I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
An immutable OS that run all app whatever are their package distribution.
Later a full OS rewritten in Rust with goods tools that share folder’s content accross all devices and mass storage device as syncthing do.
Let’s imagine a button where you click on add devices, then you scan the QR code and chose which folder you want to share. :)
The sharing thing sounds like a security nightmare. And who the hell am I sharing files with anyway? No thanks.
My vision of the future is having an os that’ll install itself on any device I own whether the manufacturers want me to or not. I want to own the things I own.
That’s it. Everything else is fine.
Well, that depend a lot on how do you setup security.
On nextcloud, i can see which device are connected to it, who, when, where and i get alert mail. When you add a new devices, as it is in the settings you will need your password. You might want to extend this security to usb storage with an isolated environnement. So all you need is a dashboard.
The solution i suggest is also a security in case of hardware faillure. How many people do a backup and copy their important file regulary ? I think i’m just making their life easier by hardcoding it. For me it’s as brushing my tooth, it’s not mandatory, but it’s better to make it mandatory.
My vision of the future is having an os that’ll install itself on any device I own whether the manufacturers want me to or not. I want to own the things I own.
Same but i differ. I don’t want any kind of device to exist to reduce our footprint’s carbon. Eg :
I would limit phones to 3 models and remove all brand. No ads needed, nor announcement. Something low tech. There would be lot benefit on the software side and repairability. It’s easier to maitain and it leaves our hand free to improve the OS
Yeah it does depend on how you set up security but…
I never used to give a shit about being secure until I got I got a virus last year. This wasn’t just any virus. I’m pretty sure there were people on the other end but it lived in my uefi, made it’s way onto 3 android phones, a tablet, my laptop, and I caught one of my phone uploading custom firmware to my Samsung tv. Samsung claimed it was impossible but. It was in progress.
Some glitch allowed me to resize the window that was being used on my phone to see their remote desktop application. And holding a button meant they couldn’t activate that button so I was able to get a peak under the hood so to speak…
Regardless I ended up needing a new motherboard and it took me ages to figure out how to get at the secret partitions on my pcs hard drives. I have to do a full NAND reinstall of the OS on my phones since. Surprise surprise. It lived in the eeprom (eeprom? Where the bootloader is) and factory resets don’t touch that.
I’ve been paranoid ever since. The fucked up part was (I still used windows at the time).that it hooked into the kernel at boot so the vrisu itself was invisible, but I could see changes to the registry it would make in real time, the one drive files it would create, the permissions you’d gradually lose if you did anything that could be interpreted as fucking with it.
I’m not sure how long it was doing it’s thing before I found it plenty of people I talked to didn’t even believe any of this, and it was hard to prove because it was fucking invisible.
So when I hear about security functions like you describe that amount to “don’t worry we’ll show you it’s secure trust is” unless I’m able to really get at EVERYTHIG in real time and have it backed up, locally or another online service, I just can’t feel secure.
Even some of the most secure platforms have the NSA hooked into everything. Like. If it doesn’t show me EVERYTHING I don’t fucking trust it. Full stop.
That’s just crazy…Given my IT knowledge, I would be a Bantha fodder…I’m not sure i would be able to see those registry being written in the system log as my main skill is doing a search several time until i undertand what were the correct words for this case and try few command. Let’s see the first step would be disconnecting the wifi. And maybe use Kali ? Dunno.
Well that’s very scary, i apologize. Thank for sharing your story :)
Network shares aren’t exactly a new thing. They exist now for almost exactly half a century.
Yes and i didn’t reinvent the whell. However, I still remind people to do backup accross those devices. It’s not news but it’s not well applied by lot people, so i would hardcode it into the OS.
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Do you have a phone ?
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Please scan qr code
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Choose folders
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Do you have a mass storage device ?
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Connect it
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Chose folders
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Warning : you haven’t setup any backup
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Warning : your last backup was last week. please connect your mass storage device to save your backup.
So, for something new, i would like to improve those utilities/tools and expand their use.
