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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@willegible @glyph @miss_rodent the point was about the level of effort, not about the “who”
@cthos Ah, right. Fair enough!
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@freya @glyph To Clarify: My own case mainly being that my paws don't work very well - and have only gotten worse over time, I routinely can't use a mouse effectively, so being able to do basically everything from a command line, customize keyboard shortcuts & remap the keyboard easily, change settings in a text file instead of needing to navigate menus, etc. are all significant accessibility concerns on my end.
@miss_rodent @glyph yeah, and for that it works great. unfortunately if you use a screenreader, it's somewhere between a trashfire and a disaster
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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 Sorry but this won't work. Some requirements are incompatible with each other.
There are distros that runs with a read-only rootfs from a CD and distros with daily upgrades. There are distros for 128 Go servers and distros for 64 Mo wifi routers. There are distros for machines that constantly sleep to preserve batteries and distros for servers with UPS that shall never go down. There are hardened distros and tinkerer-friendly distros. There are privacy-preserving distros, corporate-friendly remotely-managed distros and no-administration auto-upgrading distros. There are move-fast-break-compatibility distros and distros backward compatible with 10 years old software.
If you don't account for all of them then your unified solution will not gain broad adoption. -
@miss_rodent @glyph yeah, and for that it works great. unfortunately if you use a screenreader, it's somewhere between a trashfire and a disaster
@freya @miss_rodent the corporate consolidation model *has* made accessibility a priority because there's legislation about it in the US. It doesn't accommodate every disability, but the majority are better accommodated by corporate OSes because if you want business with the US federal government (or indeed to be used in an office at all) you need to follow the Americans with Disabilities Act. To the extent that Linux can comply with this, it's because of big corporate efforts.
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@freya @miss_rodent the corporate consolidation model *has* made accessibility a priority because there's legislation about it in the US. It doesn't accommodate every disability, but the majority are better accommodated by corporate OSes because if you want business with the US federal government (or indeed to be used in an office at all) you need to follow the Americans with Disabilities Act. To the extent that Linux can comply with this, it's because of big corporate efforts.
@glyph @miss_rodent it's because of Sun. 99% of the accessibility that exists in Linux exists because of Sun in the 2000s, and not even directly for Linux, it's all Solaris-originated afaik
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@freya @miss_rodent the corporate consolidation model *has* made accessibility a priority because there's legislation about it in the US. It doesn't accommodate every disability, but the majority are better accommodated by corporate OSes because if you want business with the US federal government (or indeed to be used in an office at all) you need to follow the Americans with Disabilities Act. To the extent that Linux can comply with this, it's because of big corporate efforts.
@freya @miss_rodent this is of course not much of a consolation if *your* specific disability is not particularly accommodated well, or if you have organically created your own accommodation which works well on BSD or Linux but cannot be ported over to a different OS. A lot of folks with accessibility needs are experiencing that right now even within Linux, on Wayland. But just by the numbers, the corporate OSes work a lot better. c.f. this mess https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/s1twza/the_state_of_funding_accessibility_development/
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@glyph @miss_rodent it's because of Sun. 99% of the accessibility that exists in Linux exists because of Sun in the 2000s, and not even directly for Linux, it's all Solaris-originated afaik
@freya @miss_rodent yeah and it's all gradually breaking now that the foundational technologies are being updated
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@glyph Sorry but this won't work. Some requirements are incompatible with each other.
There are distros that runs with a read-only rootfs from a CD and distros with daily upgrades. There are distros for 128 Go servers and distros for 64 Mo wifi routers. There are distros for machines that constantly sleep to preserve batteries and distros for servers with UPS that shall never go down. There are hardened distros and tinkerer-friendly distros. There are privacy-preserving distros, corporate-friendly remotely-managed distros and no-administration auto-upgrading distros. There are move-fast-break-compatibility distros and distros backward compatible with 10 years old software.
If you don't account for all of them then your unified solution will not gain broad adoption.@gantua yeah it's gonna have to be a really long conference
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@freya @miss_rodent yeah and it's all gradually breaking now that the foundational technologies are being updated
@glyph @miss_rodent I have a Solaris 10 SPARC machine, and right now it in the default configuration, an OS from 2005, hardware from 2002? it's going to have better accessibility than absolutely any modern Linux, evr
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@freya @miss_rodent yeah and it's all gradually breaking now that the foundational technologies are being updated
@freya @miss_rodent I think that IBM did a bunch of stuff at one point? And Red Hat was involved? I remember a big multiparty funding effort for GNOME. Maybe that was just all the same Sun work and I'm misremembering though, I guess Solaris did have the GNOME desktop at one point too.
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@freya @miss_rodent I think that IBM did a bunch of stuff at one point? And Red Hat was involved? I remember a big multiparty funding effort for GNOME. Maybe that was just all the same Sun work and I'm misremembering though, I guess Solaris did have the GNOME desktop at one point too.
@glyph @miss_rodent oh yeah you're right, IBM had AIX they were pushing, Red Hat had............. Red Hat.
