Quoting: [Linuxtayshady]I don't want to dumb down Linux for less inexperienced users, but Pop OS or Ubuntu are not good distros for beginners, Linux Mint is because it's made by people who know what they're doing.

You have two companies like System 76 and Canonical behind these distros and there's still so many bugs and issues with them. I would never recommend any GNOME based distro to any beginner, what a joke. Anyone who recommends these distros to beginners has no idea what they're talking about.

Just recommend Linux Mint, that's it.

There was this dumb shift from the community that Pop OS was the new defacto beginner distro and that was a huge mistake IMO. I heard that the developers of Pop OS want to move away from GNOME about time, GNOME3 needs to just die, fork off GNOME2 like Cinnamon did or just make something else. GNOME3 is a catastrophe and needs to be abandoned, and we need new toolkits to replace GTK so we no longer rely in anyway on the abomination that is the GNOME team. They are the worst thing to have ever happened to Linux IMO.

Sorry but that is just useless distro bashing. There is nothing inherently work with either Pop!_OS, Ubuntu or Gnome that makes them unsuitable for beginners, far from it and both Pop and Ubuntu are being successfully used right now by thousands of beginners the world over.

Gnome3 was a disaster at 1.0 but have been quite usable for several years now and while perhaps not perfect, far from "a catastrophe" and doesn't need to be abandoned. Such hyperbole is just silly and does not move any discussion forward.

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Quoting: Glog78

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NociferBut I do have one question: what if I intentionally do want to remove a "system critical" package like Xorg or my DE - how do I do it if package managers, both GUI and CLI, prevent me from doing so?

If you intentionally want to delete something, wouldn't you normally do it by, I dunno, using a "delete something" command of some sort, not by trying to trigger the deletion by installing a package? As far as I know, nobody's done anything to the stuff you do when you're trying to delete things.

Well it would happen if you where trying to replace say xfree with xorg or pulse with pipe-wire. Then you would remove what the disto have marked as an essential package and replace it with another which is what the Steam package tried to do here, the main issue of course is that there where no i386 version of the desktop or xorg available so apt replaced it all with nothing.

And that is something that the apt (and possible also yum/dnf/pacman) devs should take a hard look on, if a package have a hard dependency that requires it to remove packages but where the actual dependency doesn't exist it should straight out refuse to perform the action regardless of any "do as I say".

i can say for pacman --> unsatisfied dependencies are nearly impossible to install ...

I should perhaps have worded that differently. APT will not continue with a missing dependency either, the bug that happened was a bit more complex than that. What I really meant that the package manager should detect that a dependency wants to remove essential packages without replacing those with something else.

Now this is an extreme edge case, but since edge cases do sometimes happens which LTT is evidence of, if I was an APT developer I would have gotten hold of that broken steam package to see why things went the way they did and analysed if there was a way to detect it and avoid it altogether.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NociferBut I do have one question: what if I intentionally do want to remove a "system critical" package like Xorg or my DE - how do I do it if package managers, both GUI and CLI, prevent me from doing so?

If you intentionally want to delete something, wouldn't you normally do it by, I dunno, using a "delete something" command of some sort, not by trying to trigger the deletion by installing a package? As far as I know, nobody's done anything to the stuff you do when you're trying to delete things.

Well it would happen if you where trying to replace say xfree with xorg or pulse with pipe-wire. Then you would remove what the disto have marked as an essential package and replace it with another which is what the Steam package tried to do here, the main issue of course is that there where no i386 version of the desktop or xorg available so apt replaced it all with nothing.

And that is something that the apt (and possible also yum/dnf/pacman) devs should take a hard look on, if a package have a hard dependency that requires it to remove packages but where the actual dependency doesn't exist it should straight out refuse to perform the action regardless of any "do as I say".

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: AussieEeveeI agree in part. the CLI is not intended for newbies, but Linus was able to find a guide online and managed to bypass the protection offered to him by the gui, with only a single command and a verify command.

