Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: slapinHow come early access launch can fail?

I would assume that early access is both important for feedback and funding. That Kickstarter funding alone doesn't last long with team of 35.

Less than £6000 per person, that would be roughly one month pay for a highly skilled dev over here. Yeah that won't last long.

edit: and the studio is really from "over here" as well.

Even junior devs you wouldn't be able to have for more than a couple months and that's stretching it. So, the crowdfunding money probably ran out already by early 2020 and they probably ran on savings and maybe goodwill for almost two years until they got some money from Early Access, but not enough to cover the losses.

Hopefully the 25 being let go find something else.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I played it for 20 minutes and had to stop because I was about to puke. Someone in my stream chat said that the game was an insult to the semi-conductor industry. I have hard time disagreeing. It was pretty wacky and absurd though. 10/10

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I tried Ashes 2063 for about an hour last Friday and it seemed very solid to me. They have pulled off a post-apocalyptic aesthetic pretty well and the guns and enemies seemed fun. Definitely need to play more of it in the future and also check out Afterglow.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Glog78[
So in the end ... the user still needs to decide what he wants and not wants -> if a user can't decide in the first place if something is harmful how can he decide now? Will it stop him from doing harmful things ? Will it help him to understand the dependencies and why they are used ? Will it make him understand what is happen right now ? ... Most likely not and we might become a situation like under windows where user don't check anymore if they get an admin promt at all ... they just click it's fine someone on the internet told me to do so ... I would go so far that since you as someone who want to help can't be sure which packages are blocked by which frontend -> we will tell them to do on the commandline overruling the distribution protection ... Thats why i think we are on a complete stupid path currently ... we don't fix anything but we make it more overhead for people who are able to support those systems.

There is only so much you can do to prevent PEBCAK, but on this level I think we had room to push a bit further without any meaningful harm to any existing users, so I don't really understand all the push-back. None of this has ever been about preventing all wrong decisions or making the user learn things they don't want to learn. We are incapable of those things. But what we can do is deploy reasonable measures that make certain classes of stupid mistakes less likely to happen.

Also, I don't see how we are increasing the amount of overhead. The vast majority of situations where we support users don't involve removal of essential packages. In fact, regular users who just want to use their computer should be able to do so basically completely without ever worrying about a single essential package. They should only need to lift the veil if they are actually curious. If a user just wants to install Steam, that should never involve the removal of essential packages and we can make sure that doesn't happen either by deploying sanity checks that make sure those kinds of packaging mistakes don't happen or by having sanity checks performed by package managers so that they don't install faulty packages.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Glog78Ok very slowly ... if someone of you can tell me how you want to solve the problem which programs are essential to a user in the user environment i would agree with this solution. Here again some question which might make it more obvious from a "scenario" which can happen:

The questions you present are edge cases that might not be solved by the existing solution, but that doesn't negate the value of the solution. But sure, I'll take a stab at the issues.

Quoting: Glog78If someone removes Network Manager -> is this package essential with systemd networkd still being around or not ?

If a user explicitly removes Network Manager, there is no issue. The package manager may employ some fail-safe mechanisms to dissuade users from uninstalling it, since it can be vital for the existence of networking, but when the user explicitly orders the removal of NM then that becomes their problem. No user-level application should be able to uninstall Network Manager as part of its dependency resolution process, particularly if NM is active.

Quoting: Glog78Question 2 to make it hard -> if one distribution says it is essential and the other says it isn't -> what would you as an developer of a none distribution package choose as an answer ? (in this case kde discover?)

Make the best and probably most conservative decision the default, provide mechanisms for distributions to provide better information about which packages to consider essential. Since Discover uses the distribution's package management tools underneath, we can probably defer some responsibility to the underlying tools.

Quoting: Glog78Question 3 to make it completly lost -> what if the user wants to exchange network manager against wicd ?

If two packages provide roughly equivalent functionality which would cause them to conflict at installation time, then I would be okay with the user being able to swap one essential package for another if the user has explicitly ordered an installation of that essential package. Package managers already exist which allow one package to cover other packages as dependencies. For example, the pipewire-pulse package provides the pulseaudio dependency under Arch Linux, allowing you to fairly seamlessly switch between the two without breaking the dependencies of all applications that depend on Pulseaudio. We could also decide to require satisfying the fail-safe mechanism in this instance, since switching from NM to wicd is a fairly niche use-case and people that would actually want to knowingly do that can probably figure out what they need to do to accomplish it. Alternatively, we could simply say that NM and wicd should not conflict in the first place and have the issue be resolved on service management level. I've got Network Manager installed in parallel with systemd-networkd, but I simply have the NetworkManager service disabled.