Android, Windows, and Apple products offer out-of-the-box backup to different cloud services.
They are so deeply integrated, that many people don’t even know that their data is backed up.
And most Linux users object to it for exactly that reason.
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Syncthing hahaha. Would just need a very simple system tray / settings page UI with just the “show ID” “select folders” and more buttons
Ahah yeah but completely integrated in the OS so we do need to remind people to save their important data in 3 differents supports. I’m pretty sure people don’t do thoses saves. Except techies and people who learned it the hard way.
And a better UI where you can setup the folder space as a disk manager. eg : don’t save video on my phone. Limit the folder to 1gb on phone. And on external mass storage, share everything : 1tb
I think there is lot potential and that Syncthing should be integrated in the GNU/Linux’s core.
Very true! Its a great, powerful and very easy to use software.
in my opinion, Linux has an edge on pretty much everything except for adoption. It’s stable, secure, and updated very often. There are a ton of very great libraries for it that make building and running programs very easy. It’s great on resource management, and the kernel makes great use of the hardware.
However, most pitfalls in Linux comes from it having less adoption than more popular OSes like Windows or Mac OS. Ultimately, this dampens the “friendliness” of Linux to the masses. If you buy a piece of hardware from the electronics store, there will often be no Linux support. The “mom and dad” folk might enjoy it, but won’t know how to install or update things, simply because it’s different. Vendors will often deliver shoddy binary blobs for common hardware like wireless cards.
With more adoption comes more pressure for support. We’re seeing this with the Steam Deck already: if a game company wants to sell their games on the Deck, then they need to add Linux support, even if that means ensuring that it runs on Wine. I’d love to see this kind of thing for everyday use, i.e. a scanner including Linux software and instructions (and hopefully isn’t a nasty “install.run” thing).
If it becomes more common, then friends will help other friends with their computer. “Mom and dad” can look up solutions to problems on the internet, and they’ll be able to fix it themselves. Your aunt will buy an iPod and she’ll be able to run iTunes in a first-party way. With enough adoption, it will even be weird to run operating systems other than Linux because hardly anyone runs Windows or Mac OS anymore.
I don’t think Linux will ever be in the majority, but I see it climbing a bit in the next ten years. Lots of kinks have been worked out, and with the right software, it’s even easy-to-use and pretty to look at. We need more devices like the Steam Deck to help pave the way for more adoption! Then after a while, people will use it cause that’s what they know.
The “mom and dad” folk might enjoy it, but won’t know how to install or update things, simply because it’s different.
This is rapidly becoming irrelevant as the PC crowd is being reduced to professionals and hobbyists, who don’t have a problem learning things. The less computer-literate users stick to phones nowadays and they’re mostly content consumers on that platform so all they contribute is body count. They wouldn’t bring any contribution to Linux even if they tried to use it.
I don’t think Linux will ever be in the majority
But it is being dominant on every platform where it makes sense and/or there hasn’t been a concerted effort to keep it out. The PC is basically the only major holdout thanks to Microsoft and even them have adopted it to some extent.
The less computer-literate users stick to phones nowadays and they’re mostly content consumers on that platform
I think this is a bad thing
I mean, they’d be consumers on any device they used. Streaming/social/email/browsing that’s pretty much it.
It’s definitely bad for kids who aren’t exposed to PCs anymore.
I wouldn’t bank on professionals being technical. The desktop has tons of use in the white collar space which is full of people all over the spectrum of technical literacy, but also specialty.
These are great points. Ironically, most phones run Linux, too 😁
Honestly Wayland vs xorg thing keeps me from switching to it
Steam Deck gets more popular.
Steam console released with improved multi user experience and VR.
PlayStation sales drop in growth.
Steam OS released, PCs can use it with generic kernels.
Gaming PC manufacturers offer steam OS as a preinstalled.
PC manufacturers start to offer popular distros preinstalled.
System 76 puts their in house laptops into Best Buy shelves.
Adobe and Office no longer stuck on Windows and are distributed as wasm applications.