Adding protections doesn't make this dumbed down like Windows. It just adds protections.

Actually this raises a good point: what does the apt change do that would have made anything different for a youtuber who wanted page views? Type this, then type that. It doesn't matter if it's one line or ten - he would have followed everything written. So the change to apt? Yeah, wouldn't have done anything in this case.

Also, the original error message from the gui was exactly stopping critical packages from being removed! The original gui error message was stopping the very thing that was then done explicitly from the command line.

Well the problem was that the error from the Pop Shop was presented in such a way that Linus believed the problem to be with the Pop Shop and not with the Steam package. I think that is something that we can put down as a hard fact.

The problem is how we solve that misconception, will a more helpful error message in the shop help? Perhaps not, but then again a better message like the one KDE uses here (which matches what I requested in the earlier thread) will hopefully prevent a lot more of others in the same situation even though it would not have prevented Linus from continuing.

Because IMHO the major issue behind the LTT fiasco is that he (and his fellow Windows users) have a prejudice against Linux in that the graphical shops are unstable / don't work and that you have to use the terminal to get anything to work in Linux. That is not something that a new warning message will solve, at least not initially, perhaps on a long term though.

I think that it's important that we don't lock ourselves down in a nirvana fallacy where we will only accept a change if it solves 100%, every improvement is an improvement.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPAs a developer, if I sell something on a storefront, I'm fine paying the maintenance cost of what I actually use and a bit extra for the storefront's profit - but anything beyond that I'd not be okay with.

That is one of those things that sounds better in theory that they work in practice, e.g people tend to make the same arguments for paying taxes that they would like to pay taxes only for X and not for X+Y+Z when always ends up in situations like the US where nobody are willing to pay for infrastructure such as roads and bridges but every one uses them anyway so they tend to just disintegrate until they collapse in some huge accident.

E.g lets say that you don't want to pay for using the steam discussions pages, then your users will simply use some other games pages to discuss your game anyway (like how you'll find lots of PS4 and Epic games users using the Steam discussions pages right now). Or that when the cost of all services are no longer distributed equally over the entire user base then the extra cost per service will be much higher so if you really want to use 100% of the services that Valve have then you'll end up paying perhaps 40% or 50% instead of the 30% flat fee.

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Quoting: pbApparently it pays off to be consistent.

Well here it does since one of the arguments was that Steam took 30% due to their monopoly position which was easily countered by the fact that the cut was 30% even back when Steam was a tiny lemonade stand at the street curb.

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Quoting: TermyAsk basically all "premium" car manufacturers, many OEMs, Apple, furniture brands and so on - if you step outside of highly competetive and price sensitive areas like sustenance or low-cost/noname brands, 10% profit margin is all but "unheard of"...

Yeah we don't even have to go that far, Microsoft have a profit margin of about 40%. But I do think that one part of the problem in determining if the cut is reasonable or not is that we don't know the financials of Valve, we only know that they "make a hefty profit" but not how much and from where since they not only operate a store but also sells their own games and hardware.

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Quoting: berarma

Quoting: Purple Library Guy"Potentially harmful" doesn't really sound that bad. It also sounds vague, like the kind of message you get when the computer doesn't really know just what you're doing or whether it's actually going to do anything important, but is just putting in the boilerplate because the command generally has the potential to do serious things. Especially if you come from the Windows world, where I think the OS bitches every time you do anything other than browse the web with Microsoft Edge . . .

The more I read responses like this the more I think it was intentional. There's no way no one else has had this problem in years but a famous and technically knowleadgeable youtuber doing a live test session.

To use the terminal you need to read, it's a requirement. There's no NEXT button in the terminal, and anyone blindly copying and pasting text into the terminal and foolishly using the Intro key as a NEXT button in a Windows installer is doomed. If this is a bug, we should put an agreement request before the terminal opens to free the devs from responsibility, but then the user wouldn't read it neither. Looking at this like a bug it's unsolvable.

