It does? I'd say the backlash Ayaneo received from "Windows fans" explains the Ayaneo stuff. I'm sure an immutable system would have been more beneficial for them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm glad Flathub is successful, it's great and I wish them all kinds of good fortune. That number of active users does seem terribly low, but it can only go up!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh, if Valve are allowing the icon to be used by others then that's cool, I'm sure.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does Valve know they're using the Steam Deck icon in their system?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Snap is a gift that just keeps on giving.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh, this is lovely.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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. :grin:

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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

View this comment - View article - View full comments

not 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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments