Flatpak isn’t going to have every library, cli tool, or even every GUI tool. I think in the end out of date just isn’t worth it.

The sad thing is in the US its extremely likely the fellow would have already been dead after years living on the streets with a cardboard sign.

If you use a GUI configuration tool for NetworkManger like virtually every user I don’t know how that works. Odds are not well.

Are they so different that it’s justified to have so many different distributions?

Linux isn’t a project its a source compatible ecosystem. A parts bin out of which different people assemble different things. The parts being open source means you don’t need anyone’s permission or justification to make something different out of them.

From these many and varied efforts comes life, vitality, interest, intellectual investment. You can’t just take the current things you like best and say well what if we all worked on THOSE when many of them wouldn’t even have existed save for the existence of a vital ecosystem that supported experimentation and differentiation.

If we really believed in only pulling together maybe you would be developing in cobol on your dos workstation.

Are we suggesting that rich people who get a product for free and use it to forklift more piles of money into their scrooge mcDuck like vault ought to demand more accountability from the people who provided the free forklift.

How about they pay for that?

We are helping people enduring unimaginable hardship in a war zone where their children are being stolen and their people slaughtered. Our financials are so structured that money already committed won’t be withheld even if the Republicans have a tantrum and shut the government down.

The defect and the outrage is that Republicans are allowed to take away first responders pay HERE not that it isn’t also taken away there. This is classic "they aren’t hurting the right people thinking. Fuck you newsweek.

Black Lives Matter is a unambiguously good stance.

The rebel flag signifies support for people who fought a war against their fellows for the right to hold others in chains. SS signifies support for a mass murder’s campaign to subjugate the world and drag the world into darkness. Support for Trump is support for an autocrat who would replace Democracy with a cult of personality.

The fact that you cannot distinguish these beyond lumping them together as political stances doesn’t speak well for your analytical skills. How about you can support your fellow man but you can’t support evil?

The open source ecosystem by virtue of being free software just doesn’t have those billions of dollars to invest. For office software google docs are sufficient for a whole lot of use cases and easily shareable whereas more complex usage is easily handled by libre office.

Photoshop is legitimately better than alternatives but popular as it is only a tiny fraction of PC users use or need Adobe.

26M vs 2B is approx 1.3% of PCs

I also don’t need to select my car based on its ability to haul thousands of pounds of cargo or its performance on a racetrack either.

If we want photoshop for Linux we need to collectively bankroll it. If not there is plenty of space in the market for computers without photoshop because that is by far the majority of computers.

Alternatively coming soon to a web browser near you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvNoZxoMuGI

Actually OEMS get money for including Windows because they include shovelware trials of crap like Norton that is of greater value than the reduced cost of Windows to the big players. If sold at difference in cost the decrapified Linux version would be more expensive not less.

Anybody can have a vision, but it’s the work that matters. I’ll be worried when they become a player.

Did you entirely miss the part where IBM bought Red Hat

I didn’t say we should be satisfied with “good enough” I said in practice we build our sandcastles on the beach irrespective of the approaching tide because it’s what we know. In that context, it is no longer an absurd take it’s just recognizing reality.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to imagine that IBM’s vision for Linux compared to 2000s or 2010s era Linux is opaque, complicated, and enterprisey. It’s who they are.

The grandparent comment

Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaningfully force anything upon any large group of them.

Is pure fantasy. Software projects are dictatorships of those willing to put in the work, not meritocracies. There is nothing immoral or wrong about this but we should be realists. The entire software ecosystem is dominated by oft shitty good enough solutions which people poured enough work into to solve problems well enough.

The author is an idiot.

When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from.

Only techies ask anyone how they “get into Linux”. Say it with me now. “People don’t buy, buy into, get into, install, or use operating systems” They buy fuckin computers. It is perceptibly to virtually all non-techies a feature of the device.

There are a million types of cars but people manage to pick one and buy it same with breakfast cereals or shampoo because they are obligated to make a decision or go hungry, dirty, or walk everywhere.

People don’t particularly like making decisions and they decided what OS they were going to use when they bought the computer and they have no intention of downloading an iso, write it to a USB, figure out how they boot from it, figure out the bios options they need to disable and what works differently than what they are familiar with.

