XQuartz, and even then, it’s a pretty janky experience.

The Windows Vista part of this is a complement. Software should be fun and colorful again. Apple’s design is lacking in color, but this feels like a step forward.

I also agree that throwing transparency everywhere is probably really bad for readability. I hope the high-contrast mode can correct for that.

I beg of you: try something that isn’t going to shove a broken packaging format like Snaps down your throat.

Try Pop!_OS or Linux Mint if you want something like Ubuntu, only not broken.

If my first experience with Linux involved wasting time trying to figure out why the applications I installed appeared to freeze because they take 30-60 seconds to open after installation or updates, randomly didn’t work because of dogshit sandboxing, etc., I probably would have turned away.

Yeah. The FSF is far from perfect as well.

Eh. I don’t really care what the OSI a handful of tech giants in a trenchcoat have to say about the ethics of my licenses.

If someone wants to allow modification, distribution, and usage of your software, in the spirit of open source, but don’t want it to be used by organizations that bomb children, I’d consider that better than an Open Source™️ license.