So, really, none of these scenarios is somehow impossible to overcome and solving these three arbitrary scenarios isn't even a requirement for the existing solution to be valid.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NociferWell, this change is actually all about completely preventing the package manager from uninstalling essential packages when told to do so, either explicitly or implicitly. What produced the error Linus faced was trying to install a misconfigured package combined with his/the system's failure to first update the package listings before he tried to install it; it's just that this misconfigured package ended up firing apt's "remove essential package" routine and from thereon there was nothing to prevent apt from doing exactly as ordered, beyond that one silly "fail-safe" (which shouldn't ever have been implemented in the first place).

I am aware of the scenario. Apt still retains the ability to uninstall essential packages and that counts as having the ability to explicitly order such a removal for me. The only difference is that now the fail-safe mechanism is stronger and will better dissuade users who don't actually know what they are doing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Glog78I think we should discuss those solutions not agree to them by default or hype them. All what we have currently presented is in my eyes just "acitvism" which in the end we all might more suffer than win.

I agree with the solution because I see no obvious flaw that would lead to harm. The solutions implemented in Discover and apt seem to address a real, although somewhat niche, problem. They don't measurably increase complexity nor do they meaningfully harm usability, because the protection essentially only applies in situations where things are likely starting to go wrong already.

I've yet to see a convincing argument against the current implementation. The only arguments I've seen is that this somehow negatively affects the ability to tinker, which it doesn't, or that it doesn't solve every problem in the problem space of problems. It would be great if Discover and apt updates solved the world hunger, but I think expecting them to do that is maybe a bit unreasonable.

I don't know what to do with that activism comment. You seem to be vaguely gesturing at some sort of a slippery slope, but all I am seeing is developers looking at a problem and writing a small fix to prevent it from happening. I guess we could consider this activism of some kind, but that probably makes an activist of all of us programmers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Glog78Hi Samsai -> you are a programmer. I didn't check the implementation but from my current understanding of the issue ... either this protection should cry on nearly every installed program , cause from a user standpoint the can be essential or it does cry only on very few situations which leaves alot of loopholes and scenarios which makes it no real protection.

So, is your argument that we shouldn't accept any solution that is less than perfect? I think you'll find that suddenly life becomes very very difficult if you start rejecting solutions simply because they are not total solutions. The world runs on compromises, and computers and their software are by themselves a massive pile of compromises built on compromises.

Sure, some users may consider certain packages essential which others would not. However, I think we can establish a fairly agreeable layering, where we designate software that is foundational and without which the normal operation of the system becomes difficult or impossible. In that grouping we can include things like bootloaders, display managers, desktop environments, init systems, package management tools and the core dependencies of the previously mentioned items. After all, I think it's common sense that some user-level application getting accidentally removed is a less of a hassle than your system not booting or entirely losing your graphical environment.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I don't really understand the outrage. What even is the use-case for a package manager to totally uninstall essential packages upon install of an unrelated package? I can get behind being able to tell the package manager to uninstall essential packages when told to do so explicitly, but installing regular application software should never make massive alterations to the foundational parts of my system to begin with. Having especially the graphical package managers protect you from accidental system breakage is nothing but a good thing.

Honestly, some of this complaining in this thread could easily be applied to --no-preserve-root or even the concept of sudo. Why is 'rm' trying to slow me down from deleting my entire root folder? Why do I need to input my password to modify system files? They are trying to turn my OS into a padded cell! Back in the good old days I could punch in arbitrary values into arbitrary memory locations and the computer stepped out of my way!

Honestly, I am totally behind Liam on this. The complaints on this issue reek of elitism and I see no value in making desktop Linux more fragile to breakage or more obscure to make some tinkerers feel better about themselves. And I say that as a tinkerer myself: I am quite willing to bet that I run a more exotic setup than many of the people that are now up in arms about how their right to tinker is somehow being trampled on. You are still perfectly able to uninstall your display managers and bootloaders even after the apt patches if you really want, just try to realize that this is an exotic use-case and 99.9% of people would only do so by accident and thus there should be some level of safety to prevent that. Even Formula 1 cars come with safety features.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'll have this one too. Gotta love all of these things coming out.

View this comment - View article - View full comments