I can see, in some rare-but-actually-possible conditions, all of those elements happen, but not the last one.
Why would Adobe and Microsoft release software for WebAssembly/Web environments, when Microsoft wants to keep you locked in their shitty environment?
What I could see is that the FOSS alternatives keep getting updated (some of them, like LibreOffice, are full alternatives to close-source software and they have been like that for years), the user population expands (expecially with Adobe and MS wanting to put subscriptions everywhere) and using FOSS software as alternatives for Office, Premiere, PhotoShop, … becomes the norm.
I actually believe Adobe has already started to. Iirc that’s what powers the web version of Photoshop.
MS with Office is purely speculation. But I believe wasm will be very disruptive once we have a stable abi and I’m sure MS will want to make their own superset of that stable abi to sell Azure integrations.
This could likely also be used to make a more fully featured online office suite. If the others did come true. There could be some pressure to make office available if it put enough of a dent into Wundows market share.
The azure speculation might be true, but Office? Naaahh…
I wish Oculus brought back support
I’d go a few levels deeper: the kernel development process seems to become more and more dysfunctional. Legacy code hindering innovation, bad people being bottlenecks and this absurdly ancient “send a patch via mail” process.
Currently, that’s only sand in the gears, but if it gets worse, this could seriously threaten the future.
I’m 100% with this. It doesn’t have to be on GitHub, but something like GitHub would really help. It’s easy to create a fork, a PR, and get good reviews on relevant lines of code. With email, not so much. In my opinion, If email really was better, few folks would adopt a VCS like GitHub.
I mean, you could still have emails as the base layer, de facto it already is a well-defined protocol layer on top of SMTP, so why not slap a nice GUI on it and call it a day?
Sounds like GitHub 😁
Except not proprietary and solely owned by a FAANG company.
You mean something like https://patchwork.kernel.org?
What the heck even is the point of using email for this?
It’s established and vendor/platform independent.
I get the idea, but come on, the inventor of git, a distributed VCS is unable to have an actually distributed development?
Linus wrote git before anything like github existed, and the best way to do it was email. They just haven’t switched away from using email
Weird.
“send a patch via mail” process.
I don’t see a problem with it. I don’t know what tools you use, but the current process certainly isn’t ancient. Even if I use GitHub or something else, I still highly depend on my e-mail to actually know somebody published a patch and if I am supposed to review it. I don’t have to use a GUI coupled with shitty UI decisions. E-mails are very simple in their own way and I don’t find it ancient or bad.
- Linux Distros finally work together better. Canonical merges its Snaps with Flatpak. In times where we are so closw to unifying all apps in one package format, and Canonical does THAT.
- a smooth Desktop that is cleaned up and focusses on stability. I think KDE 6 will be very good, as they cut off old and duplicated code. But tbh I also look forward to Cosmic, as I think a new desktop, in Rust, fast and stable, made with all the modern features planned in from the beginning, has an awesome future.
- More Value in FOSS from Companies. Reverse-engineering sucks, but maany of the supported devices simply use Blobs, which is not the future I want. So Hardware with real opensource drivers, this also goes for entire Mainboards i.e. Coreboot. Coreboot is so unknown, even though its literally the only BIOS there should be. Novacustom, 3mdeb, Starlabs, System76 all work on small projects, not to forget Googles Chromebooks (with their horrible hardware)
- Accessibility, standardisation, unifying of standards. I talked with some people and they meant for example Accessibility Documentation is worse documented and not standardized, in contrast to MacOS and Windows.
- More Linux preinstalled. On routers, Laptops, phones.
- Security and privacy out of the box. All Flatpaks using portals, a differentiation between FOSS and Proprietary apps. Mac randomization, SElinux confined users, containerization for all apps. Simply what Android has since forever. A share dialog. Verified and measured Boot like with the Heads Bios.
