I'm mad about linux distros again today and I think I am realizing why this is so hard for me to write about systemically: I have a software engineer brain and so I try to model the various problems as technical problems.
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@cthos @miss_rodent Electron is definitely a more successful Flatpak than Flatpak
@glyph @miss_rodent Cool, problem solved, just run Electron everywhere.
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In short, all the volunteer-based distributions need to have a gigantic conference where they all come together and *agree to stop working on about 99% of them*, to pool efforts to make a real Linux platform. A lot of people will need to put their egos aside and decide to acquiesce to solutions they believe to be technically inferior, in order to be able to address the diffusion of labor into pointlessly recreating basically the same toolchain a thousand times.
@glyph I don’t necessarily disagree (or 100% agree) but the odds of this seem… small.
Our problems really aren’t technical - they’re social and political. The same problems that keep us from solving other political and social problems: we just can’t seem to put things aside for the common good or organize for such things without personal interests, tribalism, and greed getting in the way.
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@glyph Honestly, I think that is a reason to move further in the other direction, and become more diverse and hostile to corporate interests.
I think consolidating and trying to act more like the commercial-capitalist OSes is an ethical and social failure; the diversity and chaotic aspect of the ecosystem are a functional pillar of the community.
@miss_rodent but nothing is hostile to corporate interest here; the corporate interest can quite happily co-opt all the labor in any case; SteamOS has already proved that concept. You can either accept the corporate takeover *by* corporate leadership, or you can consolidate into an organization that protects user agency.
The logic here is "we shouldn't have a union, because that's just the same as a corporation". I specifically called out "volunteer-driven" distros (Debian, Fedora(ish), Arch)
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@miss_rodent but nothing is hostile to corporate interest here; the corporate interest can quite happily co-opt all the labor in any case; SteamOS has already proved that concept. You can either accept the corporate takeover *by* corporate leadership, or you can consolidate into an organization that protects user agency.
The logic here is "we shouldn't have a union, because that's just the same as a corporation". I specifically called out "volunteer-driven" distros (Debian, Fedora(ish), Arch)
@miss_rodent To put it another way, Capital is already organized. Do you want to be organized too, or just accept defeat?
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@glyph I don’t necessarily disagree (or 100% agree) but the odds of this seem… small.
Our problems really aren’t technical - they’re social and political. The same problems that keep us from solving other political and social problems: we just can’t seem to put things aside for the common good or organize for such things without personal interests, tribalism, and greed getting in the way.
@jzb I would say it's impossible! But still, I'm just tootin' out a dream here.
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@glyph @miss_rodent Cool, problem solved, just run Electron everywhere.
@cthos @miss_rodent … and that's exactly why I wish Linux *were* a platform
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@jzb I would say it's impossible! But still, I'm just tootin' out a dream here.
@glyph keep tooting. Dreams are important.
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@glyph keep tooting. Dreams are important.
@jzb remember to like and subscribe
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@glyph so XKCD “15 standards”…. but somehow in reverse?
(I do agree that it’s almost entirely a set of social problems though. It always has been. Indeed the whole “15 standards” problem is basically social problems translated into tech.)
@ewenmcneill yep that's the idea and that's also why it's intractable
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@glyph @miss_rodent The list includes but is not limited to:
- Manjaro on a 2015 Macbook Air 11" with XFCE
- Bazzite on a Framework 13" with KDE
- ZorinOS on Starlabs Starlite (which IIRC is highly skinned GNOME)
- Vanilla Ubuntu on a weirdo 10" tablet PC thingie from Chuwi (Required some config to enable because Ubuntu really loves snaps and they shouldn't)And all my applications just work.
@cthos @miss_rodent FWIW it's not *impossible* for this to work, but it is wildly beyond *cost-effective* for most ISVs
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@miss_rodent To put it another way, Capital is already organized. Do you want to be organized too, or just accept defeat?
@glyph I'm not opposed to the *community* organizing to tell valve to go fuck themselves -
I'm opposed to consolidating the outputs of the community into something that more resembles commercial software.Community actions like re-licensing everything (especially libraries) under the GPL to make corporate types recoil in horror, I'd be much more in favour of.
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@cthos @miss_rodent FWIW it's not *impossible* for this to work, but it is wildly beyond *cost-effective* for most ISVs
@glyph @miss_rodent I mean, I regularly come across Flatpak wrappers around software that the maintainers did not themselves package that also just works and is maintained by one person occasinally running a CI script though so I don't think this is necessarily true for all applications.
Also RE: filesystem permissions, it's now extremely rare that I have to fire up flatseal and make any changes at all for my normal software.
