Fedora QA Lead Pans Canonical 'Propaganda' On Snap Apps (happyassassin.net)

Long-time Slashdot reader JImbob0i0 shares a scathing article by Red Hat's Fedora QA "community monkey"/senior QA engineer on Canonical's announcement about their application delivery mechanism "snap"... ...and how it's going to unite all distributions and kill apt and rpm! This is, to put it diplomatically, a heaping pile of steaming bullshit... The press release and the stories together give you the strong impression that this thing called Snappy is going to be the cross-distribution future of application delivery, and it's all ready for use today and lots of major distributions are buying into it... The stories have headlines like "Adios apt and yum? Ubuntu's snap apps are coming to distros everywhere" and "Snap Packages Become Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions"...

Now, does Snappy actually have the cross-distribution buy-in that the press release claims (but never outright states) that it has? No... The sum total of communication between Canonical and Fedora before the release of this press release was that they mailed us asking about the process of packaging snappy for Fedora, and we told them about the main packaging process and COPR. They certainly did not in any way inform Fedora that they were going to send out a press release strongly implying that Fedora, along with every other distro in the world, was now a happy traveler on the Snappy bandwagon... They just decided to send out a wildly misleading press release and actively encourage the specialist press to report that Snappy was all set to take over the world and everyone was super happy with that.

Comments

News at 11

[Meditato]

Shuttleworth pulls this shit regularly. Systemd, Mir, Unity, etc.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Shuttleworth pulls this shit regularly. Systemd, Mir, Unity, etc.

Pretty sure systemd was pushed -- at least initially -- by Fedora/RedHat folks.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Since all the other distributions ride on RedHat's coat tails, they really had no choice and no say in this no-value but critical matter (systemd).

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Shuttleworth pulls this shit regularly. Systemd, Mir, Unity, etc.

What? Are you confusing systemd with upstart?

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

The imbecile responsible for the abomination that is systemd, is employed by Red Hat.

Fuck you systemd and fuck you Red Hat.

Re:News at 11

[Aighearach]

In the old days, these guys were using the same distro as me and would also show up in the help forums.

Most of them finally moved on. Thank you systemd! Thank you RedHat.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

The imbecile responsible for the abomination that is systemd, is employed by Red Hat.

Fuck you systemd and fuck you Red Hat.

how about to fuck your mother?

Re: News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

We already know that Snap Apps cannot be the shiznat because we've be told a bazillion times that Docker is already the shiznat.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Since all the other distributions ride on RedHat's coat tails, they really had no choice and no say in this no-value but critical matter (systemd).

Of course they did. No reason they couldn't maintain the non-systemd version and merge from upstream. Yes it would be a little more work but if people were as passionately anti-systemd as they pretend to be then this work would easily have been done. But no, instead it is suggestions of moving to FreeBSD as if running away from the problem to a system that could just as easily incorporate a systemd-like approach is any kind of solution.

Vaporware Press Release

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop the presses!

Re: Vaporware Press Release

[WarJolt]

It's not vaporware. It's just not what they said it was. ROS packages should work great with snap. It's just not portable to any other distrubution except Ubuntu.

Catkin also does most of the work, so it's not fair to call this a win for snappy.

This will most definitely be an Ubuntu first thing.

Unification

[NotInHere]

Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.

One might argue that third party closed source software is bad because its closed, but this is how the world works unfortunately, and linux won't get any hold on the desktop market if you can't even port your closed source application to it because each distro is its own special snowflake.

Re: Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse than that, each release of a distro is it's own special snowflake.

I'm enjoying the ruffled feathers of the packagers; here we see them faced with the outcome they created.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.

The few times that I've ever needed or wanted to install anything that was only shipped in binary form, the packages that were put out for one or both of the popular distros (usually Ubuntu and Fedora) could easily be packaged and run on others distros (such as Gentoo and Arch which I use). Actually, by the time I wanted to install those things on my distro, somebody else had already made an ebuild or packaged it in AUR, so.... do we really "desperately" need whatever this snap apps thing is? Doubtful.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core. I'm not a fan, but it's undeniable that systemd didn't become popular simply by building on initscripts. Even OpenRC doesn't do that; it uses sysvinit, but the scripts are entirely its own. Iterative development is not enough to create large breakthroughs. In the systemd example I gave it's really not that large because it doesn't actually do anything new, but it's still such a large change that it wouldn't be possible if it wasn't its own project.

In the "wonderful" unified Linux world, you'd be stuck with what you're given. If upstream doesn't want your contributions, you no longer have the (realistic) option to fork. You either get it into the mainline release, or your innovation or improvement simply doesn't get used because everyone's already "agreed" on this base.

Unification destroys the concept of distributions, destroys the ability to fork and build, destroys the ability to greatly change and innovate. I may not be a fan of some of the recent changes (such as the systemd cult), but I absolutely respect the shit out of the environment that makes that change possible or even easy. Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.

The main issue with "targeting" is itself. Software should depend on as general a base as possible. For example, it shouldn't be using low level dependencies with unstable APIs. Most applications (games being the biggest examples) can get by with dbus, udev, xorg/wayland, and SDL. Other libraries such as libav, libpng, and so on are rather stable if you target them correctly.

If we want to point the fingers at anyone, it's the closed sources guys modifying the libraries that they use and expecting every distro to use their modifications. In the same breath, Ubuntu is one of the worst distros to target *because* they modify the libraries so much. The rest of Linux land doesn't suffer all that much, if at all. Build your shit right and it'll work.

Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack. I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Unification would be the death of Linux. It's all snow, you not being able to shovel it because each snowflake is individual, is a different problem.

Re:Unification

[phantomfive]

Unification is what linux desperately needs

No, Linux's strength comes from its diversity and flexibilty. Linux is the dominant operating system in the world right now, and it's because of its flexibility that it was able to easily be adopted on platforms as different as bionic/android, and SLURM/Linux.

If someone tried to enforce their system ideology on everyone, then these variations wouldn't be possible, and Windows phone might very well be the main competitor to iPhone (all the OEMs wanted that....or something, and Google hit first with Android).

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know how many different versions of Linux run across a thousand server environment?

Yes. Our datacenter has many thousands of boxes, and we happen to run CentOS on our machines. At any time, there are at most two different versions of Linux across our datacenter. When we roll out updates, some boxes will obviously remain on the old version while others are upgraded until they are all the same version again.

If you're struggling with heterogeneous machines, maybe you should consider making your datacenter more homogeneous.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

I solved the problem by switching to FreeBSD. Saves a lot of time not dealing with Linux kids reinventing an octagonal wheel every 3 months. Plus you get a first-class port of ZFS. I highly recommend giving it a try.

Re:Unification

[Dutch Gun]

Diversity is something of a double-edged sword. It's great for people that have a very specific itch to scratch and of course the open source nature makes Linux great for customization, but I think the amount of fragmentation on Linux tends to dilute efforts at fixing some problems. So, apparently, Linux needs a new app delivery mechanism? How many does that make now? How many desktop environments are there? Everyone seems to keep heading off and make their own rather than fixing the existing ones.

That's a lot of duplicated and wasted effort. Granted, it ultimately provides more choice, but I think it also tends to make each of those choices much less polished than what it might otherwise be.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that "third party[sic] closed source software" "is how the world works" then just stick with Windows. That's how the world works.

We are more interested in how the world *should* work. Please don't try to distract us. So fae, we've been pretty successful at making the world a better place.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

If unification means GNOME/GTK3, systemd, whatever the hell Ubuntu's UI department shat out recently...no thank you. We don't need core systems with ridiculously egotistical leads wrapping their tendrils around Linux. Linux is about choice and freedom; if we have to trample those to get more closed source programs, what the fuck is the point?

Re: Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with you up until the point you implied that systemd became popular.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.

Redhat/Fedora, SUSE/openSUS, Arch, Debian, and other major players don't seem to be impacted by this third party closed source vendor only targeting Ubuntu. If that were the case, there would be no need for Snap, Ubuntu would already be the default distro. More likely, Snap is just what it says it is - a software delivery targeted at mobile (which can also work with desktop). The problem is Ubuntu isn't a big enough player in the mobile sphere and probably even the desktop sphere. By promoting Snap as the unifier of linux, however, might just get enough user base for one of these software vendors to produce for linux. But rest assure, Canonical is not promoting Snap for the benefit of other distros, it is for their own benefit. They simply need the other distros to buy in to get a large enough base to attract attention.

Ironically, Snap isn't even needed for these vendors to support multiple distributions. They could always use SUSE/openSUSE's OBS and have automated builds for whatever platforms they so desired.

