Endless OS Now Ships With Steam And Slack FlatPak Applications (endlessos.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Steam and Slack are now both included as Flatpak applications on the Endless OS, a free Linux distribution built upon the decades of evolution of the Linux operating system and the contributions of thousands of volunteers on the GNOME project. The beauty of Flatpak is the ability to bridge app creators and Linux distributions using a universal framework, making it possible to bring this kind of software to operating systems that encourage open collaboration...

As an open-source deployment mechanism, Flatpak was developed by an independent cohort made up of volunteers and contributors from supporting organizations in the open-source community. Alexander Larsson, lead developer of Flatpak and principal engineer at Red Hat, provided comment saying, "We're particularly excited about the opportunity Endless affords to advance the benefits of open-source environments to entirely new audiences."

Comments

Linux desktop doesn't satisfy

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to like Linux for a desktop OS. But I just can't and mainly its because stuff just doesn't work, or doesn't always work or works poorly on Linux and much better on Windows or a Mac. If I am going to dump Windows 10 I will obviously choose Mac OS over any sort of Linux flavor. Sounds so great to be free which is about all Linux desktop has going for it these days. Maybe Chrome OS is a option for some, I myself have tried it and its just too Googleish for me. Steam totally failed on its Linux systems and why its keeps trying to sell a cobbled together limited Linux gaming platform is beyond me? If your a gamer and using Steam your going to want Windows.

Advert

[umafuckit]

OS nobody has heard of now ships with Steam and Slack... Great.

Uh

[jon3k]

"built upon the decades of evolution of the Linux operating system and the contributions of thousands of volunteers on the GNOME project. "

That seemed kind of unnecessary. Are we going to start announcing all distro news in this way?

Re:Uh

[kqs]

XKCD 630

Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[bogaboga]

Folks, I am still looking for Linux's worthy office competitor. To me, this means an application that can be scripted, an application in which business logic can be programmed. I have developed many such applications using VBA.

Once Linux gets something near equivalent to Office on Windows, I will bite.

And yes, I am aware of LibreOffice and the like if one simply googles them. None of what I have seen cuts it, unfortunately.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[ledow]

I'd query why places think they need to run their business logic in a desktop OS via a word processor's macro language (effectively).

All the office-integration I see looks like it should be no more than a temporary, or rarely used, system of operation.

What kind of things do you script in VBA that you can't do effectively with a dedicated system?

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[Dog-Cow]

People who run businesses are not programmers. They are not interested in architectural purity. They want to get their work done. Yesterday. They use the tools at hand. If you want them to do a better job (whatever that means to you), you have to give them better tools.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[ledow]

Exactly - better tools, more suited to the task. And if you're programming in VBA (like the OP), chances are you don't have those better tools.

What job do you need to perform in Word, Excel or Access that can't be done better using something else more suited to the task?

The reason people use them is because they have them there. And then they carry on buying them because they are so accustomed to having them there. On Linux etc. you have OTHER things there. But you're not accustomed to them.

But still, whenever I see an Excel spreadsheet used as anything other than a sheet to tinker in, or Word used as some automated letter-creator from a CSV, or an Access database that sits standalone instead of ODBC to a proper SQL server (of any kind), it makes me wonder why people have done that.

And the reason is "because we already have it, and it can be bodged to do what we're doing today". You can't convert those kind of people to ANYTHING else, even another office suite, while that's true.

It's nothing to do with architectural purity. It's to do with not running your business on the basis of there always being the one guy who understands the VBA code that does something virtually-the-same-but-with-a-tiny-business-rule as everyone else on the planet, coupled with the thing you bought to write letters or check your email.

And, again, I'd question - what business task are you running that requires Office? How often? What does it save? What kind of investment in development? Because putting that investment into proper tools would return dividends, and cost less in the long run.

VBA is job security in places that don't know that they shouldn't be hacking things together in Excel and Access. It's fine for running numbers and interfacing with a proper database, but it's at best an ad-hoc query/reporting/prototyping tool, not a thing for building business-critical processes.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[Frosty Piss]

The world doesn't turn for you.

According to a discussion I was part of in my Philosophy 101 class, indeed the world DOES turn for me.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[Immerman]

>whenever I see..., it makes me wonder why people have done that.

Because they're not programmers. And they aren't interested in hiring competent programmers to write their mostly-still-trivial "programs", especially since the programmer will often have to expensively recreate a lot of functionality already included in Excel/Word/etc, starting with reading and writing data into extremely complex and poorly documented Office file formats for interoperability with everything else they do.

