I was only trying to be funny, apologies. I thought it was ludicrous enough that it'd pass. Channeling some boomer humour.
Seriously though, I do understand the appeal of it, just not the appeal-to-price ratio. £200 is a lot of money for a glorified screen mirroring device. It's not that it's overpriced per se (it's probably about right in terms of the cost of the hardware), just that I don't understand how it can be worth it with that functionality at that price point.
Well I hate GNOME personally but it's just because...
I think there's a big difference between having software preferences (even very strong ones) and making the hate of something a personal crusade.
I like GNOME and I don't really like KDE. But I absolutely, categorically don't hate KDE; it's a big project with a lot of high quality contributors and a lot of very happy users. I just don't really enjoy the design.
I don't like Mac, but I don't hate Mac. I really don't like Windows, but I'm still able to recognise it for the engineering feat that it is. The world is full of things that aren't my personal favourite, but none of them have done anything to me to elicit genuine hatred.
Wayland, GNOME, systemd and snaps seem to be the unholy quadfecta of obsessive hate in Linux land these days. People seem to practically set their own personal identity against their feelings on these technology stacks. If you don't like them, just don't use them...
Wine and Rosetta are fundamentally different things. Wine is a reimplementation of Windows APIs on Linux, whereas Rosetta is hardware emulation (famously, Wine Is Not an Emulator).
The equivalent of Rosetta on Linux is QEMU, and specifically qemu-user-static.
The thing about hardware emulation, though, is that it has a non-trivial processor overhead. Apple Silicon gets away with it because it's a very fast chip which has been designed partly with hardware emulation in mind. Trying to emulate x86 on some generic off-the-shelf mobile ARM chip is not going to give great results.
I was referring to snapd, which is the thing that actually has the hard limit on a single repository. That's fully open source (and there's one major fork of it out in the wild, in the form of Ubuntu Touch's click). The tooling for creating snap packages is also all open source.
The APIs which snapd uses to interact with its repo are also open source. While there's no turnkey Snap Store code for cloning the existing website, it's pretty trivial to slap those APIs on a bog standard file server if you just want to host a repo.
Not open-sourcing the website code is a dick move, but there's nothing about the current set up that would act as an obstacle for anyone wanting to fork snap if that's what they wanted to do. It's just with flatpak existing, there's not a lot of point in doing so right now.
It's all open source so there's no reason you couldn't fork it and add that functionality. Although it'd probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn't be a simple one-line change.
You can; the issue is that you can't add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it's still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there's nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody's really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
I've just googled Dell XPS M1530 and it seems like it shipped with a Core 2 Duo CPU, which is 64 bit.
For reference, the last mainstream 32 bit desktop processors were launched over 20 years ago. As a rule, if you're trying to run a 32 bit machine in this day and age it is probably an antique, and running modern software on it would not be all that sensible even if you could.
I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of "ew, snap", but it's a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical's dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
As Signal is open source, I guess someone could just fork it. It's not like anybody is really using it en masse as it is, and the kind of people who use it at the moment are also exactly the kind of people who would be happy to migrate to another service if they had a reason to.
Literally everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp, including 100% of my own extensive contacts. If I could download an open source rival app and still have full interoperability with WhatsApp users, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I've got Signal installed on my phone, but it's basically pristine and unused due to the lack of people to talk to. What's another app for the pile?
Legitimate question: would Signal or Matrix be the most desirable place to end up in a hypothetical post-WhatsApp Hegemony world? Or XMPP for that matter?
I've honestly never got my head around the difference in terms of the pros and cons of each.
And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir... the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.
This old canard again. It drives me mad every time I see it.
snap
Came first. Flatpak was Red Hat's "not invented here" rival. Flatpak turned out to be more popular. That's a) not evidence that Canonical did a NIH, and b) evidence that sometimes doing a NIH pays off.
Unity
For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.
Mir
I'll give you this one. But Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.
Upstart
Alright you didn't actually list this one, but damn it these straw men aren't going to fight themselves! People often mention upstart in the same list, despite the fact that it was released before systemd, became briefly widely adopted across Linux land, and then when systemd came to maturity Ubuntu dropped upstart almost as quickly as everybody else, showing that the NIH instinct really isn't all that strong.
Most of these are just a list of things that a big company tried to see if any of it sticks; that's the very grist to the mill that FOSS thrives on.
It also ignores all the stuff that Canonical either originated or early-adopted which has survived, like LXD, OpenStack, or cloud-init.
Exactly this. There's no nefarious motive to doing this, because Amazon can already do everything nefarious that they want to do with their current Android-based Fire OS.
I'm actually willing to take Amazon's reasoning at face value for this. They say that Android is too heavyweight and inflexible for embedded IoT devices, and that they want to build something lighter. This makes plenty of sense, and is indeed something that Google themselves have also said as justification for their move to Fuschia for their own embedded devices.
For Linux fans, it's probably a good thing that Amazon has chosen another Linux-based architecture rather than doing as Google are doing and moving off Linux to a different kernel.
Android is already free software, and see how far that gets you. The kicker is that you're tied into their services (with all the data harvesting, targeted advertising and monetisation that that involves).
I was only trying to be funny, apologies. I thought it was ludicrous enough that it'd pass. Channeling some boomer humour.
Seriously though, I do understand the appeal of it, just not the appeal-to-price ratio. £200 is a lot of money for a glorified screen mirroring device. It's not that it's overpriced per se (it's probably about right in terms of the cost of the hardware), just that I don't understand how it can be worth it with that functionality at that price point.