Here's the gist of the problem. Canonical gave up on the desktop a long time ago when they pursued mobile. The problem is they are too small of a player in mobile to get noticed and in the time they've been gone from the desktop innovation they were so known for, others have caught up and even passed them by. The desktop is still alive, but most opportunities for growth are in the enterprise. With linux, that battle is predominantly between Redhat and SUSE (and Fedora and openSUSE). The only way Ubuntu can get their foot in that door is if they can convince people to run their Snap packages, regardless of the distro used and then chip away at the installed base. Ultimately, Canonical, like many dot-coms, were focused on finding the next big thing while ignore the golden goose they had. In doing so, their golden egg has become a very tarnished brass.

Re: Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

So did you say you wanted progress or stability now? Kinda getting mixed messages here.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted my datacenter to be more homo, I'd hire Lennart Poettering to run it.

Re:Unification

[AdamWill]

This is a perfectly reasonable point of view, sure. Do you think the best way for a company to try to achieve unification behind their system is - before holding any meaningful discussions with other distributions - to issue a press release massively overstating their system's current capabilities and heavily implying it has already *achieved* unification? Don't you think it might be better to, oh, I don't know, actually talk to other distributions and try to achieve some sort of consensus? And be honest about what their system is currently actually capable of, and the challenges involved in making it a truly viable cross-platform solution?

Re:Unification

[Ol Olsoc]

Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.

One might argue that third party closed source software is bad because its closed, but this is how the world works unfortunately, and linux won't get any hold on the desktop market if you can't even port your closed source application to it because each distro is its own special snowflake.

I'm not concerned about market share, but you are correct just for useability sake. When pressed for time, I often just use Wine and a Windows app rather than walk through the build process of non-repo apps.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

snapd has built-in spyware and forced updates just like Windows 10. I'm staying away from both.

Re:Unification

[NotInHere]

Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core.

Let me continue on your systemd example. You are completely right, innovation works this way. But once the new innovating product is there, and it is obviously superior, people will want to adopt it. Thanks to systemd you now have an unified way to specify services, and an unified way to start and stop them. It is good to have it.

I am welcome to any project which builds on systemd, and keeps the user {CLI,configuration} interface.

If upstream doesn't want your contributions, you no longer have the (realistic) option to fork.

Having trouble convincing one maintainer to add your contributions? Well, It'll be surely harder to convince multiple, if you want a feature inside the whole ecosystem.

In the context of package managers this might be binary diffing. You want the linux package managers to do binary diffing? You'll have to convince each and every little distro king to accept your patch.

The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug.

That might be right, to some extent. But what is fucking wrong is that you have multiple different package managers, each with their own way to invoke them via CLI. Arch even has two, yaourt AND pacman!

And package managers are very simple things. Generally each distro does the same things, just calls them differently.

I do NOT think that this is good.

Yes, its good to have a choice between desktop environments, and between web browsers, or file managers. That's all great. But the amount of lack of unification just harms linux IMO.

Why does each distro need its own package managers? Why does each distro have to re-invent the wheel for this?

All we get from this is just bugs over bugs, and waiting for each package manager to implement the same improvements like binary diff downloading or displaying a progress bar on download.

In fact, with most distros you are missing the choice when its about the package manager. You have to take what the distro gives you.

Unification [...] destroys the ability to greatly change and innovate

The linux kernel has been constant target of innovation, and it has stayed monolithical all the time, without any forks.

Software should depend on as general a base as possible.

I do agree with that one: but many features are not available via abstraction layers, and then you suddenly need to add ugly desktop environment specific code if you ever wanted to implement that feature.

The main issue with "targeting" is itself. Software should depend on as general a base as possible.

So you want to give support to your users via phone. Should you be required to know how each and every distro does things?

In windows you can say "go to start, type 'abc', then click this entry then click yes then no then ok".

Re:Unification

[NotInHere]

IDK about the software industry, but in other industries press releases often overstate the truth or make it easy for journalists to misinterpret them. Its not a good practice but it does happen.

I haven't read the press release myself so I can't really make a judgement on whether it was okay or not.

Maybe you don't like mark, but I think its awesome what he's doing, and that he invests his money into ubuntu instead of some yacht or an apartment in some skyscraper.

I'd say its okay to be pissed off by this considering that they didn't make any consensus beforehand, but IDK, for them it seems to be enough that you can port your application to fedora, not that fedora uses it as its main method.

Would fedora adopt it if nobody used it? Its the classical network problem. An app distribution method nobody has installed gets no adoption by app developers because nobody will be reached with it, and if there are no apps for some package manager, nobody will use it, let alone use it as their main package manager.

Re:Unification

[phantomfive]

I think the amount of fragmentation on Linux tends to dilute efforts at fixing some problems.

Which problems specifically?

Re:Unification

[Dutch Gun]

I mentioned one already, so let's use that as an example: desktops. The situation is a hell of a lot better than it was just five years ago, but my feeling is that if efforts weren't divided over a dozen different projects, it seems like a lot of these issues would have been fixed much quicker.

Like I said, it seems like it's a bit of a double edged sword. It's really great to have a choice in desktops, but along with that comes the reality that each of those desktops is far less polished than what you see on commercial OSes like Mac or Windows.

Re:Unification

[phantomfive]

ok, that's a reasonable place to start, desktops certainly aren't as good as they could be.

Do you think the problem is that there is the division of efforts? If Gnome were suddenly the only desktop available, would that make it a better desktop? Conceivably it could also give the project leaders a power-trip, and lead them into the false belief that whatever decision they make is correct, for example. As another possible counter-point, do you think having a single project could cause things to end up like IE6......without competition and thus completely stagnant?

Re:Unification

[thegarbz]

Yet the only times I've ever needed to install something, even if it was just a newer version of a package already part of the distribution it has resulted in half a day's work. Once it failed so completely that I ended up installing a different distro in a virtual machine solely to run the package in question until the updated package came out in my distribution. Or my least favourite, I offered to fix someone's Ubuntu distribution for a 6pack. If I'd have known that the guy installed a PPA that caused package incompatibilities and somehow got apt to the point where any attempt to fix it made it try and uninstall core packages of his distribution I would have asked for a case of beer instead.

Linux package management is much like blindly hitting next on an installation screen in windows without reading any of the text. When you get your software from a very reputable source that you trust things will go pretty well, even when you don't chances are you'll only have minor issues. But every so often you stray from the mainstream and someone has to spend hours cleaning up the resulting mess.

Will this replace apt? Doubtful. Is finding a pre-packaged dependency free alternative to traditional package management unnecessary? heck no.

Re:Unification

[Hognoxious]

I second that. Incompetent design and poor management are what hold the Linux desktop back, not dilution of effort.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux needs common standards, not "one system or one component" for anything you can write down. A filesystem layout with one or two variants. A general basic packaging mechanism that lists dependencies, files introduced, potential configuration files for that service/application and so on. A general way to provide an abstract configuration and hook mechanism for dependent services but not losing readable logging. Small amounts of perturbation. Upstream package providers to actually stick with it so you have a chance of swapping out this WM for that WM and not have to reconfigure everything.

Windows is stagnant, lacks a vision, and accumulates cruft due to their "low level" focus. The polish is wearing off, the low level focus of guys like Chen and a lack of focus have left then with an OS so full of cruft, that is conducting a DOS attack against itself, and installing a consumer version burns a day.

OSX is deteriorating. It was the OS of choice for engineering, science, arts, developers who wanted a UNIX OS that could run e.g. Photoshop. ISOs, VNC, X, cc. These are being removed or deprecated bit by bit.

So why are you concerned with focussing the efforts of other people on replicating past failure? You can concentrate your effort on one distribution. If that is backed by one corporate entity like RedHat or Canonical, you're in the same boat as Windows or OSX customers.

Re:Unification

[Dutch Gun]

I'd certainly not suggest a *single* desktop would make things better. But there's a pretty big difference between *one* desktop and the many that are in development now. I mean, we've got Gnome, KDE (Plasma) as the big two for a while, but now also Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, Xfce, Budgie, Pantheon... and probably more besides that. It feels to me that part of what's driving this is not an effort to improve, but to differentiate. There's nothing wrong with that, but on the other hand, it's not exactly helping drive things forward either.

Like you suggest, though, one great thing about having multiple projects is that you do have a choice. After Unity and Gnome 3, many users would seek alternatives like Plasma or Cinnamon.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me continue on your systemd example. You are completely right, innovation works this way. But once the new innovating product is there, and it is obviously superior, people will want to adopt it. Thanks to systemd you now have an unified way to specify services, and an unified way to start and stop them. It is good to have it.

Thanks for the best laugh I've had all day. The systemd mess is definitely not an example of much of anything other than large egos and small programming ability. And lots of lying.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

weird...

Almost every closed source software package that I've used on linux was better supported on RedHat than Ubuntu.

(Most annoying offender was probably Dell).

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Unification of architecture does not destroy the ability to fork. What destroys the ability to fork is the fact that nobody is willing to burden the cost of maintaining the fork.