They write complex monstrosities in Excel, not because it's the right tool for the job, but because it's the only tool they know that's even vaguely appropriate to the job, and they can learn new "tricks" incrementally from whatever place of developmental ignorance they start from. And VBA is an outgrowth of that - a "horrible" language that encourages you to do a whole lot of things in really bad ways, but easy to learn in tidbit-sized chunks when you just need to add *this* little bit of extra functionality beyond what you and your predecessors have already managed to do.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[Immerman]

"Business logic" seems to mostly be code for just that - really basic math (and often convoluted conditionals) that can be implemented (badly) in a spreadsheet (augmented by basic scripting), by people who aren't competent programmers, aren't interested in becoming so, and aren't interested in paying for someone who is to do the work for them.

And lets be honest, that last one is actually a pretty reasonable position considering the difficulty in evaluating the competence and integrity of anyone claiming to be a competent programmer for short-duration contract work.

And frankly the first two are as well - these are people hired as office workers - if they had the skill and desire to become programmers, they mostly wouldn't be there in the first place.

Scripting and "business logic" is basically the badly programmed glue that holds together projects not worth hiring a dedicated programmer for. Or at least that's where it starts, though like any program feature creep feeds its cancer-like growth, potentially fueled by business growth until you've got something so large that it really should be done right, but now it will take years of expensive programmer time to re-implement properly without breaking anything.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[BronsCon]

As a programmer, when my wife needed a simple way to track sales for her print business, I gave her an Excel spreadsheet with a few macros.

By taking that shortcut (and using the access management facilities which already exist in Office) I was able to avoid building an entire I/O interface complete with entry forms and reports, didn't have to worry about infrastructure or what the database should look like, and could skip right over authentication. For what amounts to a single user system, it actually makes perfect sense.

This was done done during my workday, it took me about 2 hours; I could have spent a week, full-time, developing the database, implementing a secure authentication system, designing and implementing the forms, designing and implementing the reports, and tweaking all of that until it made sense to the end user, an it would have cost between $2600 and $6000 depending on which client(s) I was setting aside in order to get that done. In the end, I worked two hours extra the day I did it, so it didn't cost me anything; but there's no way I would have put in an extra 40 for that.

Now, when someone's paying me they're gonna get the whole enchilada, because that's what they're paying me for... and because I can bill for it. But, even then there are times when they tell me it's for one person, or one event, or some other single-use reason, and they don't want to pay for it -- I point out how the work may be useful in the future and, when they can show me that it won't be, they get an Office "application" if that's what they're after.

Sometimes the right tool for the job is the tool that can do the job quickly, cheaply, and without requiring a bunch of other tools.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[BronsCon]

It sounds to me like he did pay for it to be implemented. He bought Office.

If open source wants to seriously compete with closed software, they need to do everything closed software does, better than closed source, and they need to be compatible with that same closed software while doing it.

Case in point, Linux and BSD in server environments. Nobody seriously uses over Linux or BSD over Windows on their servers because it's free, we use them because they do the same things and they do them better. Where that falls apart (running as an AD DC for newer versions of Windows, as a singular example), we use Windows because we need it to work.

Sure, you can tell me about all of your friends who run Linux on the desktop and, well, they're developers and fairly well paid ones at that. Sure, and I can point out they they're either employed by someone else or doing very small-time contract work where they don't necessarily have to interact with many proprietary systems. Kudos to them for being able to make their living that way, but if their choice of tools is based solely on freedom, sacrificing effectiveness and efficiency, they're not serious.

TL;DR: If Windows suddenly became better at running servers than Linux or BSD distros, there would suddenly be a whole lot more Windows servers out there. Oh, and the guy you're bitching at did pay for the features he wanted.

Re:Where is MS Office's worthy competitor?

[ledow]

20 years experience running the IT in million-dollar companies.

Now tell me... what was your actual answer again?

And who mentioned PowerPoint? Nobody scripts Powerpoint.

We're not saying "Who uses Office?". Word processors and spreadsheets are necessary and vital tools for day-to-day operations.

But we're saying "Who scripts their office suite and then runs their business on that script?". Because the answer is as I said: People in tiny companies, who are happy with bodges, who never put in a proper system.

As soon as you step beyond mail-merge, you can afford a system to do what you're doing. Even if it's software designed especially for that one task, at least you have some accountability and support, rather than "Oh, the macro's broke - we'll have to get John back in to fix it to take account of the new dates".

Re:Yet another reason AGAINST Linux...

[Computershack]

Linux makes Windows look cohesive, and that says a lot...

That has always been the case. Linux's strength is also its greatest weakness to adoption.

call me a freetard too...