- Stability and ease of use. An immutable distro with all the right presets, automatic updates that listen to unmetered networks and enough battery level. A nice setup dialog including things like that. (Possible in GNOME and KDE)
One of the things I really dislike about Linux is how when setting up, there’s a bunch of things you need to troubleshoot, look them up on the forums even though you haven’t really done anything wrong, it’s just how some software works or there’s a bug or there’s some weird setting that’s incompatible with your system.
I wish there were better defaults for software in the future or just better compatibility/more bugfixes so these cases get rarer and rarer, making it comparable to initial windows experience.
Yup. Basically this. I’d love to not have to know anything about the system other than which programs I want to run.
I want to be able to use all the software I want on Linux, officially supported by the manufacturer. No more unofficial version that’s kinda working but not really. All the hardware in my new Laptop should come with official Linux drivers, so I can actually use all the things I payed for. I want to be able to contact the support if something doesn’t work, and not get a “we don’t support that” as an answer. And I want to be able to truly recommend a Linux OS to my non-techy friends and family, so they too can enjoy the freedom and privacy instead of having to sell it out to big corporations because they just can’t use a terminal.
I don’t think this “plug in your phone and use it as PC” will ever really work. Apps and games always get more fancy and demanding as computers become more powerful, and desktop PCs will always be much more powerful than phones. E.g. a couple of years ago I thought at some point I can buy a tablet and use it for heavy duty coding because it will have become powerful enough, but all the tooling just eats up the performance increase to help you be more productive.
I also don’t believe in the “OS in the cloud” thing. Always connected programs and games are shitty already, just image that with your entire OS. There are physical limitations that will always make it inferiour to a good local setup imo, at least until we figure out how to connect network devices with wormholes instead of cables. What I do believe in is having a small always-on personal server in your home, that can replace most of the cloud services we rely on today.
The first paragraph tells me you don’t understand linux?
Why is that?
I don’t know what you mean by “unofficial versions”. All the hardware being supported is simply not feasible because there is no financial interest for manufacturers to do so. You as a user have to make sure you are buying hardware with a good rep. How often did you call/write to a support in terms of computer hardware in the last 10 years? Fixing the problems yourself is a much faster way of solving issues. And this never will cease to be the case for any linux distro.
Your friends are not prioritizing freedom/privacy over comfort, so Linux will never “solve” their problem.
I’m not talking about how it is today, I’m talking about how I think it should be in the future. Of course there are reasons why the things are like they are today, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t or can’t change.
Someone buying a Windows laptop or Android phone for example doesn’t need to check if that OS is well supported on that hardware or whether they will get official support for it. The device comes with the OS and the manufacturer guarantees that it will work, that is what we should achieve for desktop Linux as well. E.g. those dev machines with Linux preinstalled and officially supported by the OEMs are a great step in the right direction, but we need that for the regular consumer across a wide range of devices!
Unofficial versions are versions created by the community because the manufacturer of a software doesn’t officially support it on your platform. A simple example would be Flatpaks for Discord or Teams, or running games with Proton or regular programs with Wine. If it works it works, but the original devs won’t invest any time to improve it, and they might even break things in new releases because it’s just not on their radar.
And many of my friends and family do think about privacy a lot, but most of them just cannot fully migrate to Linux without extensive and continuous help from me or other techy friends/relatives. They cannot fix a broken boot or a game that won’t launch unless you tweak the configs! They can use a preinstalled Windows or macOS however, and they can call/write the support of whatever they want to use if it doesn’t work. There is no reason desktop Linux can’t reach the same level of official consumer support, and it needs to in order to be a true alternative for regular people. They should not have to sacrifice comfort for privacy and freedom.
Again, you don’t understand Linux. There never will be official consumer support for Linux. Also Linux is the wrong answer if you don’t want to fix problems yourself.
You are free to think that, but I completely disagree! Desktop Linux is in this “you have to fix it yourself” niche by necessity right now, not because it’s a good solution. And it actively prevents most people from enjoying its benefits.
I mean I upvoted because you can have your opinion anyway, even though I disagree. But I really don’t get how people rely on support to fix there problems. I never contacted windows support or whatever, I always researched myself how to fix something. I feel this is like an illusionary argument.