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@glyph I'm not opposed to the *community* organizing to tell valve to go fuck themselves -
I'm opposed to consolidating the outputs of the community into something that more resembles commercial software.Community actions like re-licensing everything (especially libraries) under the GPL to make corporate types recoil in horror, I'd be much more in favour of.
@glyph Basically - I think the better response, if the community is all coming together anyway, is not to standardize and make the ecosystem more homogenized.
But to actively make linux harder to monetize and commodify according to corporate models. -
@glyph I don’t necessarily disagree (or 100% agree) but the odds of this seem… small.
Our problems really aren’t technical - they’re social and political. The same problems that keep us from solving other political and social problems: we just can’t seem to put things aside for the common good or organize for such things without personal interests, tribalism, and greed getting in the way.
@jzb @glyph Social means community. Which community is most likely to achieve what you envision? We don’t need to consolidate all the efforts of all possible contributors. We just need enough effort from a large enough group rowing in the same direction. User friendliness has long been a Linux issue. Sign me up to help!
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@glyph @miss_rodent I mean, I regularly come across Flatpak wrappers around software that the maintainers did not themselves package that also just works and is maintained by one person occasinally running a CI script though so I don't think this is necessarily true for all applications.
Also RE: filesystem permissions, it's now extremely rare that I have to fire up flatseal and make any changes at all for my normal software.
@glyph @miss_rodent The one exception I can think of is Ludusavi because it has to search a huge variety of places to locate game saves and I did have to grant it permissions to a weirdo directory (but that's also kinda on me for putting the games in a nonstandard place)
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@glyph @miss_rodent I mean, I regularly come across Flatpak wrappers around software that the maintainers did not themselves package that also just works and is maintained by one person occasinally running a CI script though so I don't think this is necessarily true for all applications.
Also RE: filesystem permissions, it's now extremely rare that I have to fire up flatseal and make any changes at all for my normal software.
@cthos @miss_rodent I think I do have some nuanced structural critique of flatpak that I sadly don’t have time to get into right now, but if I am being honest most of my systems have a weird quirk where user data lives outside home directories on external media and this causes flatpak’s weird slightly-wrong but makes-things-mostly-work heuristics absolutely violently explode in ways which cause huge issues that contributes to an overall *immediate* negative impression
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@cthos @miss_rodent I think I do have some nuanced structural critique of flatpak that I sadly don’t have time to get into right now, but if I am being honest most of my systems have a weird quirk where user data lives outside home directories on external media and this causes flatpak’s weird slightly-wrong but makes-things-mostly-work heuristics absolutely violently explode in ways which cause huge issues that contributes to an overall *immediate* negative impression
@glyph @miss_rodent Understandable, and yes, there are some pretty sharp edges.
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In short, all the volunteer-based distributions need to have a gigantic conference where they all come together and *agree to stop working on about 99% of them*, to pool efforts to make a real Linux platform. A lot of people will need to put their egos aside and decide to acquiesce to solutions they believe to be technically inferior, in order to be able to address the diffusion of labor into pointlessly recreating basically the same toolchain a thousand times.
@glyph but why? What's the problem if there's a long tail of distributions with few developers and users, in addition to the big ones? Some may have only minor differences, but many focus on a specific niche or are built around completely different technologies that solve different problems, and you never know which ones will become important in the future, either by themselves or by proving that something works well enough to be widely adopted
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@glyph @miss_rodent But things like Flatpak exist.
@cthos @glyph @miss_rodent I can't speak to macOS since I don't own an Apple device and thus don't have access to any of that world (maybe I'll pick up a Neo if I have a few spare bucks so that I can develop for Arcalibre there), but Windows is far from a monolithic platform these days.
It's also notable that I can use Windows to develop for Linux, given Docker and WSL, but it's much harder to use Linux to develop for Windows due to entirely manufactured obstacles.
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@cthos @glyph @miss_rodent I can't speak to macOS since I don't own an Apple device and thus don't have access to any of that world (maybe I'll pick up a Neo if I have a few spare bucks so that I can develop for Arcalibre there), but Windows is far from a monolithic platform these days.
It's also notable that I can use Windows to develop for Linux, given Docker and WSL, but it's much harder to use Linux to develop for Windows due to entirely manufactured obstacles.
@cthos @glyph @miss_rodent That is, I incur a significant additional expense developing for Windows as compared to developing for Linux — an expense folks have been kind enough to help with, but an expense nonetheless.
The expense isn't just a proliferation of distros, it's also how easy it is to access and use tools for dealing with that proliferation.
