Quoting: randylThis is exactly why I believe the Linux ecosystem needs to address its incredible fragmentation.

As if this has never been discussed before... Make a start and name the standard init system, the standard desktop environment, the standard package manager, the standard release cycle. Shall it be AppArmor or SELinux? What's the standard file system? Or the standard sandboxing solution?

Quoting: randylFrom my persective I don't consider Ubuntu the standard or a standard at all. At best they're ~40% of 3% and that's tiny and in no way automatically defaults them to a standard.

Who cares what you think? It's mere facts: The most widespread distribution is *Ubuntu. Neither is it of any interest, how much they contribute upstream, and as far as OS customization goes - there hasn't been a lot going on in this direction over the last few years.
Yes, there is no "standard" distro and there will never be one, hence developers target the most popular distribution. Period.

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Quoting: tmtvlNeat. Too bad it's Ubuntu, we don't need Canonical to grow too big for their shoes.

One of these gratuitous comments... Now let's hope that Red Hat or SUSE doesn't grow too big either or we might end up with enough market share for proper recognition by hardware vendors and software developers.

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Quoting: drjoms

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: 14The amount of 3D games is sad.

Games don't need to be "3D" to be fun.

Ladies don't have to be pretty for you to fall in love with them.

Indeed.

Quoting: drjomsFood doesn't have to be tasty to eat it.
Bed doesn't have to be comfortable to be slept in.(as, in jail for example)

Depends on you how hungry or tired you are.

Apart from that pretty much all games I played recently are either 2D (Dead Cells, plenty of classics on MAME) or "fixed perspective" 3D.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoThe Mint 20 Cinnamon is ideal for former Windows 7 users... Specially if They use the right tweak [External Link]

Oh dear, another one of these "Windows 7 users won't spot the difference" success stories.

They will. Since Linux does not and will not work like Windows. Ever.

"So I a have this Linux thingy and it looks like my Windows, but it hasn't got my D: an E: drives. How am I ever gonna store my stuff? And I couldn't find my tool for configuring the special keys on my keyboard. And..."

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Quoting: AwesamLinuxIf there was one thing I would like to change about Mint, that would be to make a new icon theme. I'm thinking of something similar to the current Moka based one, but one that is designed to be scalable (so that there is not need to make one icon in lots of sizes, GNOME is moving towards that direction. However, the style they are going is not to my liking. I generally prefer icons that have templates and gradients).

No. Even scalable icons have to be done for several sizes. I've worked on a few Papirus icons and you still do 6 sizes per icon. It's explained here

https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme/tree/master/tools/work [External Link]

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Quoting: DesumNeat gimmick, but I can't get behind proprietary emulators. I'm not even a Stallmanist, but the point of emulation is preservation. Having your emulator be closed sauce runs counter to that.

Why? This emulator does all sorts of things, but it does definitely not "preserve".

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Quoting: Pangaea

Quoting: TuxeeReally? Showing an image of a flatpak package to prove the bloatedness of a snap? Really? (Besides I can't find a XNView snap to see whether this is different.)

Maybe read what I posted then, instead of barking up wrong trees. With bloat I always talked about the hilariously ill-named flatpaks. I have never used Snaps and don't intend to, so have no idea if these are bloated too or if the downsides are more about the Canonical lock-in.

Sorry. Yes you were mentioning flatpaks. (From my experience snaps are not exactly bloated.)

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Quoting: soulsourceThat's actually my main point of critique regarding all container formats: They delegate dependency tracking to developers, what makes it basically impossible to prevent situations in which users end up installing the same libraries over and over and over again, in different versions

It's the other way round: that's the reason why you have these containers - to have dependency compatibilty on a per-application level.

Quoting: soulsourceI fully agree however that container packages are preferable to some developer-hosted binary tar.gz. Yet, I don't see how they could be a suitable alternative to distributor-maintained traditional packages (deb, rpm,...).
I have the feeling that the ideal solution for end-users is a co-existence of containers and traditional packages, each having its own preferred use case.

I don't think that this was ever seriously disputed - even by container enthusiasts.

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Quoting: PangaeaHere is an example of what I mentioned earlier. And I've tried to install such things in the past and it did indeed take up an enormous amount of space - wildly more than the actual program does. I don't like bloatware, and you'll be hard pressed to find bigger bloat than this. Are the sticking the entire Linux OS in there or what the hell?

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Really? Showing an image of a flatpak package to prove the bloatedness of a snap? Really? (Besides I can't find a XNView snap to see whether this is different.)

Quoting: PangaeaIf you download the program from their website, the deb is ~50 MB and the AppImage ~80 MB. And this isn't even the most egregious example. I've seen +2000% as well, maybe even more. It's totally absurd. I much prefer to download from the repo, or directly, or from a PPA that I can instantly disable afterwards.

Why are you doing that? You are aware, that you can download the deb packages of a PPA without setting up the PPA.

Quoting: PangaeaSnap sounds even worse, but in different ways, so I'm very happy about Mint doing the right thing here and ensuring the safety and interests of their users. If people absolutely want snap, you can manually install the stuff.

You are aware that in Ubuntu 20.04 there is only one snap package installed ("Ubuntu Software"), that this can be replaced by the native application with a few mouse clicks, and snaps are not forced on Ubuntu users? Ubuntu users have exactly the same variety of native packages available as Mint users. Plus a snap installer and daemon which you can use or not.

Quoting: PangaeaNot the first time Canonical has done something dodgy -- and surely not the last time.

Ah yes. Another sinister conspiracy...

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Quoting: tuubi"You're not fans of a thing I like so you must be ignorant and get all your info on social media." With such a confrontative attitude, I'm sure you feel right at home on Reddit and YouTube.

(Don't know whether this targetting me, but I actually never post on YT or Reddit.)

And one of course can prefer whatever containerization or packaging solution. But it's pretty lame when the given "reasons" don't stand the simplest fact check. (Or worse spinning some idiotic conspiracy theory.)

As stated: I prefer "normal" packages, but when it comes to proprietary software snaps are just a way more handy solution than some obscure zip files. So far all my snap packages (PHPStorm, Skype, the desktop clients of Mattermost and Telegram) have worked without any issues (apart from an initial slow start), are far from "bloated" - and looking at the version numbers - get updated regularly.

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