Snap is a gift that just keeps on giving.

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Oh, this is lovely.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumI have to ask, how do people justify allowing a video game absolute total control over their computer at the kernel-level?

How does one justify that is a good thing to have? It is a rootkit.

Regardless if you use Windows, Linux or the other one it just sounds like a bad idea. I can't help but feel the reason these companies won't do this for Linux is simple: They know most Linux users would reject it, and refuse to use the game anyway.

But it still begs the question, why are some people accepting of this?

Because they are ignorant of it and even if they weren’t they wouldn’t care, they want to play what the cool youtube people and their friends are playing.

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Quoting: Kithop

Quoting: damarrinSnaps/flatpaks are there to make packaging and distribution easy for software creators and make them independent of distro maintainers who may or may not include a given piece of software, or may be including an ancient version of it.

Totally agree - that is 100% a valid use case for this, and a better way of putting what I was trying to get at: if your distro *does* ship an up to date version, you should use that as your first choice, since it may need to have been customized for said distro, it'll be kept up to date with shared libraries, etc., but if it *doesn't* (and you don't want to go down the rabbit hole of compiling it yourself... I've written my own janky PKGBUILDs for that, in fact, and it's not user-friendly), these are a great fallback.

My issue primarily is that Canonical likes to push the snap version of a package as the first choice, regardless if there's a perfectly valid .deb available, and I think that's wrong, because that pulls Ubuntu even further away from upstream Debian and introduces yet another unique distro-ism when trying to troubleshoot. The cynical part of me worries that 'pulling away from upstream Debian' is their big goal.

That said, it's been a few years since I ran Ubuntu on a desktop - does an 'apt install firefox' still pull in the snap by default? If they've walked that back since, then my argument is invalid and out of date.

I generally agree running software from the native packaging system gives a better experience. Install is much faster, it starts faster, takes up less space, etc.

But, from what I've seen a number of distros (Ubuntu!) might ship the current version of a package as a deb/rpm at a certain point, but as time goes on it will fall behind until the user has something much older than is available as flatpak/snap.

If the user knows what they're doing they might then switch to flatpak, and possibly switch back to native packaging when they upgrade to a newer version of their system then switch to flatpak again - which just makes no sense and is a load of extra unnecessary work. Especially as the settings directories are different and have to be copied over.

As for Snaps and Firefox, they've managed to improve the user experience massively so it now runs fine, but if you object to snaps in general there's just no point in running Ubuntu. More and more things are moved to snaps and this will only continue.

I did rip out FF a couple of times and replaced it with the deb, but it's just such a hassle to do every six months, it makes no sense. It reminds me of people caring about privacy but continuing to run Windows and disabling all the data gathering options on every update, feeling like they've somehow beat the system. It's just nonsense, unless you have way too much free time on your hands.

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Well, AI may be bad right now, but I'll eat my hat if it doesn't become much less bad very quickly.

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Quotenot provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.

Thankfully not, if the "needs of today's citizens" is having no skills at all and telling AI to write anything, including a crime novel or a PhD thesis, or draw anything including a photorealistic compromising image of the girl next door who isn't interested in you and whose life you want to ruin and have it spat out in seconds.

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Quoting: KithopYeah, I don't mind stuff like Flatpaks for devices like the Steam Deck, where you don't normally get write access to the entire filesystem, but on desktop?

Unless you have a need to sandbox something, just use your distro's packages - they will be compiled with the recommended versions of libraries for the whole ecosystem, instead of storing multiple, slightly different (and potentially way out of date!) versions depending on what you're installing.

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way and it's not even the main point of these package formats.

Snaps/flatpaks are there to make packaging and distribution easy for software creators and make them independent of distro maintainers who may or may not include a given piece of software, or may be including an ancient version of it.

They are also there for users who now can always have a piece of software available directly from the Snap store or a flatpak repo and have the latest version of it, regardless of whether the distro they use provides it.

Since you use Artix you may think every distro is like Arch where every piece of software ever written is included in the aur, but that is not even remotely the case for the vast majority of distributions. And there are good reasons for that, so there is a space for both.

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Quoting: CatKillerAt some point I'll probably try Witcher 3, but my copy was a GOG key that came with my GPU so I'd need to set up Heroic and stuff, and I haven't really been arsed

Heroic is completely painless and it mostly just works no problem.

That said, the latest version of W3 is broken on OLED SD (if you have that), as the game detects a HDR screen but SteamOS does not detect the game as running in HDR and it's all very gray and washed-out. Helpfully, HDR can't be disabled in the game.

If you can install the pre-finaldefinitiveedition, or whatever it's called, you should be golden.

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I did fall when walking the dog a couple of weeks ago. All the snow is now gone, unfortunately, and the forecast says we won't be having any before the year is out. Which means a muddy, rainy, soppy Christmas.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guyand I definitely hit the actual bookstore for them whenever at all possible

Huh. I had you pegged as more of a library guy.

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