Re: Unification

[Luthair]

I think even if there were only a couple we'd still be in the same polish state. The real issue is that devs only want to work on the shiny new feature, not fix/maintain those that someone else wrote.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I was thinking about switching to FreeBSD as well but then I'd lose out on Steam. Ugh!

Re:Unification

[exomondo]

"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core.

Google has certainly done a pretty good job of taking Linux, creating a OS platform in Android and making that available for hardware manufacturers and developers to target. Are the GNU/Linux distributions so much more innovative than Android? Seems to me pretty much everything new that has come out has been almost universally panned as being crap: upstart, wayland, mir, systemD, snap, GNOME3, Unity, etc, etc ...

Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.

Linux-based operating systems can have the same thing, there are even mature distributions that don't use systemd for example so why do you want to use the ones that use systemd rather than the ones that don't? What I mean is you want freedom of choice and there are hundreds of developers actively working on distributions that support that so maybe you should support them.

Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack.

I don't think so, we haven't seen that happen on platforms like Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, etc ... why would it happen with GNU/Linux?

I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.

It it's free software you can just remove the check and redistribute it.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

and that's just the anti-system d side!

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be right, to some extent. But what is fucking wrong is that you have multiple different package managers, each with their own way to invoke them via CLI. Arch even has two, yaourt AND pacman!

Better example would have been debian with apt-get, synaptic, aptitude, dselect, etc.
Yaourt is just a wrapper for searching and installing dependencies from aur, as well as using pacman to maintain and install from precompiled (official/custom)repositories. Yaourt will not work without pacman.

Re:Unification

[sjames]

We already had a way to start things. Just drop a script into /etc/init.d and link to it from the various rc?.d. Systemd broke that. Currently systemd will start scripts too, so best bet is still a script if you want all the cases covered.

As for packaging, a lot of commercial user apps come as a tar file you unpack in /opt.

The real problem is in library versions, especially dealing with software compiled against the latest greatest bleedingest edge version.

JeLo much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Green-eyed lady lovely lady
Strolling slowly towards the sun
Green-eyed lady ocean lady
Soothing every raging wave that comes

Green-eyed lady passion's lady
Dressed in love she lives for life to be
Green-eyed lady feels life I never see
Setting suns and lonely lovers free

Green-eyed lady wind-swept lady
Rules the night the waves, the sand
Green-eyed lady ocean lady
Child of nature - friend of man

Green-eyed lady passion's lady
Dressed in love she lives for life to be
Green-eyed lady feels life I never see
Setting suns and lonely lovers free

SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[BenJeremy]

Until everybody learns to play well together, Linux and other great open source projects will continue to be fractious tech that people will, rightfully so, find hard to take seriously.

Maybe both sides are right, maybe neither side is... but as long as people take sides, draw those battle lines, polarize the issues to extreme levels, open source projects can never mature (indeed, maturity is a word we can not associate with such feuds). Compromise and communication seems to never be considered.

That's not to say it can't be done, but the types of personalities that stand in the forefront of Linux, for example, seem very bull-headed - obsessed that their way is right, and never willing to accept constructive criticism or the possibility that there may be a better way of doing things.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[SocietyoftheFist]

Ummm, where you been the last 20 years? Linux is a data center operating system, lots of money being made off of it that way. There is a free UNIX that isn't fractured, and is making its maintainer good money on desktop hardware and it isn't Linux.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

Scuttleworth was an asshole before he even got into Linux, and if you had stopped to think for one second before proceeding to try to smear "Linux" with the asshole-brush, you've have realized that Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer and even that stinkning little hypocrite Bill Gates are all the same. Snakes and assholes, the whole bunch. "Linux" isn't even a factor.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

That driving assholish personality is the reason we have FOSS. Everything can't be a hug fest. FOSS is so large that everybody will never learn to play well with everyone, it's also large enough that many already do play well together.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

You say "compromise" and "communication", I read "coercion". Software in Linux is often built to scratch an itch. The developer already has an opinion on how the task should be done, and writes the software to reflect that. It's expected that if a piece of software doesn't do what you want and upstream won't adopt it, you fork it or build something new.

Not every random feature request is worth consideration, discussion, or "compromise". And considering most FOSS devs are volunteers, nobody really has ground to stand on by calling them out; they answer to nobody. If you want a feature badly enough, pay for it or build it yourself.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, exactly. Linux works great in places where:

a) A company curates and customizes a specific version of it for a specific purpose (Android, TiVo, Synology, etc)
b) The OS doesn't matter so much, since it provides standardized services (e.g. web servers)
c) The free price gives it a huge advantage in mass deployments on commodity hardware (data centers)

The fractured nature of Linux also isn't as much of a problem if the source you plan to use is free and open, so can simply be compiled to work with the target environment. It's more of a problem with closed commercial software. I'd imagine whether you see this as a positive or negative largely depends on how you view free/open vs proprietary/closed software.

One place those conditions don't really apply is as a desktop OS. The sad fact is, most of the useful software out there is Windows software, and so for most people who want to actually *use* that software, Windows makes the most sense for their OS. Any *nix on the desktop other than OS X is almost an error margin.

For people who don't actually need some specific piece of software and theoretically *could* switch to Linux... well, very often they're the sort of people who I'd suggest would be better off with a tablet or Chromebook anyhow.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

MacOS?

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

You complain that open source developers are "very bull-headed--obsessed that their way is right."

Why would anyone develop something in a way that they are convinced is not right? That doesn't make sense.
The very cool thing about open source devs is that, well, their work is open source. So if you think they are 80% right and 20% wrong, pull up a chair, fork their code, and set it right. How can you not see that arrangement as leaps and bounds better than the deal you get from closed source solutions?

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[AdamWill]

Almost everybody is already pretty capable of working together. Did you know, fr'instance, that I've spent the majority of my working time for the last year working on Fedora's deployment of openQA - which is a (very nice) system written by SUSE engineers? We now regularly make commits to upstream openQA, the SUSE folks have been fantastic about working with us, and other distributions have been expressing interest in and experimenting with using openQA - and have been welcomed by both SUSE and RH/Fedora folks.

Canonical is the one player who is *always* pulling this kind of bullshit. Do you think a good way to kick off the process of playing well together with the other distributions is to issue a press release - and hold a press call - strongly giving the impression that their system is mature and ready for deployment, and that all the other distributions have already bought into it, when neither of these things is remotely true? Does that seem like a good way to engender good will and collaboration with the other distributions, to you? No. It's an attempt to strongarm the community into accepting your system by hoodwinking the press into giving it so much of a push it looks like a fait accompli. Why would any other distributor feel particularly happy about that?

Have you noticed that *not a single other distributor* pulls this kind of crap? It's always and only Canonical. We don't do it - however much someone may or may not dislike systemd for instance, we didn't build a half-assed Ubuntu package for it then issue a press release saying "Systemd Is Coming To Ubuntu", did we? SUSE don't do it. Arch don't do it. Elementary don't do it. Debian certainly don't do it. *No-one* but Canonical does it. Have you noticed how whenever this stuff happens, it always seems to involve Canonical?

When the SUSE folks built a PoC of openQA testing Fedora, they didn't issue a press release saying 'Our Awesome Test System Is Coming To All Distributions!" Nope. They contacted us in a super nice and friendly way and said hey, maybe you'd like to take this and run with it. And so we did! And now we're collaborating. *that's* how you build cross-distribution collaboration. Not by issuing bullshit press releases first and sending out ridiculous requests for people to come to your Snappy development sprint a day later, after the backlash blows up in your face. (Yes, they actually did this. The invitation goes out of its way to say that the whole team "including Mark Shuttleworth" will be there, as if we're all going to fall over ourselves like a bunch of starstruck teenagers or something. No, they didn't ask other distributions to come to some kind of neutral discussion about application bundling formats, they just asked us to come to their previously-arranged Snappy development sprint.)

Re: SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Which sounds really interesting and plausible until you admit in another post that you work for Red Hat and are a big SystemD/Potterling supporter. So what you're really saying is that it's only OK when it's Red Hat leading the Linux community around by the nose. It's Linux: "Be reasonable, do it my way" is a way of life.

Re: SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

He talks about collaboration, and you talk about not liking leadership and mooching off the work of others. Great. Just build your own init system. Red hat never asked, nor coerced you to use systemd. Canonical actually is doing that for snap.

Re: SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[untoreh]

Mmm... bull-headed you say? Heh! Interesting choice of words :p

Re: SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

Except we had an init system that worked, years of work, thousands of volunteers contributed. And then Redhat deleted it and replaced it with the work of a small clique of their developers that don't play well with others. We don't need to make an init system because we already had one. Basically Redhat are crying now because they can dish it out but can't take it, typical bully.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but he seems to know that he can't get the larger Linux community to play ball by applying the stick.