You lost them around step 2 and lost all hope of moving forward unless the prize at the end is something much better than “does everything I used to do but differently”

The success of Chromebooks, android phones, and the steam deck is that it was driven by devices people wanted to use not an OS people wanted to use. If you want to see more Linux use that is the story you need to focus on.

Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaningfully force anything upon any large group of them.

Even for developers, there is a very substantial cost to any deviation from the herd and little time or money for these projects. Factually a handful of companies run the Linux userspace and a handful of people run those companies.

You can go your own way but existing market share and resources matter more than quality or merit.

Actually, its an opaque system that makes it much harder to understand what is going on because it’s a declarative file that is consumed in a non-obvious way by code written in c which is not going to be remotely comprehensible to them. Most people are apt to google for the magic incantation that appears to match their problem without understanding anything.

Not only are simple and easy not the same they are opposing interests in most actual practices.

I had an extremely simple Funtoo (Gentoo derived) installation it had bios boot -> 4 line grub.cfg with explicitly specified kernel and initrd. Making a kernel involved cding to the directory where the new kernel was making it copying a file and changing a text file to point to the new kernel. Understanding how software was built was work because you actually have to specify things you want vs don’t want but it was extremely simple. In fact everything was like that from boot, build, services. Anyone who took a few hours could probably trace it from the first line of grub.cfg to the last service starting up.

I have a more complicated void install that uses rEFInd -> zfsbootmenu . When a new kernel is installed dkms rebuilds modules and dracut handles preparing the boot up, updating automatically creates a snapshot and zfsbootmenu makes it possible to boot into a prior version of your OS. I set none of it up it was configured by an installer and when I messed something up it was a LOT more work to understand how it works and it was impossible to trace it from end to end without googling and reading documentation.

I have a single board computer running a derivative of Ubuntu. The official installation procedure that you are supposed to be able to do remotely doesn’t work at all so I plugged a monitor and keyboard to it loaded the image to a sd card and booted and ran the commands it said to run and it works without issue. It’s opaque but easy to use and if it ever doesn’t I’ll probably just reinstall the image from scratch and run the commands it said to run.

I would recommend Ubuntu/Mint if you just want to do things. If you actually want to understand it for its own sake I would recommend something simple instead of easy.

You can do most of that with cron as well https://man.archlinux.org/man/fcrontab.5.en. If you want details about successful runs I think you would have to ensure you always logged.

People have been making services for decades and systemd is 13 years old. I kind of feel like it probably has virtually all of the options its ever going to have. Also most of what people would use such a GUI for is to start stop restart enable disable the thing people have been doing for an eternity which doesn’t require even displaying the unit file.

Splitting something into multiple executables doesn’t make something not monolithic just like splitting a program into multiple source files doesn’t make it not a monolith. It’s not a monolith when the different component parts can be cleanly factored out, replaced, and used outside of the original context or with different versions of related components This is in fact very hard. Much harder than making a monolith.

For instance the X11 ecosystem isn’t a good example of a monolith because its designed to make it trivial to swap in different loosely coupled components. You don’t worry about needing your window manager and X11 to come from the same commit so they actually work. You can argue that the toolbox that systemd provides it is worth it but arguing that it’s not a monolith just screams I’m not a developer.

It case the subject wasn’t entirely clear in my prior post I agree with you, and that is exactly what I was trying to say. You the user of a foss project, aren’t a customer unless you give someone money. It IS your job to figure out your own issues. If you ask for help from your fellow users and they graciously provide you help then this is a gift you should appreciate. Because the person isn’t an expert on that topic in the employ of the creator, they might not know everything, nor do they have the infinite patience imparted by being paid by the hour to provide you help. They have their own shit to do. Treating them with entitlement and contempt like people treat support will burn these sorts of folks out, and they are far from an infinite resource. If you want a paid support relationship instead of treating the open source community as free help whose time you are entitled to, you ought to actually pay someone to do that job.

Free open source software projects you don’t pay for don’t have paid support. If you talk to a fellow user it IS your job to figure out your problem. if you don’t have the will to understand anything you ought to buy a support contract.