Maybe the problem is that there shouldn’t be a financial interest in order to motivate or enable support.
And the money for that should come from where?
The problem I am alluding to is the way that “financial interests” means somebody reaping the value from others’ labor. There is more than enough talent, interest and time available to develop robust solutions to hardware enablement if we stop feeding the machine what it consumes today. There is simply no reason that a manufacturer shouldn’t be producing hardware with open specifications to a global market that consumes its product. Additionally there is more than enough revenue that goes to paying people that contribute less than they produce for the hardware purchased by consumers. We fix this by making it illegal to create walled gardens that make us beholden to vendors.
There is simply no reason that a manufacturer shouldn’t be producing hardware with open specifications to a global market that consumes its product.
Are you aware of Intel scandal in regards to AMD? What do you think Microsoft was/is doing? Also if you criticism is aimed at hardware manufacturers, then this is the wrong topic for it? Linux cannot do anything about it, because it has no financial interest.
Well okay, since it’s up to me: Let’s have free software. Fully free Linux on every phone, including all “firmware” which has gotten awfully soft lately. No more proprietary driver blobs for ethernet controllers or cellular modems. No more proprietary DRM modules. No more “smart” consumer goods that come without source code. The free software revolution has gone pretty well in some respects, but we need to finish the job and put an end to all that garbage.
Idk why people are so passionate about it, cause there is no “Linux” - there is a lot of “Linuxes”.
I mean, what defines Linux? The kernel? The desktop environment? The flexibility?
Cause, dude, in a desktop level linux has many options, some very little smooth (like any window manager you have to configure everything by yourself) and some very smooth (like KDE and Gnome). I risk to say that Gnome and KDE are as smooth as MacOs/Windows.
Applications are kind the same. What applications are we talking about? There is a huge range of possibilities, which includes apps that run only in windows as well as apps that run only in Linux. Surely main stream apps are most designed for Windows, cause they have the majority of market share, however almost always there is an alternative good enough in Linux.
I wish the future of Linux would be our own people don’t blame on projects trying to innovate, like Gnome and KDE does. People on Linux looks like loves to makes things hard or exclusive, but man, we need simple things as well. Simple things on Linux does not “rot” Linux, but make Linux more usable and, as consequence, makes development faster while big techs have to start paying attention to Linux.
By a strict definition, the kernel is what defines Linux.
We all know that nobody respect these definiotions and mostly when someone says linux, reffers to the full operate system
Define chair.
I think the future of Linux is brighter than Windows, which is one of the reasons I switched.
I know I’m in a growing niche that still prefer to do my computing at a stationary desktop with a standard keyboard and mouse, A lot of Linux DEs still feel mainly geared towards desktop use while Apple and Microsoft have been mainly focused on the tablet/laptop space for over a decade now.
Then we get into the whole push to “cloud computing”. I don’t think Microsoft will go cloud only with their next OS like some are saying, But I do believe cloud integration will become so embedded within Windows that disabling cloud features or going completely offline will no longer be possible in the foreseeable future. The average person doesn’t give a shit about this move, hell some are welcoming it with open cheeks, But it will be a breaking point for a lot of enthusiast users.
I got a lot of other reasons for moving to Linux but I’m overall happy with the way things in the Linux world are going. And I got a few friends interested in moving to Linux sooner or later for similar reasons.
I think it’s already a great system, its philosophical foundation of being built around user freedom is fantastic. It just has a few things that are definitely still problems for desktop users. Namely,
- Sensible defaults
- Proprietary driver management
- Distros needing to distribute software in their repos instead of authors doing it themselves
- Too many competing application formats, each with glaring issues
- Inconsistent theming with GTK vs QT (mostly app developers’ faults tho)
- Both popular display servers have huge issues
- Lack of manufacturer support for hardware (this will come with time if Linux continues to become more popular)
- Incompatibility with existing standards, especially Microsoft products
- Lacking proper professional applications for things like video editing that actually work consistently
- Gaming anti-cheat compatibility
- Generally being easy to break the whole system on accident
- Power consumption on mobile devices
I guess that’s a lot, but it’s still a great system ha.