Canonical have dogfooded their offerings, but never demanded that the rest of the world follow their lead by attempting to co-opt long standing projects like udev.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not defending Red hat or that ultra-asshole Ploetter-whatever. They are ultimately responsible for making parts of Linux being in worse condition than when I picked it up in the mid 90's, but that's not relevant.

The point is that the parent poster (you?) is wrong. What the post is complaining about has absolutely nothing to do with Linux, nor does Linux have a higher proportion of problematic people, some of them are just more visible. All the wrongs and flaws cited in the post could just as well have been directed against the persons I mentioned, bullheaded, unwilling to accept any form of criticism etc, which frankly makes the statement that "people will, rightfully so, find hard to take [open source] seriously", hard to take seriously. It's based on the utterly false premise that non-open projects are in any way or shape better, which they are not.

Re: SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[JohnFen]

Red hat never asked, nor coerced you to use systemd.

True. The coercion was applied to the other distros. The distros are coercing users to use systemd. I don't see how that's much better.

My bias: systemd has been a disaster for me, and it's necessary to remove it to make everything work properly (which is becoming more difficult over time). Either that, or spend a few weeks restructuring my machines and replacing software that I am pleased with.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends if he means free as in beer or free as in speech, but then MacOS is only free as in beer if you buy the overpriced crystal pint glass to put it in first

Whining from fedora

[butchersong]

An open source project is claiming that it is going to be successful and widely adopted... so?

Re:Whining from fedora

[AdamWill]

It's claiming that it already *is*. And that it is "enabling a single binary package to work perfectly and securely on any Linux desktop, server, cloud or device", when it currently does nothing of the sort, because confinement is disabled on other distributions and cannot work effectively on X11 (which is still the default for every major distribution) in any case. That's a direct quote from the press release - note *present* tense. It does not say Snappy will some day "work perfectly and securely on any Linux desktop". It says it does so right now. This is patently *not true*.

Windows 10/server 2016

[Billly Gates]

I wonder if snap is coming to Windows? It would be great to install snap packages regardless of OS since Ubuntu is coming to Windows 10 anniversary update

Re:Linux is for penguin fuckers

[Anonymous Coward]

At least get it right... sudo snap install "windows spyware 10"

Redhat's strategy

[phantomfive]

This quote show's Redhat's strategy fairly well:

Flatpak’s (Redhat's preferred alternative to Snap) developers have been communicating with technical conference presentations and blog posts and trying to build a dialog with application developers and distributors

That explains how systemd worked, too. Systemd talked a lot with the people who write startup scripts, at both redhat and debian. They tried to be responsive to their concerns, and give them what they wanted, which is why systemD succeeded.

Just as notable is who is missing from the dialog: the actual users. Which explains why systemd made startup-script writers happy, and a bunch of users upset.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

A vocal minority of users are upset about systemd. Most couldn't care less that some minority group of neckbeards are upset.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

What point are you trying to make? "Look here's a majority and here's a minority" does not a point make. Insulting the so-called minority doesn't do your argument any favors, either.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather say they abused their leader position in pushing systemd into Linux world. I dislike it A LOT but I have to accept it.

but as for this, I am angry. why they act like a bitch.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't just any Linux users, though. They're the best Linux users. They're the ones running thousands or tens of thousands of Linux systems. They're the ones pushing companies to use Linux. They're the ones contributing to open source software that runs on Linux. They're the users that Linux can't afford to lose. Yet now they're quickly being forced over to the *BSDs by systemd and its problems, never to return to Linux. Linux will suffer because of their departures and it will never recover.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, experts, what do they know, eh? What Redhat wants are consumers, not peers.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[phantomfive]

You might not recall it, but there was a time when I would boot my Linux desktop, go downstairs to get myself a drink, and come back upstairs just about the time to login.

Liar.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

Most simply learn whats new and move on, they don't go about screaming that the world is ending.

The complainers may make it look like a lot, but its not.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm... no. Nope.

Let's see... Debian lost a few *good* DDs over it, mostly over the shitstorm, not systemd itself.

At work, nobody cares. At all. They will use whatever is in RHEL/Centos/SuSE. Someday I will get them to accept either Ubuntu or Debian instead of Centos.

DevOps could care less, as long as it is stable. And so far, we have managed to keep the absurdly idiotic crap systemd upstream pulls away from stable releases of every distro. And upstream isn't that unreasonable: when every distro BUT Fedora patches away something, they listen. They're just too gang-ho to ever trust near a stable system, but they're not different from anyone else but the kernel and TeX crowd in that regard, certainly no worse than Gnome or KDE people.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't just any Linux users, though. They're the best Linux users. They're the ones running thousands or tens of thousands of Linux systems. They're the ones pushing companies to use Linux.

This is a testable hypothesis. If these people are so incredibly critical to open source then we should have seen a hell of a massive swing away from Linux when systemd became mandatory. Except there wasn't. Which leads us to the following conclusion:

1. These gods among Linux users are vocal but just roll over and take it.
2. These gods among Linux users were wrong and ultimately there was little to worry about.
2. These gods among Linux users are actually a minority among themselves and there's plenty of others running 100s of thousands of systems that make them a rounding error in the great history book of Linux.

I mean if they were right then by all accounts the world should have ended and we'd all be living in eternal darkness running BSD everywhere. But ultimately it turned out to be just a bunch of whining slashdot users, which is nothing out of the ordinary.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem is that anyone with the ability to change this abomination are faced with several issues:

1. Replacing systemd is the equivalent of rolling and maintaining your own distro. You need significant time (ongoing) and people for this.
2. They are already devoting all of their time and effort elsewhere, and have too little time already.
3. Most "gods" have the organisational skills of a baked potato.

So what are they going to do? Look for a banner to rally behind, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. The only banner thus far has been Devuan, but it's hardly been trumpeted, so I'm guess people are hedging their bets and waiting. Those guys need to look at getting significant social involvement and publicity.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of points to make here:

1. systemd boot times are, in fact, measured as slower than sysvinit on
equivalent systems. The argument for systemd has long since been
reframed from "we need faster boot times" to

"we need something that can solve complex boot dependencies and manage
the whole system", so you are (ironically) behind the times here. I'm
guessing you have conflated your experience

due to the massive increase in speed of modern hardware.

2. There's no speed advantage whatsoever as to when you call socket()
and bind(), the job takes exactly the same time regardless. There is
some overhead involved in the handoff from

systemd to each daemon, but in terms of boot time it is negligable.
Again, the purported advantage is not speed, but that many daemons only
need root to bind to privileged ports, which

systemd removes the need for (at the expense of slaving all daemons to
itself and becoming a network manager as well as an init system)

3. Trust me when I say it gets better.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Upstart was fine at being able to start activities in parallel. The problem is that the apps are not written to start up without every service already running so everything ends up serialized anyway. Systems solved nothing

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Kjella]

That explains how systemd worked, too. Systemd talked a lot with the people who write startup scripts, at both redhat and debian. They tried to be responsive to their concerns, and give them what they wanted, which is why systemD succeeded. Just as notable is who is missing from the dialog: the actual users. Which explains why systemd made startup-script writers happy, and a bunch of users upset.

But do (non-paying, non-contributing) users really matter? Debian has their "do-ocracy", those who do the job decide what to do and how to do it. Linus has been saying much the same about the kernel:

Jim Zemlin: Let's look a level deeper at the social interaction because open source is often described as this sort of democratizing process that, you know, everyone has a say, there's this grand consensus, but at the end of the day, needs to be some sort of decisiveness when it comes to making decisions. How do you deal with that?

Linus Torvalds: Well, I mean, it's really not a democracy at all and some people call it a meritocracy which is not necessarily correct either. It's - I have a policy that he who does the code gets to decide, which basically boils down to there's a - it's very easy to complain and talk about issues and it's also easy for me to say, 'You should solve it this way.'

But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is actual code and the technology itself and the people who are not willing to step up and write that code, they can comment on it and they can say it should be done this way or that way or they won't, but in the end their voice doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is code.

And it turns out people are lazy, so most people are much happier just arguing and quite often you only have one set of - one example code and there's not a lot of real choice there. You - there's not a lot of people who are competent enough to really do kernel programming and also not lazy enough that they actually get the job done.

