Patch @ Patch @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

You can start one on a cloud hosting service tomorrow, and then if at some point you want to move to "on premises" hosting (as in, a Raspberry Pi in your basement) then you can migrate over easily enough. That's the whole point of self-hosting; all of the data is yours to manipulate and move around as much as you like.

Plenty of US businesses play ball with the European norms when they function in Europe. The big US car manufacturers (Ford, and GM back before they sold Opel/Vauxhall) are unionised in Europe.

They recognise that the game they play at home in the States is very different to the game in Europe.

That Tesla isn't smart enough to figure out the same thing is not an enormous surprise.

I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.

All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian ("why are all the packages so old!"), or Fedora ("ew, Red Hat"), or Gentoo ("is that a laptop or a space heater?") or...er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.

I don't think arch has it any worse than the rest.

They started selling them in the UK this year, and I've already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).

Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They're sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they're reviewing well with the auto press. It's not like there's any magic to it. China's a cheap manufacturing country, and they're undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.

I've been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it's baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There's lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, "is this thing pleasant to use" stakes, they just never manage to get it right.

Windows 7 was...fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.

When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can't get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.

I can practically hear the EU Commission stoking the furnace as we speak...

It's not a "shitty title", because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.

Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn't something the OP can comment on because they didn't test it.

We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they're all pretty similar under the covers), but that's not on the OP.

In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.

How much effort that they've put into battling hate speech is irrelevant; all that matters is how successful those efforts are. It feels like there is far more hate speech on the platform than there was a couple of years ago, ergo they're failing.

If I were an advertiser concerned that my brand will appear alongside rampant neo-Naziism, it would be scarce comfort to be told "yeah, but we tried..."

It's a big tech company. Unless you're an actual coal-face developer or sysadmin, most of the actual challenges will be the same regardless of what the machines with the blinky lights are actually doing.

It's not like the CEO is expected to be cutting code.

I legitimately do this every time. I seem to be simply unable to parse it correctly.

If I had to wildly guess, I'd say recruiting/career opportunity ads. Demographic and interest-based targeting would be pretty effective at drilling down to the sorts of people you'd want to apply.

ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.

And I know what you're going to say: "But ChromeOS isn't proper Linux". But it's a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).

The fact that it doesn't really resemble any "mainstream" Linux distro is kind of the point. It's a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that's exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.

Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we're in now, we have to accept that that's never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.

Plenty of Linux distros aren't just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn't get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it's just that their products aren't targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they're targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they're targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There's a good market there, it's just a different market.

Slaps ocean; this baby practically desalinates itself!

More to the point, who in their right mind thinks that BMW would be selling a car with a 45mph top speed? Like, at all?

The fact that a person who works for a BMW dealership of all people would genuinely think this is simply not credible.

Alright, I've just looked up both code repositories. You're right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.

Snap is quite a bit older than that; its original codebase was released as "click", which was part of the Ubuntu Touch project; it's a project with a fairly long history.

Flatpak's roots come from OSTree, which has its own depth of history, but the idea to use that to create a containerised packaging format came after clicks and Appimages (and their forerunners) were already on the scene.

Again, not a criticism of flatpaks. On the contrary, it shows that being the latecomer doesn't mean you can't be the winner.

Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af).

Ubuntu had their own motivation for Unity, which was their at the time focus on full device convergence. That is, a single DE on PCs, smartphones, smart TVs and kiosks. It was something which wasn't on the cards for GNOME and which was made clear was not going to be a design focus, and there really wasn't (and still isn't) any other DE that was built with that focus in mind.

Of course it didn't work out. Partly because Canonical never had any success marketing Ubuntu Touch (on phones and tablets) or Ubuntu TV; partly because they were never able to get Unity to a place where it worked in that way (the never-released Unity 8, now Lomiri, was due to be the big pay off, but it was stuck in development hell). Canonical pulled the plug on it because it was haemorrhaging money on it and they desperately needed to get back in the black.

But honestly, there's as much legitimate reason for pursuing that as there was in any of the others. COSMIC being written in Rust isn't revolutionary; Rust is great, but it's just a memory-safe C-family language. It's a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.

Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Canonical's main focus has been contributing to Mutter rather than Mir. Mir's usecase is really more for kiosks, signage and thin client devices (where it's the guts of Ubuntu Frame); although it's possible to build something like that in wlroots, nobody really has yet. And in any case, I take issue with:

why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.

Birdtray sounds like what you're looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.

It's a typo. It should be "comprised".

I've never understood why people run without swap. There's basically no downside to having it. If you're running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you're on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you're probably not in an "ample RAM" situation anyway.

Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?

You dry them?

Oh dear god I hope nobody was planning on giving ChatGPT nuclear bombs.