-1 downvotes?
That is like a double upvote!
Whatever it is I hope we don’t end up “selling out” for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn’t the gnome way.
I don’t mind gnome existing but it isn’t for me and I hope I don’t get forced into using something that I can’t modify to meet my workflow wishes. I’m seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.
Part of the great Linux experience is the ability to have competing projects with differing philosophies. Part of infinite configuration choices includes the choice of installing GNOME instead of KDE (or one of the dozens of other DEs and WMs).
Personally I much prefer the GNOME design ethos over KDE; I am not one of life’s desktop tweakers, and my Linux experience would be much diminished if that’s all there was. But I’m glad KDE exists for those users who like that sort of thing.
There are some very crazy looking Gnome customizations in the unixporn community. At a glance they look like a custom window manager setups, not sure how well it performs though.
Well my point is that Gnome can be customizable just not as straightforward as KDE.
RISC-V first class support.
We have the basics down. But hopefully desktop-class RISC-V will be within our reach in a few years!
Immutable root filesystem.
Less user error from borking the root fs. And also less apps relying on the root filesystem would be good. Likely something to be achieved with portals and other XDG work.
Wayland only for all modern desktops.
Wayland will soon have the ability for a lot of cool features that X11 doesn’t have, such as storing session data to disk and relaunching into new desktop environments without relogging. This’ll make hybrid graphics a lot easier to manage as changes to the active GPU can be done dynamically without logging out and back into your system.
Greater adoption of XDG portals and XDG standards.
Linux is obviously great in many ways because it lacks a single solution to a given problem, and that it’s just a kernel, so most of your end-user system is totally configurable while still being a Linux system. However, we have a lot of overlapping work that makes said end-user systems hard to manage when standards collide. Hopefully Wayland will encourage developers to work through XDG portals and other common standards to make Linux user AND developer-friendly.
Nvidia drivers
A contentious issue, but I think the future of Nvidia drivers will be open source. The proprietary drivers have been a blocker in many ways as they’re ‘good enough’ and better than Nouveau, so no one is going to bother backing the FOSS project when the prop. project is better. However, lots of very smart devs are working on bridging the gap and leverage the newly open-sourced portions of NV’s drivers, which will hopefully manifest as the end of AMD/NV driver quality discrepancies.
WINE support improved for general desktop apps
Every few years we get a new “Photoshop WORKING on LINUX???” tutorial that has some cryptic setup instructions or github repo that eventually falls to the wayside. WINE is getting a lot more support thanks to Valve and I imagine starting to take on Windows apps for first class support will be a gamechanger for the creative industries that rely on certain Windows-only apps!
Ending the distro-specific packing systems.
Yup, the best saved til last. My boldest claim is that Flatpak is going to kill off the necessity for RPMs, Debs, APKs, etc. for most end-users. The flatpak size disadvantage is negligible in the age of terabytes, but it allows devs to ensure a consistent build environment for their apps on all platforms (something that has caused a lot of flame wars between Fedora and app devs in the past).
For people who DO need apps from reproducible, stable-based pipelines (eg. docker, sysadmins, IT professionals) we’ll see Nix becoming dominant. In fact, it’s already beginning to eat into docker/container build systems thanks to its powerful reproducibility and infra-as-code paradigms. It’s having a real boost after a relatively quiet first decade of life, likely thanks to features like Flakes that can spin up developer environments in seconds.
My boldest claim is that Flatpak is going to kill off the necessity for RPMs, Debs, APKs, etc. for most end-users.
No it isn’t, until you can build a Linux system on top of only Flatpak. And guess what you have then? Yet another distro using a different packaging system with its own opinions, just like the rest of them. And there will still be other packaging systems because not everyone will agree with how it does things. Especially once developers start including questionable code in their Flatpak packages, because nobody is there to stop them, which distro maintainers are going to strip out in distro packages because it’s harmful to users.
that’s the beauty of distros, those that want traditional package structure can still use a distro that does.