As an end user, I've certainly had situations which pretty much amounts to "we don't give a shit", "you got what you paid for" and "if you don't like it, do it yourself". If application developers and system administrators get a taste of their own sour medicine, maybe they'll figure out what I did - your voice is pretty worthless. What you get is the scraps of whatever itch the developer had that overlaps with yours, if they don't care about your use case then tough luck. Those who do will do whatever they want to do, the rest will have to suck it up. Kettle, meet Poettering.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. Frankly Systemd once it covered the basic desktop "needs" of starting and stopping daemons in response to transient hardware, went for the Ubuntu jugular by pandering to cloud devs. Keep in mind that Docker with a Ubuntu filler have been a Canonical cash cow for some time now, and RH has been trying to get a piece of that cow for some time. And what do the systemd/RH guys do but massively complicate the life of Docker?

https://github.com/subuser-security/subuser/issues/216

A number of developers from RedHat were once very involved in the project. However, these developers had a very arrogant attitude towards Docker: They wanted docker changed so that it would follow their design ideas for RHEL and systemd. They often made pull requests with poorly written and undocumented code and then they became very agressive when those pull requests were not accepted, saying "we need this change we will ship a patched version of Docker and cause you problems on RHEL if you don't make this change in master." They were arogant and agressive, when at the same time, they had the choice of working with the Docker developers and writting quality code that could actually be merged. Another thing they often said was along the lines of "systemd is THE ONE AND ONLY INIT SYSTEM so why do you care about writing code that might be portable?" Or "even though the universal method works with systemd now.

This is a cloud market share war, with traditional servers and workstations as collateral damage.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[JohnFen]

I'm guess people are hedging their bets and waiting.

This is what I'm doing. For the moment, I can make my systems continue to work by removing systemd, but I see the day coming when that will no longer be feasible. When that happens, I'll survey the landscape and pick an OS that meets my needs. Who knows? Maybe systemd will resolve all the problems that make it unworkable for me and the OS I pick will be the same one I'm using right now.

It's essentially a cost/benefit decision. Right now, sitting pat is the most economic answer, but ultimately it won't be.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[loonycyborg]

There is a big difference between "your voice is worthless" and "the final decision is done by people who actually can do the job". Some contributors actually go way beyond the call of duty to help users. But their power isn't unlimited and tradeoffs must be made. Some users want sub-optimal or impractical decisions to be made, often decisions that would screw other users. And once they fail to make things go their way to everyone else's detriment they declare themselves "voiceless" and "powerless". But the truth is, final decisions are always done by people who do stuff, or at least on their behalf. This applies to everything, not only open source projects. Even a paid software house will tell you take a hike if you ask them to do something asinine. If you're lucky. If not, they'll agree at first, and later declare project to be a failure, but will pocket money anyway.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[phantomfive]

Along those lines, I remember when Apple stopped using Samba (because of GPL3) I asked Andrew Tridgell if he was sad to lose users and marketshare. He said, "They weren't really contributing back code anyway, so it's not an issue." For Tridge, the project is what matters, not the raw number of users. He would enjoy working on it even if there were very few users.

On the other hand, Samba is a solid, portable, excellent project. As for me, I've been writing my own critique of systemd, looking at the benefits and drawbacks.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Piss off!

Those whiners are a far cry from the cream of the crop. Nor are they the ones pushing and contributing to GNU/Linux.
They're a sad, incompetent bunch who is not even smart enough to get used to anything new.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

As for me, I've been writing my own critique of systemd, looking at the benefits and drawbacks.

You'd make a great Vegan, phantomfive.
You already tell people things they didn't ask about, linking them to your useless, uninformed journal filled to the brim with the ramblings of an incompetent.

Re:Redhat's strategy

[phantomfive]

You shouldn't be a vegan, babe.

Re: Redhat's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not borne out by verifiable facts. Debian lost a lot of top-grade contributers over it. The only demographic that doesn't care are the pure users, who contribute absolutely nothing.

The only place where linux needs more unification

[Anonymous Coward]

is the fucking C++ ABI. Basically everything else works together fine in a forward compatible manner. But thanks to a number of clusterfucks by GNU, Redhat (gcc 2.96 anyone?!?!) and possibly a few others, the ABI tends to break every few versions and even if you try and use the compatible ABI flags to compile in a manner that will still work on earlier/later versions you quickly find out that each libstdc++.so subtley breaks C++ classes/data structures in often hard to debug ways.

Fix C++ and you'll have fixed the cross-platform binary compatibility of linux. Don't and you'll be left with the same (worse than microsoft!) dll hell that linux has had since the version 2 series.

captcha was 'whacked', as in 'This C++ ABI bullshit is WHACKED!'
then it was 'smallpox', as in 'The C++ ABI is a smallpox upon the land!'

Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would greater consistency between the Linux distros make it an easier platform to target with binaries? Of course! But what we've seen happen with systemd, GNOME 3, and now these "snaps" is that this unification is happening around the worst technology around.

A typical Linux distribution today consists of the Linux kernel, which is actually quite good, and everything layered on top of that is shit.

We hear about systemd causing one problem or another far too often. For example, it was just a few weeks ago that we learned that a systemd change broke software like screen and tmux!

X is a trainwreck, but Wayland is even worse. With X we get a prehistoric relic, but at least it's somewhat usable. With Wayland all we get wheel spinning pointlessly in mud, going absolutely nowhere.

Then there's GNOME 3, which is by far the worst user experience we've ever seen from a Linux desktop environment. It's a tablet-oriented UI that nobody actually uses on a tablet, yet desktop users who try to use it are forced to endure the tradeoffs made to try to cram a desktop environment onto tablets.

People were attracted to Linux in the first place because it offered software that was better than what we found in Windows or Mac OS at the time. But that was 15 years ago, and times have changed. OS X and Windows provide a much better user experience these days for desktop users. FreeBSD is now indisputably better on servers.

These efforts to unify Linux have ruined it, I think.

Re:Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so bad about Wayland? I thought it was going to fix the problems of X11.

Re: Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like systemd was going to fix slow boots...

Re:Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

A typical Linux distribution today consists of the Linux kernel, which is actually quite good, and everything layered on top of that is shit.

That's because it is left to the "community" and they don't work together, they fight. On the one hand you might think having 10 different ways to do things is a good thing and creates competition but as you can see with things like systemd, upstart, mir, wayland, etc it just creates infighting and fragmentation. No regular computer user wants to have to choose which init system they want to use and they certainly don't want to suffer the inevitable vitriolic backlash if they were to say they are using systemd and it is working fine.

The Linux community is almost exclusively geeks and geeks don't like things that are user-friendly, they like to "check under the hood" so to speak, which is fine but it's the MO of much of the community to belittle those who just want a simple system and this is exactly why desktop Linux hasn't progressed in usage share for the past 2 decades but corporate implementations of Linux-based systems -- namely Android -- or those applicance-type systems from companies like TiVo have taken over the consumer world. Similarly Sony's ORBIS has proven that FreeBSD can be a fantastic gaming platform but it would take the focus of the community to make that so and that simply will not happen, it takes a corporation that has a goal to be able to make that happen, not a bunch of bumbling, infighting nerds trying to prove they are more 1337 than the next guy.

Re:Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, I can't say I have experienced any of your issues, and find all the indicated horrible pieces, work just fine for me. (Note: haven't started using Wayland yet).
systemd - never had a problem with it on any of my machines. (I also used gnu screen and tmux). Maybe the problem you are talking about I can look forward to experiencing? (Fedora 23 & 22, CentOS 7, Debian 1 release behind)

X - Well has been X.

Gnome 3 - With a few plugins seems to work pretty nicely for me. I have about half my boxes on Gnome3, other half on XFCE

Re:Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there's GNOME 3, which is by far the worst user experience we've ever seen from a Linux desktop environment. It's a tablet-oriented UI that nobody actually uses on a tablet, yet desktop users who try to use it are forced to endure the tradeoffs made to try to cram a desktop environment onto tablets.

I agree with you 150%. Gnome 3 is the Windows 8.1 desktop for Linux. I am so glad there are other Desktop environments for Linux. Sad thing is Gnome used to be a really good desktop.

Re:Unifying around shitty tech is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ruined it" might be a bit extreme. Personally, I find it amusing to think that Canonical might "systemd" Red Hat with Snap...

And then the amusement quickly wears thin and I remember that it's just a bunch of a-hole developers forcing their "vision" down everyone else's throats. That's the price the majority of us pay for not actively contributing to open source- the people that do get a disproportionate degree of influence on how Linux evolves, and some of them are egomaniac pricks. To be fair, it's a developer's job to be "creative". That creativity, rather than being stifled outright or discouraged, needs to have checks and balances. The community's continued failure is that code doesn't survive through natural selection anymore, it survives because some primadonna developer (or organization) amasses and then asserts political influence.

And for all the systemd fanboys, congratulations. Enjoy your "modern" init system. Being enraptured with something because it's new and ignoring it's lack of integrity or virtue is a hallmark of weak-minded children. Embrace Change for its own sake, and be grateful that you live in a time where that level of ignorance isn't self-limiting.

Hypocrites

[inode_buddha]

Fuckin hypocrites. RH/Fedora is the outfit that gave us Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd infamy. And *they* think they're gonna call out anyone else after those debacles? Methinks they doth protest too much... somebody needs to go over to RH and tell them to STFU.

