Quoting: GBee

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GBeeWhat the Mint packagers seem most concerned about is their own demise. If the world moves to Snap then there will be less opportunity for them to screw with code before it reaches the end user. This is a future I can get behind

That's ridiculous. If I choose to use a particular distribution, I want the people in charge of that distribution to have control over the packages. If I wanted the packagers of a different distribution to have control, I would have chosen that different distribution. Duh.

You seem to be misunderstanding the difference between distro level customisation and packagers silently modifying and f***ing up applications in all sorts of ways for no good reason and usually without end-users even being aware. Packages being created by _developers_ of the original application (you decided to ignore that part of my comment) would avoid a lot of instability, bugs, security flaws and provide consistency in application behaviour but would not prevent distros customising configurations, themes and generally deciding the mix of default packages to give their own spin.

But Snaps would prevent all that. They're centralized to Ubuntu and can't be modified by other distros that carry them. That's the point of Mint avoiding them and hence the point of the article. If you're talking about something different you should perhaps signal that you're shifting off topic.
But in any case, no I'm not. The thing is, you're looking at things from a packager's perspective, but I'm looking at things from an end-user perspective, and as an end-user I have no real way to judge between packagers' ideas of what's a good package and Distro maintainers' ideas of what makes a good package, but I have some notion who the distro people are and basically no idea about the packagers. I don't choose between packagers, I choose between distros. So my instinct is going to be that no, I want the people I have some ability to choose between, to have the power to make alterations. Come to that, if I'm acquiring a whole system, I want the people testing it as a whole system to be deciding what's good security, not the people creating tiny individual bits in isolation. If that upsets some package maintainers, that's a pity, but too bad.

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I've been having fun with it. I'll get back to it as soon as I finish my 4th anniversary celebration playthrough of Stellaris.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: gradyvuckovicBlender, the chad open source software.

This is the second time in a week I'm seeing someone on here using MRA/incel terminology. What the heck is going on?

Hey, male insecurity is a serious problem and shouldn't be belittled.

Considering it's the main behavioral driver of the presidents of both the US and Brazil.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: gradyvuckovicBlender, the chad open source software.

This is the second time in a week I'm seeing someone on here using MRA/incel terminology. What the heck is going on?

Chad is pretty widespread slang, I don't think incels can really claim ownership (of very much, really). What's an MRA?

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Quoting: t3gHey Linux Mint.... 2010 called and they want their UI back.

To be honest, I don't really care what year a UI comes from, I'm more interested in whether it works.
I tend to like furniture made of real wood over self-consciously modern uncomfortable chrome-y crap too.

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I think for people in charge of, or using and supporting, distributions other than Ubuntu, the centralization problem cannot just be waved away. From what Alan Pope of Canonical himself said, you can't get Snaps from anywhere except Ubuntu. Period. He thinks this is a feature, and I can see where from Ubuntu's perspective it is; the issue of fragmentation, as with lots of undiscoverable PPAs, is real, even if I think he maybe exaggerates. If Ubuntu is using Snaps it makes some sense for Ubuntu to want them to be Ubuntu's Snaps in Ubuntu's store.
But the same is true the other way around; from the perspective of any other distro, this "feature" is a problem. If you go with Snap, you are handing control over part of your repository to another distro. If you want those Snaps to work well, this may in turn impose limits on how you build other parts of your distro. Further, since the particular distro controlling those snaps is a for-profit corporation, what you have handed control to is a competitor, which has a motivation to get rid of you. Depending on the workings of a competitor's closed source software (the Snap store) does not strike me as smart.

And for people using those other distributions there are related problems. I pick a distribution because I like what that distribution is doing and how, maybe even why, they are doing it. If what I pick is not Ubuntu, particularly if I don't even really like Ubuntu, I'm not going to be wild about my distribution using something that's in Ubuntu's centralized control.

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Quoting: KohlyKohlI gave up on snaps. They look awful on a 4k monitor, are slow to start up, and take up way too much space.

I can dig the other stuff, but how on earth can they look any different?

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: PatolaYes. The granularity/heterogenity of PPAs is commonly poised as a disadvantage, but here they are an advantage, because you can disable/enable the sources individually. You have granular control in who you decide to trust.

It's interesting. I asked for some statistics recently from our IS people, and they didn't give me anything other than number of hits over a period of time on a PPA. I can't get any detail about where those people are, who they are, or anything like that, all I know is relatively which are the most popular PPAs and interestingly there are a large number of people who have a PPA - and I'm not going to tell you which one it is - but there is a PPA in Launchpad that is more popular - popular in terms of number of people who hit it every day - and that PPA is empty. It has nothing in it. But it's because people read documents and blog posts and instructions that say, "this is how you get that thing. You add this PPA," and so people just blindly do it, right? And so there are people out there who will blindly follow instructions, even if they are patently wrong they will still do it. And so the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it. There are no packages in it. It used to but it doesn't any more. It's a problem that people wanted solving and somebody solved it by creating a PPA but subsequently deleted the stuff from that PPA. And none of those users probably even know that that PPA is empty and they probably don't even know that they're no longer getting updates for that piece of software.

(Edit: the transcript is in the "long quote" so I'll repeat the key point: the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it.)

From the video I linked to earlier. Of course, rather than simply not having anything in, the PPA could put something else there, like the infamous case where someone changed the wallpaper [External Link] of everyone that was hammering their home machine because some instructions somewhere said that people should get software from there.

I watched that video. That particular point he made did not impress me. It seemed designed to sidestep broader issues by cherry-picking a sensationalized case.
As a side note, why does he even know how many people are downloading PPAs from outside Ubuntu?

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Quoting: GBeeWhat the Mint packagers seem most concerned about is their own demise. If the world moves to Snap then there will be less opportunity for them to screw with code before it reaches the end user. This is a future I can get behind

That's ridiculous. If I choose to use a particular distribution, I want the people in charge of that distribution to have control over the packages. If I wanted the packagers of a different distribution to have control, I would have chosen that different distribution. Duh.

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CatKiller was just mentioning the announced Chinese government policy of replacing foreign computers/software (probably with an unspoken emphasis on Microsoft) starting this year. Now we have a major Chinese computer company announcing availability of a bunch of computers with Linux on 'em. Co-incidence or is something going on?

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