Even the current flatpak first distros like OSTree spins of Fedora (Silverblue, Kinoite et al) provide mutable containers for using any package format you like.
because nobody is there to stop them, which distro maintainers are going to strip out in distro packages because it’s harmful to users.
I doubt thats really the case? Most distro maintainers mostly want to make sure a package works with their provides libs etc. If a package is malicious, it just will not become a distro package. At the same times this esoteric part about what distro maintainers actually do is so nebulous and at the same time “overrated” (debian).
Flatpak is still not able to fully replace native apps in certain situations, sure, but that wont be the case forever. If Ubuntu believes they can replace debs with Snaps I believe someone can do the same for flatpaks given enough time.
Flatpak lets people host their own repositories, which is where I think we’ll see distros becoming distinct if they DO choose to diverge from Flathub’s selection, such as choosing to block non-free software. Over time, though, people generally all just add flathub if it isn’t already available.
And, again, if you need something more finegrained than flathub, there’s no reason why distro maintainers can’t move to a nix-based infrastructure-as-code and you’ll be free to host a repo with all of your distro’s software packaged as code.
The power maintainers want over users is simply too much effort to justify as more apps begin to complain about packaging issues downstream, and apps become more complex to build. Users will inevitably bypass them. Devs will inevitably become hostile to downstream repacking.
The flatpak size disadvantage is negligible in the age of terabytes
the issue is overstated as most flatpaks use the flatpak platform runtimes and share their own libraries in a similar manner to the host, yes its separate libraries, but its not dozens of disparate copies like some detractors of flatpak seem to state
Yup this too. We’re basically seeing a more standardized and healthy way of managing shared dependencies in Flatpak that doesn’t sacrifice the developer or end-user for sake of a few megabytes.
Best post so far here.
Can you elaborate why a sysadmin/IT prof. should use Nix? Or are you referring to, those people deploying Nix systems for the “masses”?
I’m no sysadmin or IT prof. myself, but here’s my take.
With Nix, you can build out an entire Linux operating system from the ground up with a few files. You can specify the exact versions of software and even dependencies of software so that every single installation of your OS is going to be identical. You can upgrade specific software and roll it back if it has problems. Dependencies are managed through Nix in a way that allows them to be shared where necessary (saving space) but diverging when necessary to prevent dependency hell.
The best part, imo, is that all software is from source. You don’t have to rely on package maintainers at RHEL or Debian to keep apps up to date and working - Your system will download binary blobs from the cache server or build apps from source when theyre not available. You get to have bleeding-edge apps (if you want them) without the pain of waiting 6+ months for them to come in from your distro updates.
It’s quite immature when it comes to tools that make it easier to pick up and learn, so there’s drawbacks in that regard since many IT pros will stick to tools that enterprise systems offer that make managing their infra MUCH easier.
However, Nix is imo the future of non-flatpak applications because it’s simply smarter, faster, and more declarative than RPM, Deb, Apk could ever be.
Thanks for the write up, for me as a sysadmin it just doesn’t hold enough attraction on why I should make a switch. We are not going to change our infrastructure to NixOS. And for workstation use, I don’t see the benefit.
My favorite idea is Linux or Android-derived, or a completely new, Rust-based AGPL-licensed OS, running on 100% open RISC-V hardware. Same for its phone equivalent. All chips must be open, no secret code in them.
For Linux desktop to grow past the single digit market share it is at today. It needs to be led by tech visionaries not by code evangelists . The average user doesn’t care about if it’s running Wayland or x11 or whatever shit you name it they only care about their OS having all the features they need and support all the latest hardware they buy.