Re:Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

Leeches? *shrug* speak for yourself. Doesn't matter what else they've done, that does NOT give them a pass to trash everyone elses shit.

" Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Henry Spencer, in Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald"

Re:Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

And those who think UNIX was complete in the mid-1990s are forever condemned to regurgitate that quote, tediously.

Re: Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

NEW! Because NEW! Now with MORE NUMBERS! Does everything the same, only with more complexity, more bugs in only 3 times the time! Seriously, systemd really is awful. Redhat have lost any respect they may have had, and it will likely be impossible to recover at this stage.

Re:Hypocrites

[AdamWill]

Last time I checked, Lennart wasn't grown in a Red Hat lab. I don't think we have that technology yet. He was working on PulseAudio before we hired him. We gave Lennart a pay cheque; he comes up with the ideas on his own. ;)

However much you dislike PA and systemd - and feel free to dislike 'em as much as you want, it's a free world - they achieved their positions honestly. We did not build half-assed PA and systemd packages for a few other distributions then issue self-congratulatory press releases about how great they were and how PA and systemd were now the universal standard for everything.

Re: Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd most certainly did not aquire its position honestly. It sucks when you're on the receiving end, right? Boo hoo.

Re: Hypocrites

[AdamWill]

in what way did it not?

Re:Hypocrites

[thegarbz]

What debacle?

Ubuntu releases snappy on their distribution, claims success around the world despite no one agreeing to it.
Redhat releases systemd and pulseaudio on their distribution, everyone around the world adopts it.

I can see which one is the debacle here. Oh and you think a couple of whining users matter? hahahahaha

Re: Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

In a nutshell, that it was presented as a fait accompli. Nobody outside of your core developers ever had any significant ability to alter course once you, a single vendor, had set it. Existing working sysvinit was literally ripped out of existing rpms, meaning that there was no way to revert even if we wanted to (as an aside I notice systemd requires far more boilerplate than sysvinit ever did) Usually these things are kept conditional build, but Redhat was determined to burn bridges. It was made a dependency for so many other things (gnome for example) that other vendors had no choice but to capitulate to using it. Classic embrace and extend; I always knew Redhat wanted to be Microsoft so bad it hurt, but if I wanted a Windows replacement on my machines I'd wait for Microsoft to install Windows 10 without my permission, thanks. At this point I am seriously considering moving our datacentres over from CentOS to a BSD variant (we're still on 6 and the retooling required for 7 means it would likely be less painful). Sure, Redhat wont mind as you dont get revenue from CentOS, but you will lose significant mindshare.

Re: Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

Pulse audio - giving you a quieter world.

Curious..

[Daemonik]

How is a package manage cross platform when they don't even know how to package apps for a Fedora distribution yet? One would think, possibly, that questions of how and where to put apps and their dependencies in the various filesystems would be the first thing you find out, no? Or does it just chuck everything into opt?

Re:Curious..

[JImbob0i0]

Not /opt ... /snap actually ...

If you install it you'll see you get a 'Core' Ubuntu system in /snap/something-or-other and then overlayed on that is the snap in /snap/app-of-some-kind

So basically they use a not-quite-namespace (pivot-root to be precise) with no container tech to do a "super chroot" (via pivot-root) into an minimal Ubuntu installation to run the app overlayed on that ...

Re:Only Luddites Get First Posts

[TechyImmigrant]

Patiently awaiting the APPS guy.

I predict it will be the SNAPPS guy this time.

Lead Pans

[Hognoxious]

Apart from the toxicity, aren't they likely to melt when you put them on the hob?

Re:Only Luddites Get First Posts

[Hognoxious]

In Soviet Russia, apps guy awaits COWS!!!.

Re:The only place where linux needs more unificati

[Anonymous Coward]

By C++ ABI are you talking about the stdlib? Does it break that often? I've heard horror stories about boost (and it's caused me headaches as a user), but if it's the stdlib that's unstable, then... damn. I'm glad I write C.

Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why people consider Android to be Linux. It's nothing like traditional Linux distributions.

Sure, a customized version of the Linux kernel is used, but everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away. That's probably why Android is successful: the Linux kernel is marginalized to the point where almost nobody even realizes it's there, and the traditional GNU/Linux userland is thrown away and replaced with what's essentially proprietary software, even if the source code is available.

Android isn't successful because of Linux; it's successful despite using Linux. Android would be just as successful were it built around the, say, NetBSD kernel instead. It's not the kernel that makes Android useful; it's the custom userland software that Google has created that makes Android successful!

Android is as much "Linux" as Windows would be "Linux" were Microsoft to replace the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel. That is, it would not be "Linux" in any meaningful sense.

Re:Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[NotInHere]

That's what you get by calling the GNU/Linux operating system "Linux". If you used Linux as the name of a kernel, this issue wouldn't happen.

Android is as much "Linux" as Windows would be "Linux" were Microsoft to replace the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel. That is, it would not be "Linux" in any meaningful sense.

Thanks to the shared kernel, Android has lots of things common with GNU/Linux:

* usage of the ext2 file system family
* usage of / instead of \
* the same binary format
* the same kernel APIs; if you write a driver for android, a gnu/linux driver is not far away

Thanks to these common things, people have been able to port things like busybox or shell servers to android.

Re:Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[phantomfive]

everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away.

Not really, run "adb shell" and you have a familiar unix environment.

Re:Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

I take exception to use of "GNU/Linux" for concepts neither originated.

Usage of a specific file system on a device is irrelevant. The UNIX file system semantics however are important and don't stem from GNU/Linux.

"/" did not originate from GNU/Linux.

The binary format is not specifically relevant since you will not create single fat binaries for Linux32/Linux64/Android but tooling being able to handle both is, I'll grant that.

A driver for *BSD or Android would equally point the way towards a GNU/Linux driver.

Re:Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[exomondo]

Sure, a customized version of the Linux kernel is used, but everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away.

Like what? It has a package manager, a filesystem, a shell, a DE, a networking stack, a windowing system, etc ... It is componentized just like any GNU/Linux system.

Did he even read Canonical's announcement?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article (I know, I know) and Adam's rant seems to be completely unconnected to Canonical's announcement earlier this week. He seems to be ranting about headlines he's read in _response_ to Canonical's announcement and not what the developers are actually saying.

Adam is countering claims that rpm and deb packages are dead, but Canonical doesn't seem to have any such plans. He's countering the idea snap packages have universal support, but Canonical does not apepar to be saying they have, only that they could with help from other distros.

This seems to be yet another example of Adam going bat crap crazy over something without a foot in reality. I honestly wonder why Red Hat employs him, he does far more harm to their brand than good.

Re:Did he even read Canonical's announcement?

[AdamWill]

Did you actually try reading my post? Like, the bits with direct quotes from the Canonical press release?

Here, here's an easy one. The very first sentence of the press release claims Snappy is "enabling a single binary package to work perfectly and securely on any Linux desktop, server, cloud or device". *Present* tense. The claim is that it does this right now.

This is patently and demonstrably false. The snappy packages for Fedora are built with confinement disabled, and the installation instructions tell you to disable SELinux to use snappy. Thus the whole supposed 'security' feature of snappy itself is inactive (the snaps are not confined, they have full system access), and using snappy requires to to *significantly decrease* the security of the whole system (not just the snaps you're running).

Not to mention that meaningful confinement of X11 apps is impossible, and all major distributions still use X11 by default. This is why no-one is running around telling everyone they should use Flatpak right now. I presume it's also why Canonical engineers haven't been running around telling everyone to use Snappy right now. Canonical's PR department appears to have no such qualms, however.

So. There's a nice easy one for you. But for the advanced class - Canonical PR are not a bunch of idiots. They know exactly what they're *doing* when they issue a press release with a lot of key words and phrases carefully arranged in extremely ambiguous ways. You can bet your bottom dollar they were not shocked and amazed when all these stories came out saying that Snappy was now the agreed-upon universal app distribution system and apt and rpm would be dead any minute now. (Or if they were, it was in the "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" sense of the word). They knew exactly what they were doing. Have you seen 'em running around issuing clarifications, fr'instance? No? Hmm, wonder why that is. It's fairly apparent from the articles that *were* published that Canonical held a press call to go with the press release; do you suppose they were carefully correcting the assumptions of journalists on said press call? Hmm? Doesn't look like it, does it?

Re: Did he even read Canonical's announcement?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fairness, there's no shortage of install instructions that say "make sure SELinux is disabled." This is never much of an imposition as I've yet to see any Redhat release where SELinux was configured to even work correctly with their own defaults out of the box, so chances are that's already happened. As all SELinux is good for is breaking POSIX compatibility and secuirty theatre, there's not really any downside to doing so anyway. If I wanted genuine security I'd be patching in grsecurity instead of using some half-baked vendor tragedy.

snap vs systemd

[belgianpainter]

Watching the folks who brought us systemd argue with the ones who are bringing is snap gives me warm fuzziest.