[Herve5]

I for one am shifting, in full agreement with S. O., from various macintoshes (used for 30 years on) to obviously Linux.
Obviously there is time spent selecting the right replacements to OSX usual apps, specially as I cannot accept things resembling Win crap.
But even for the most arcane ones (a paper library manager that both autocompletes entries from internet sources and exports to open formats and to android, a raw image converter that properly deal with luminance curves and one-year-old serious cameras, an RSS reader that is something else than a puddle of intrusive messages...) the only difficulty lise in choosing.
This, definitely costs time. But compared to the 30 years I had on OSX, it's just nothing.
And now I'm not owned anymore by google, apple or microsoft app-walled-gardens.
Leaving you Wannacry ;-)
H.

Re:call me a freetard too...

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Have at it. My time is worth more to me. Windows 10 fully patched, WannaWhat? Also, my company is smart enough not to run an unsupported OS using an ancient hackable protocol which the manufacturer warned about four years ago. But sure, blame the maker. Nice thing about linux, when it breaks after apt-get update or dnf upgrade you can't really blame anyone, because it's "not my lib." that caused the issue. Been there done that. Done with it. Servers? Completely different story. LInux on the desktop is worthless for the vast majority of users. But feel free to think it isn't.

Re:call me a freetard too...

[Herve5]

moving from OSX to windows would demand me exactly the same time investment for the same app shift, with the additional nicetie of being owned by microsoft -which was the very reason I chose apple, dozens of years ago when there was no 'app market'...

UmmmmWHUT?

[macraig]

What is this frigging doublespeak that to me seems to say nothing special at all? This especially irks me: "the ability to bridge app creators and Linux distributions using a universal framework, making it possible to bring this kind of software to operating systems that encourage open collaboration".

This distro is a whole lot of nope!

[Halo5]

Looking at the website, here is some of the included software (pulled directly from the website):

Metrics Kit
Metrics API — Lightweight API for recording user metrics from apps and system services.

Event Recorder Daemon — Saves recorded user metrics and transmits them in small batches when there’s an internet connection.

Metrics Instrumentation Daemon — Records information about the system, such as performance info.

Phone Home — Anonymous user counter.

A Linux distro that phones home. Well, now I think I've seen it all!

It's a gift!

[thegarbz]

To be able to write 133 words without actually saying anything at all is a real gift.

"Redistribution Policy"

[Halo5]

Also, IANAL, but I don't think I like this clause from their "Redistribution Policy":

"Physical Redistribution:You may redistribute pristine, unmodified copies of Endless OS on physical media such as CD/DVD, USB disk or SD/MMC card."

Since it's based on the Linux kernel, I'm pretty sure we can modify and redistribute it pretty much however the f#ck we want! They can restrict logos, graphics, any commercial components, etc., but that's about it. Of course, just because a company puts something in their license agreement doesn't automatically make it legal, but this is VERY misleading. REF:

https://support.endlessm.com/hc/en-us/articles/210527203-Am-I-allowed-to-redistribute-Endless-OS-

They make it sound like, just because they have included a bit of non-open-source software with their distro, this gives them complete control over redistribution policies. Again, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's not how the GPL works...

Flatpak - no gym required.

[fahrbot-bot]

Much easier to maintain than a "six-pack".

On the other hand, the lead developer is from Red Hat, and works on Gnome, and some of their other developers have caused a lot of heartburn ... (not naming any names, of course)

Re:Yet another reason AGAINST Linux...

[Ramze]

The number of distributions isn't the issue as they're all the same OS with minor tweaks or a different display environment and packaging system. Once you factor in the size of the community and the level of support for a distro, they all whittle down to basically debian/ubuntu - based, red-hat based, SUSE-based, or ARCH-based. Most will choose Ubuntu or Fedora/Red Hat. SUSE is still a close third, and Arch is more for those that like to fiddle with everything under the hood.

I advise Ubuntu, though I prefer a Cinnamon desktop (which is the DE that ships with Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu.)

I've tried all the major flavors of Linux... Arch was somewhat lacking in repositories, SUSE was really nice as was Fedora.... but nothing beat Ubuntu in terms of community support -- not just from Canonical, but from linux users and programmers in general -- especially when it came to package management as Ubuntu is debian based, so download .deb files or add PPAs that are compatible. Linux Mint was nice, but it was (and still is) slower to release newer software for the sake of stability (and having fewer people to help maintain the package than Ubuntu has).

Don't let the distros bother you. Everyone and their mother can create their own distro with a simple fork of the code and a repository. If a distro doesn't have great support and maintainers, it may as well not exist, though... and Ubuntu is imho, hands down the best... just pick your favorite interface and run with it. Many prefer Gnome, some like KDE or Mate -- I stick w/ Cinnamon. It's just the GUI interface, though... everything under the hood is pretty much the same.