Add to that any average Joe would freeze at the prospect of having to enter a command line to maintain their computer or use their firewall. In short for Linux to grow it needs to copy windows or macOS otherwise it will keep being used by nerds and sys admins
In a very real sense I do think that the command line is ever so slightly too maligned as a beginner friendly tool. I definitely agree that it’s intimidating for people and that it’s easy to mistype a command or whatever… but good god is it ever nice to be able to tell somebody to “just copy and run this command” instead of guiding them through a GUI. Of course that has its own problems (ideally you don’t run commands you don’t understand), but it can be a really nice way to quickly help somebody. Macs strike a good balance with this in my opinion. There are GUI options for more or less everything (that seem to be front ends for command line tools), but also command line versions available, giving you the best of both worlds.
The problem with the command line line. Is that people don’t understand what they are typing . what command means what. And don’t really care to memorize them. I’ve seen tech illiterate people navigate their way through leading how a mobile OS works because of how user centric they are designed. If you give them a Linux distro with a bunch of command lines to type. They would rather call someone more knowledgeable to do it or give up on it entirely. Unfortunately this is something Linux Devs don’t understand
Linux dev’s do understand this, and there have been huge UI strides in the last 10 years that make Linux a lot more beginner friendly than it used to be. With the use and improve philosophy of Linux, you end up with the largest number of changes being targeted towards a similar demographic of the people making the changes—power users and nerds. As the audience for Linux has widened, we’ve seen a bigger variety of ideas integrated to make Linux approachable, as a direct reflection of the diversity of the people making the improvements.
Basically, Linux is a direct reflection of the people contributing to it.
For sure! The command line definitely lacks discoverability and just isn’t the mode of interacting with a computer that the average person is used to. That said there are situations where it is very much the right tool for the job and there’s plenty of times where it’s the easy way to set something up, even for a beginner.
If I’m being perfectly honest I do find that a lot of the complaints about the command line come across as a bit… silly, sometimes? I can absolutely acknowledge that it has its problems and seems intimidating, and I’m not expecting the average technology illiterate person to deal with it… But there really is not that much to it, and I think people are far more afraid of it than they need to be. Plus I think the amount of command line knowledge required for somebody to start using a mainstream distro is greatly exaggerated. You may eventually want to learn it (and shouldn’t be scared to!) and you may rarely run into something where the best way to solve a problem involves the command line… but you’ll be fine :).
Sometimes I think what we would do differently if we could rebuild the terminal from scratch. Do away with all the recursive acronym naming bullshit and the “You had to be a member of the compsci faculty at Stanford in 1975 to get it” references, use words that mean things to modern computer users.
Thats the reason I hate pacman. pacman -Syu…ok.
APT had (and kinda still has) the opposite problem. “apt-get install” is redundant. And true to Linux fashion, there have been a few implmentations of an “apt install” syntax, which were different enough to be a problem.
Also my OSMC box bitches at me when I run “apt upgrade” because it wants me to type “apt full-upgrade…”
There are some things I’d like to ask the Flatpak developers while holding them 6 inches off the ground by their shirt collar. Like why is it such a bitch to run flatpak update over ssh? It wants you to key in your password 96 times if you do that. It’s also really fun to deal with org.whatthefuck.WhatTheFuck too.
I don’t think apt is as bad as pacman, I use nala on my debian machine. The best syntax in my book has zypper, but I am biased. Simply running a flatpak from cli is a hassle. :P
Yeah I’ll go with that; convention is you run software by evoking its name as a command. apt install vim, then you can run vim by typing “vim.” Not with Flatpak, you evoke “flatpak run .org.bullshit.Vim”. It’s not merely designed to be used through a GUI, it’s designed to be not used through a CLI.
Clicking buttons doesn’t mean you understand what they do. And often time they don’t do what you would think they do. CLI on the other hand is actually much more direct, because the entered command does the same thing on almost any machine and you can read about what it does with “man command”.
GUI have context and user feedback
Command line has :0: error: Undefined temporary symbol :0: error: Undefined temporary symbol
What? Is this sarcasm? CLI offers much more debug potential than GUIs.
For someone who knows what they’re doing maybe, but this is about those who don’t, which is 99% of people.
So what are you doing when a GUI tells you “error”? You give up and do something else?
Linux is not the answer you seek.