Re: snap vs systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, systemd? oh snap!

Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

It's the absolute truth of everything, as shown by the past DECADES of various standardization attempts.

Meanwhile, the concept of snaps is broken and WRONG. The reason is quite simple. Let's take OpenSSL for example. A lot of software uses it, links to it. In a snap-only world, if you had a dozen snaps on your computer that used OpenSSL, each and every one would have to update their packages INDEPENDENTLY. You have zero control over your computer. You cannot pre-empt, you cannot patch before the upstream does, you're at the mercy of that huge blob becoming available for each snap.

And NOTHING stops closed-source commercial software vendors from shipping their software with BUNDLED libs, and/or statically linked, right now. Except one little thing. They don't care about less than 1% of the user base. Case in point: Steam.

So there is absolutely NOTHING in snaps, no benefit whatsoever, over the existing delivery methods. You want a centralized app container for all your distros? Tarballs. You can tarball your bundled and/or statically build application if that's what you want, even today. And guess what, EVERY *nix operating system on the planet supports those.

And good luck with the isolation/containerization part, until all the distros agree which one to use. LXC, LXD, docker format, rocket format, next-container-wonder-du-jour.

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Blaskowicz]

So what if the binary tar ball does the same thing as the snappy snap? Just ignore new features in the snap, right?
What if you unpack shit all over the place in /usr and are unable to clean it up. Yea after years of experience you'll maybe not do that but making software hard to install and untrackable just to please you is silly.

Getting some place to list the installed software (both CLI and GUI), with a version number, an uninstall button and a shortcut created in the start menu is better than nothing at all.
I hope directories and processes are supported, that's the isolation most people need.

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do all that with any package manager. Package the binary, install the package, and when you're tired of it uninstall it. Or, if that's difficult, use a mainstream distro and install the package instead of making a mess. A .deb is always available.

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Anonymous Coward]

So either you were born yesterday, crawled from under a rock first time since ten years ago or are simply trolling. Because there already exist widely accepted containerized application delivery formats. For example DOCKER. I think pretty much every distro supports docker. Hell, even Windows does (as a format and tool, of course you can't use Linux containers on Windows), and even FreeBSD does (with jails, and in fact you can even use Linux containers on FreeBSD because we have linux compatibility layer).

So, WHY. WHY do you, and everyone else, ignore everything that already exists, and praise some shitty NIH closed source app-store wannabe product from Canonical?

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Blaskowicz]

Isn't that stuff for sysadmins? What it's for, server software? Even if you're right, I'd rather try snappy snaps (once upgraded to an OS that uses them) since it advertises itself as a package manager for end user software, not some framework to set up virtual virtual images.
If I want to fuck around on the command line doing system things I could try the more classical solution of making my own deb as was suggested. I would at last learn to make a deb, if only to package stupid things like a wallpaper or a winamp skin.

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[DarkOx]

I agree I think the next 2 years or so will prove the likes of SNAP and docker to be about the worst thing to happen to computer security since Windows came on the seen.

I have every confidence that hacking Linux systems is going to become shooting fish in a barrel. Exploit some obsolete lib -> get shell -> run precanned generic container escape code and get root.

Re: Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Anonymous Coward]

We bundle fragile software from precious developers that need 25 different libraries into containers.

This is a powerful concept.
$procData.py /path/to/data|FragileCodecontainer|Finalize.py /path/to/results

Re:Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm.... it's containerization. It's not specific for servers nor desktops. You obviously have no idea how that works which explains your eager approval of new and shiny. And also, if the command line interface is inadequate, then write a GUI for it. That's X lines of code. Unlike x * 10000 needed for an entirely new and YET ANOTHER containerization system, delivery method, blah blah blah, that brings no improvements over other systems.

But hey, again, like all the other 14 competing standards that came before Snappy, we'll just have the 15th. Not that I care. It's just sad to watch the endless cycle of fragmentation and reinvention of the wheel.

Actually, it all makes sense. Canonical is a corporation. The employees need to justify their existence, right? The easiest way to do it is to invent shit and claim success and leadership in the FOSS world. Meanwhile, while the crickets are chirping, nobody but Ubuntu uses Mir. Nobody but Ubuntu uses Unity. Nobody but Ubuntu will use Snappy.

Nothing new from Shuttleworth and co.

[Darkness Of Course]

They do this all the time. Hardly worthy of a response although I am glad to see a clarification regarding RH and snap. The lack of communication is amusing. However, let's not forget Red Hat *cough* systemd *cough*, spits on floor.

I don't miss any closed source software on Linux

[ffkom]

I am happy if any vendor intending to sell closed source software stays away from Linux. If you want closed source software, go for Windows or MacOS, and let them treat you like the puny, dependent consumer you are. I for one am happy without any single piece of commercial software. And I am happy with any technically challenged people to not use Linux.

Re:Linux is for penguin fuckers

[lucm]

you mean... sudoctl systemctl snapctl installctl windows10ctl

output of the command:

"active/dead: upgrade was ... 9:32 am"

to view the full message, run upgrade again using a 4k monitor.

take over the world and everyone was super happy..

[Anonymous Coward]

those redhat & debian fuckers did it already with that systemd shit

Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Redhat and Fedora,

FUCK YOU FOR SYSTEMD

We've been goobered

[Anonymous Coward]

They've severely fucked over ANOTHER whole generation of IT guys.

Assholes

Personal post

[AdamWill]

For the record, Slashdot, while I *am* an RH employee and a Fedora QA team member, this was a personal post, as the first words of it explicitly claim. It's not posted on behalf of Fedora or RH and does not reflect the official position of either RH or Fedora.

Re:Personal post

[inode_buddha]

I give you a lot of credit for sticking up for yourself and/or RH here since obviously not everyone agrees :)

That said, its just my opinion that RH pointing the finger at Cannonical is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, since RH has also caused its own share of grief especially among smaller users.

Disclaimer/qualifications: Everyday desktop RH user from v.5 all the way up to FC14. I now split my time between slackware and LFS. I understand the business need for the enterprise approach and features but I don't think its a good idea to muck around with long-standing UNIX design philosophy, and I strongly believe that users should be making those choices for themselves -- not the distros.

Re:Personal post

[inode_buddha]

-- forgot to add, IMHO Redhat's best releases *ever* were in the 6.2 thru 7.x series.

Re:Personal post

[AdamWill]

Well. You may not see it this way, but to me there's a rather big difference. Usually when people talk about RH 'causing grief' and 'UNIX design philosophy' (sigh, if I had a nickel for every time...) they're talking systemd. Yes? Well, sure. Lennart wrote systemd, RH is fairly solidly behind it these days (though note it wasn't at first - Lennart had to sell systemd inside RH about as hard as he had to sell it anywhere else), and quite a lot of people don't like it.

Fine, it's a free world. But that's ultimately a technical argument. We didn't put systemd under an RH CLA. We didn't issue press releases prematurely declaring that it was taking over the free world. It's a freedesktop.org project, you don't have to sign your soul over to RH to use or work on it, it has plenty of non-RH contributors, and it got integrated into non-RH distros through their usual processes for feature review.

I don't usually actually have any problems with Canonical's engineers, or their projects, believe it or not. Of course there's the whole Wayland/Mir mess, but that's kind of an exception (and even there the main problem is down to management, not engineering). The stuff I don't like from Canonical invariably comes from management and/or PR, and (again purely my personal opinion) ultimately derives from Mark and his poor-man's-Steve-Jobs complex.

I don't have any particular problems with Snappy as a technology. Heck, a couple of things about it might be better than Flatpak (I don't know either system in much depth, just broad overviews and the specifics I dug into for this kerfuffle). From a purely technical viewpoint - if you ignore the publicity, and the problematic influence of snappy being under the Canonical CLA and the server end being a black box - it's perfectly possible Snappy could turn out to be the best answer to this particular question. It's certainly not a Wayland/Mir situation - Snappy and Flatpak both have fairly complex histories and predecessors, but whichever way you cut it, they've been around about as long as each other.

The issue I have is specifically with *this press release about snappy*, and more specifically with the way it vastly overstates snappy's current capabilities, and the way it strongly implies that snappy already has substantial cross-distro buy-in. Taken together - and if you look at the stories that came out of it, which Canonical PR *certainly* was not ignorant about, especially given there was a press call - this comes off as an attempt to effectively pre-empt the whole process of building consensus around a solution by giving Snappy such a strong press push that everyone just has to fall in line behind it, regardless of the fact it's not remotely *done* yet and there are other options that have already been trying to build support the right way.