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@freya @miss_rodent I think that IBM did a bunch of stuff at one point? And Red Hat was involved? I remember a big multiparty funding effort for GNOME. Maybe that was just all the same Sun work and I'm misremembering though, I guess Solaris did have the GNOME desktop at one point too.
@glyph @miss_rodent HP was probably involved too, what with HP-UX
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@glyph @miss_rodent HP was probably involved too, what with HP-UX
@freya @miss_rodent oh dang, I had forgotten this. Wild. https://www.linux.com/news/hp-chooses-ximian-gnome-hp-ux-workstations/
(I never saw an HPPA machine in real life, my entire experience of them was random internet people asking me to make my software work on them. We did have a buildbot provided by one of them at one point, briefly, I think, but I couldn't even SSH to it, I had to email a guy and ask him to make config file changes)
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@freya @miss_rodent oh dang, I had forgotten this. Wild. https://www.linux.com/news/hp-chooses-ximian-gnome-hp-ux-workstations/
(I never saw an HPPA machine in real life, my entire experience of them was random internet people asking me to make my software work on them. We did have a buildbot provided by one of them at one point, briefly, I think, but I couldn't even SSH to it, I had to email a guy and ask him to make config file changes)
@glyph @miss_rodent what the fuck that's deeply cursed
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@glyph Completely disagree. The fact that we don't have a "real Linux platform" is our strength. It's non-monoculture. It's why software has to be written to follow specifications rather than treating an implementation as the specification. It's why the BSDs etc. are still viable too - software that's portable to different Linuxes is usually also portable to them. It's why we're not stuck listening to the worst people forcing their ideas on us, but can make something different that still runs basically all the same software when you want it to.
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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 In an age where defragmented and concentrated platforms are an existential risk for getting easily tainted, I strongly disagree with the desire to have a single unified Linux platform. The existence of 10 different GTK and Qt based platforms, regardless of the level of their technical differences, is a better situation for me, as a user, than the existence of just the "GNOME platform", regardless of how feature packed, user friendly, and cohesive it might be.
I have already seen software I've used for more than a decade and developed a muscle memory for (vim) getting tainted, the possibility of fundamental building blocks like systemd getting tainted would be a massive diaappointment, even though I don't use it at the moment.
When an alternative exists, regardless of how technically deficient and incomplete it may be, people can start thinking of working on it and switching to it. When there's none, people have no choice but to consume what they're given.
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@glyph I've literally run into cases where a user-facing application fails entirely if Visual Studio is installed on the same computer.
UCRT helps somewhat, but not nearly enough. There's a reason why I not infrequently find that running Windows apps on Linux in separate Wine prefixes is more stable than running them on Windows.
@xgranade @glyph On the CRT (C/C++ runtime) issue, Microsoft's "Hybrid CRT" technique (https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/blob/main/docs/Coding-Guidelines/HybridCRT.md) needs to be better known, and supported by open-source tools (Python, Rust). Assuming you're not still targeting Windows 8.1 or below, it does just enough static linking, while taking advantage of the DLLs that are always available on Windows 10+.
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@glyph I can't address macOS since I'm again entirely outside of that world, but IME, no matter how painful Linux dev is, it pales in comparison to Windows dev as soon as one single line of native code enters the chat.
Like, .NET applications that rely exclusively on .NET packages and so forth work *fine*. It's really once you try to interact with native code, appx publishing, or anything other than "run this NuGet command" that things break.
@xgranade @glyph Forgive me if I come off as a Rust fanboy, but Rust is pretty good about making it easy to ship a self-contained native executable on Windows. They just need to make the hybrid CRT (see my other post) the default. I guess I should open an issue and then a PR.
That also means it's easy to use Rust to build a native module in a larger Python or Node.js app. (Not sure about .NET; last time I tried, you were on your own for implementing and consuming a C API via P/Invoke.)
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@matt they're free to read my analysis, think "nah", and forget about it. I'm not particularly influential here, it just bothers me.
but the reason it bothers me is that the cost here is permanent irrelevance. is the point of a free software desktop to have direct, monarchical control of the development process of your compositor or whatever, or is it to provide *users* with a more accessible and open computing experience where they can have agency and control over their applications?
@glyph @matt over time things have moved in the direction you're suggesting. I think systemd and sway are pretty good examples. Systemd in particular implemented a lot of core functionality and stayed committed to their bit long enough almost every distro has continued to shrink their init script footprint.
The gtk/qt thing would probably also be taken care of best by shrinking the space of responsibility those toolkits take up rather than choosing between them.
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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. And there are numerous technical problems to think about (platform interfaces, ABI boundaries, release management, etc) but the core problem is a social one, which requires a social solution.
@glyph
Would a cross-platform Haiku compatibility layer be a leaner universal environment than the Flatpak obelisk?
Haven't really tried Haiku, but I appreciate that it's focused on the desktop/GUI experience since the start (nominally a POSIX system, but the system folders have less obtuse names).
Will probably dedicate a pendrive to it next week.
Debian-based systems with XFCE or Plasma have served me well for the past couple years: but I still seek out alternatives now and again. -
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