If you read "Potentially harmful" after a long text, and you have to type "Yes, do as I say", and after having tried and failed to install a package in the standard way, you should be wary that something worth of attention is happening. You just have to read a few more lines above to better understand what's happening or stop if you have no clue. But the messages were clear even for the newest users that could read. And thinking otherwise is really believing that Linus is an idiot, that he's not.

Well there are the possibility that it was done deliberately to drive a thesis (Linux is difficult) and I accused Linus of such when it happened. But there is also the possibility that Linus was simply blinded by his Linux prejudice (you have to use the terminal in Linux to get anything done and the terminal is this magic obscure box).

That said, I think that many people in this thread should see this small clip from LTT that they released yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XHoNYJZPb4 where they start to discuss that Windows is far from perfect and that they perhaps should have a part 6 where they try to approach a new Windows install as a noob and not as a hardened Windows veteran.

But what struck me as extremely funny from that clip is that Linus and Luke have earlier complained en masse on how Linux users always reply "well works for me" when they try to describe a problem that they have, and here the instant that Linus mentions that Windows is not perfect he gets a "well it works for me" type of reply in the chat that he reads out loud without really reflecting that this signifies that it's not Linux users that have the "it works for me", its computer people at large. Also the comment section is full of "it works for me" regarding Windows update, completely hilarious how oblivious the Windows users who earlier where so salty about Linux are about their own behaviour when Windows gets a tiny bit of scrutiny.

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Quoting: ElectroDDStore the project on EU servers.
There was a recent ruling saying that fixing bugs was not a case of copyright infrinment.
Reverse ingeneering is protected under a law in itself to allow interoperability of software on hardware and under this law you can even break DRM to a certain extent.
At least, that's what I understand...

Not applicable here. Fixing bugs are you creating patches for the game, this is not what re3 did. Neither did they re the code to see how to work around a DRM or make it work on new hardware, they re:d the code to use as the base for their own code and that is the problem that opened them up for this lawsuit.

And before anyone says that they did no such thing, there are entire series on YouTube where the lead re3/reVC developer show how you use a disassembler to convert the gta binaries to source code and how you then clean up that code to get it into a workable state.

The EU law is there to allow you to patch and modify the existing software to make it work, not to create a distributable version of said software. Before that law both things where seen as violating copyright, now only the latter is.

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Is is just me that are worried that they have removed this in apt when LTT was using apt-get? Or do those two share codebase?

Anywho, I think that a much more important lesson to learn here for the distro devs are completely ignored. And that IMHO is that the Pop-Shop only told Linus that it refused to install Steam and not why and how to report it.

In the best of worlds (and this should be fixable) the GUI should first tell him that the

QuoteThere is a problem with the package where a needed dependency is not present, either this installation is in a broken state or there is a temporary problem with this specific package that we at Pop!_OS needs to fix.

Your list of packages have not been updated for quite a while and performing an update to possible get a newer version of said package could make the problem go away so should I update the list of packages for your now?

And there should also be a button in the GUI when this happens with "click here to report this as a problem on our GitHub or send a mail to this mail address if you don't have a github account".

Honestly I think that far too little time is spent on making these shops user friendly and they have just become some QD wrapper around apt/yum/pacman.

Another example is DistroTube testing out Ubuntu 21.10 and this happens: https://youtu.be/QsuI-nLqwhg?t=686 notice the insane error message that actually tells him that it refused to install it again since the installation is in progress but it's so obtusely written that DT doesn't see it, not to mention that the store doesn't put up any progress bar what so ever.

Or that the Gnome "Software" (great name guys) just shows an empy page with zero progress bar while it syncs the list of packages so it looks either empty or broken when used the first time.

THIS is the problem, not that LTT happened to hose his desktop due to a one in a million bug.

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