Re:Personal post

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just systemd. Also Gnome 3. Also Pulseaudio. Also Wayland. Also SElinux. Also DBus.

Re:Personal post

[Anonymous Coward]

Its always a "personal post" with the RH guys, no matter how much it helps mommy RH...

Re: The only place where linux needs more unificat

[Anonymous Coward]

Boost is a pile of garbage that every junior developer buys into. Then when perf tests happen everyone finds out how amazing it is! That and the code has a complexity factor dialed up to 11. It will only takes weeks and months to rip it out and replace it with sanity.

Re:I don't miss any closed source software on Linu

[Dog-Cow]

I am happy when people like you are run over by drunk drivers who proceed to smash into telephone poles. Classic win/win.

Snappy is non-free anyway

[Lirodon]

Only the client portion is free software. It only works with a proprietary, Canonical-run package repository. Canonical does not offer source code for the server aspect, and thus, does not offer the ability to create third-party servers. The entire system is subject to Canonical's walled garden.

Re:Snappy is non-free anyway

[JohnFen]

I've seen this reported elsewhere too. Is this really true? If so, that's a complete showstopper.

Good for games, even open source ones?

[Blaskowicz]

Let's me start by saying that when you want to run a game, you're more pragmatic and the political/philosophical/meta-technical issues take a second or third seat. I.e. even if snap packages are "evil" game users want to play the game, and Steam is a bit evil for someone who played in the DOS / Windows 95 days (or 8/16bit before that) when you didn't have to log in to some tracking platform each and every time. It's still praised a lot still.

Games are distributed as .deb etc. packages, binaries or Steam. There is GoG but I'd wager it's not very well known. There is also source if you want to fail at compiling it, or fail at compiling dependencies.
If you're bored and want some games you might look into your package manager for distro provided games, it should be safer in a sense and they're there. Of course the games suck, but they are not in great numbers and they are outdated. Especially as users may be running Ubuntu LTS (and its spin off's) or Debian stable. For multiplayer games, an older version usually is a detriment. Emulators lack in quantity and quality.
End result even a pure open source game is easier to run on Windows, since you download and run setup.exe and that's all, latest and most usable version. (and no driver issue)

Hence if there were snap package of games and some place to browse them it probably would be a lot better/easier.
A second technical reason that prevents even me from running games included in the distro or distributed as .deb : I can't install a 600MB game or smaller at all, that's more than there's free space on the / partition. And running automatically out of / space is already what happens if you don't do apt-get clean in a while (or with useless older kernel versions). Thus .deb games are useless or only work in some cases.
IF snap games can be installed on the 40x to 100x bigger data storage partition, problem solved!

Re:Good for games, even open source ones?

[DarkOx]

A second technical reason that prevents even me from running games included in the distro or distributed as .deb : I can't install a 600MB game or smaller at all, that's more than there's free space on the / partition

So to clarify, you don't want to use sane package management and would prefer to basically spray software all over the place like the Windows drive letter model because you can't mange your storage effectively? Look first off it 2016, you don't have a good excuse for not have 600MB free on a volume especially root.

Second you should be using some kind of pooled storage. In fact just about everyone should. You should also be using a file system that handles that well. Severs with specific performance needs might be an exception but no desktop linux should be using extX on partitions. The right thing to do for the average end user is Btrfs or ZFS with the different top directories in their own subvolumes. That way they can grow and share space with each other efficiently. You don't need to decide ahead of time how big partition X ought to be. You still get an easy way to handle different backup requirements, and nice like like snapshots that can be used like system restore points etc for free.

Ubuntu should work on put the UI and easy of use bits around that sort of thing rather than trying to solve problems that nobody really has, like SNAP.

Re:Good for games, even open source ones?

[Blaskowicz]

As it is, distroes default to ext4 and users can use a small boot drive (low end SSD, eMMC, very old hard drive..) or do the basic separation between / and /home on a single drive. I advocate for joes and grandmas and everything in between. You might as well talk of ghetto SANs or hypervisor desktop rigs. I could network boot an iSCSI volume from a ZFS file server afterall, after spending a few hundreds on a tiny PC and a couple 2.5" drives.

Re:I don't miss any closed source software on Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

I am happy when Windows users get stabbed in the gut, scream like a little bitch and slowly bleed out, knowing all along that they are going to die soon.

I would laugh and point. Then I would rape their wife with my cock slamming into her ass just inches from their face, pull out and blow my nut all over their face right at the moment that they die while simultaneously slitting their wife's throat. The last thought in their mind is knowing another man took his wife and dominated him with hot cum.

Taking a fat shit on their grave is optional.

Who comes up with the fucking names?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much across the board. Modern names for software sound so stupid that I avoid using it when ever possible.

Ubuntu, an African term for "Debian is too hard for me"

.

Re:Redhat is a bad actor

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat is the bad actor here. They are a 2 billion cathedral with deep ties to the shady defence and security industries and devoted to self preservation like all cathedrals. They consistently trash and badmouth anything they cannot control while posing as good actors. They are only riled up about this as Snap is an alternative to the XDG/Flatpak solution they promote. Ubuntu hardly threatens Redhat but cathedrals are paranoid and rather than fight it out in the market and let users choose they would rather play politics and frame this as a NIH or open source issue. The NIH argument can be applied back to them too.

This effectily reduces choice in Linux with technologies Redhat does not control. They do it to Ubuntu, they do it to Linus and they will do it to anyone who threaten their interests.

Systemd adoption is as much to do with slyly integrating udev and logind which left distributions with little choice and pushing it as a new vs old thing which deflects disucssion on merits. This is just another form of embrace, extend and extinguish. The only thing Freedesktop org has achieved is surreptiously promoting Redhat's interests. Their revenus allow them to hire thousands of open source developers and fund projects and push agendas through them.

This is not necesarily in the interests of the open source community and and its long overdue to have a transparent discussion on open source funding and understanding of the impact, infuence and behavior of companies like Redhat.

What might happen in the end

[Anonymous Coward]

... RH will ultimately see the benefits of Snaps. After some years we will finally have consensus among most (?) interested parties on a new packaging standard that will be called Spans.

Both RH and Canonical are doing great things. Canonical seems to me as more agile/innovative and thus often proposes ideas/improvements that seem more disruptive. One may say that Canonical goes around the time-consuming processes of proposing standards and wait for the entire community to reach an agreement. An obvious example is how Canonical decided to work on Unity+Mir in order to reach Convergence; how many more years and manpower would it take to reach Convergence without owning the display server and DE?

In the particular case of Snaps, there are improvements over the already existing packaging approaches. Yes Snaps might not be perfect, but they are a step towards the right direction, lets work on that. Now, the attitude "I am not going to the party because I am not the organiser" is not right. Canonical did invite everyone by making sure Snaps run on all distributions, right?

Pot, Kettle...

[Anonymous Coward]

Black!

Any real Linux user

[Anonymous Coward]

Knew that was bull shit and if you wanted to spend all day fixing your Gentoo distro just try it.

depedency nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

because rpm has really gotten the job done... oh wait... lets add untrusted random rpm find or homebrew on mac. snappy might be crap but canonical has a track record of making things work. for free

systemd pulse

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff sed

The Linux "Brand"

[Anonymous Coward]

Canonical has consistently been making an effort to make their brand, Ubuntu synonymous the Linux.

They keeps introducing Ubuntu specific things that makes it incompatible all other Linux distros while equating Ubuntu=Linux so as to make all other distros appear inferior, broken and uncool.

Linux noob et all

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to be an ignoramus here, but why can't we use something like Snap, AppImage,etc. alongside other packaging methods; just to have a choice. I have an ARMHF netbook, Toshiba AC100, which orginally had Android 2.2 on it. I'm running Lubuntu 14.04 on it now and I sure as hell prefer it and am glad guys put the effort in to port it, but almost every time I generate a script for download with Synaptic or apt-get (WiFi on the netbook is flaky) and download with a download manager on a different machine, I come up with some packages missing and have to hunt for them on Google and Launchpad. I'm just a general user, not afraid to dabble and tweak, but just a user, and want to fully switch to Linux now on all machines (Shindows 10 the reason), but this is the thing that would scare off most inexperienced people away. Granted it's ARMHF and specific machine, etc., and it's surely not mainstream; I'm just saying that for convenience's sake, there could be an additional method of installing all packages in one file/whatever/container.

For example I wanted to install Nvidia Tegra driver and it needed specific Xorg-xserver-core. Fine, Synaptic installed it, but since it was a new version, it also removed all other Xorg components and left me without a way to get into desktop. Didn't know enough to pay attention what it was removing while installing, and I had to learn about dpkg,etc., get all xorg components/drivers hunted down and downloaded separately and dpkg -i one by one. I learned and that's the price of Linux, but a casual user would croak.

I think this has to be improved, and one container/one install would help.