deong @ deong @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.gnu.emacs/current/active/export/bin/org.gnu.emacs is not what I expect a Unix system to want me to type if I want to run Emacs. Nor is flatpak run org.gnu.emacs. These are tools built by someone whose mental model of running Unix software is "click the icon in the Gnome launcher". That's one aspect what I'm describing as not being "simple". I don't want my mental model of how to run Unix software to include "remember how you installed it and then also remember the arbitrary reverse-FQDN-ish string you need to use to tell flatpak to run it". If I'm honest, that alone is sufficient to signal it wasn't built for me. I could work around it for sure with shell aliases, but I could also just not use it, and that seems fine for me.

You're correct that Flatpak solves that problem, and there's some value there. But you can also solve the problem by just having two versions of Python or two version of libjpeg or whatever installed, and then you as the user/admin manages ensuring that each program uses its correct dependency. That's certainly more difficult, but I've just not found it to be problem that is both frequent enough and difficult enough to solve that I would personally value the tradeoff in overall complexity of adding Flatpak to the way I manage and use my systems.

I accept that I'm in the minority on these things, but I value simplicity really highly, and I mean "simple" as a very specific concept that's different from "easy". It can be harder to resolve library dependencies on a system where everything is installed using the native package manager and common file systems, but nothing is as "simple" as ELF binaries linking to .so files. Nested directories branching off of / is "simpler" than containers.

Do I have any practical reason for preferring things this way? Not really. There are some ancillary benefits that come from the fact that I'm old and I already know how to do more or less anything I need to do on a Unix system, and if you tell me I need to use flatseal or whatever, I'd rather just use users and groups and tools that have been fine for me for 25 years. But that's not really why I like things this way. I have no issue with embracing change when it otherwise appeals to me --I happily try new languages and tools and technology stacks all the time. What it really is is that it appeals to the part of my brain that just wants to have a nice orderly universe that fits into a smaller set of conceptual boxes. I have a conceptual box for how my OS runs software, and filling that box with lots of other smaller little different boxes for flatpack and pyenv and whatever feels worse to me.

If they solved practical problems that I needed help solving, that would be fine. I have no problem adopting something new that improves my life and then complaining about all the ways I wish they'd done it better. But this just isn't really a problem I have ever really needed much help with. I've used many Unix systems and Linux distributions as my full-time daily use systems since about 1998, and I've never really had to spend much effort on dependency resolution. I've never been hacked because I gave some software permissions it wouldn't have had in a sandbox. I don't think those problems aren't real, and if solving them for other people is a positive, then go nuts. I'm just saying that for me, they're not upsides I really want to pay anything for, and the complexity costs are higher than whatever that threshold is for me.

That's not all that different than a traditional package manager. You're downloading the dependencies either way. With Flatpak, they're bundled in. With a traditional package manager, it just fetches all the dependencies and shows you that they're being installed one-by-one. Either way, it's one command to install.

If you’re on Wayland, you’re probably on your own, but Xorg almost certainly can support anything except stuff like RGB lighting and DPI switching and that sort of thing. "Normal" mouse buttons should just be generating events that you can see with xev, and then remap them with xkbcomp or xmodmap.

I use a Razer Naga Trinity with the MMO buttons on the side, and I configure it exactly how I want with a script that calls xkbcomp when my window manager starts.

It’s more, "oh, that video clip looks like shit, and every time anyone on this chat likes something, everyone gets spammed a repetitive long-form explanation, and we can’t add Jimmy to the chat because it’s SMS now and AT&T limits it to 10 people, and …"

In the bad old days, SMS was incredibly limited. Apple came out with iMessage, which was both a full IP messaging client with rich features, but seamlessly fell back to SMS, and that was amazing, because a lot of the people you wanted to talk to only had SMS. Google briefly had a similar thing, but whoever ran that product lost the weekly pistols at dawn match that Google uses to set corporate strategy, and hangouts lost SMS integration, which meant you needed two message apps — one for IP messages that was good and a separate one for SMS that sucked. And they were completely separate — no shared threads or history or anything. And then hangouts was killed anyway to make room for chat, or meet, or duo, or allo, or jello, or J-Lo, or Oreos, or who the fuck knows anymore-oh. And so for several years, if you wanted the only thing anyone in the US ever wanted from a messaging app, you had to get an iPhone, because Google kept killing their apps every year like, "hey guys, our new app still can’t talk to your mom, but we integrated the "hot dog or not" feature from Silicon Valley into it, and isn’t that amazing?"

Now, it doesn’t matter, because no one is limited to SMS anymore. Everyone could be on whatever IP platform. But Google still picked a fucking standard built by the phone company with crappy baggage attached like requiring a phone number to use it, and anyway, they’re so late that everyone already picked iMessage. Even if RCS was as good, no one wants to change a bunch of stuff to be no better than when they started, and RCS also still isn’t as good.

The green vs blue bubble thing is just a shorthand way of talking about it. The average person either doesn’t care or cares because mixed-platform group chats have lots of rough edges and limitations, so if you’re the lone Android user, it feels like your fault.

Anyone who seriously escalates this stuff to being a real life problem is crazy, but it is more than just the color of the bubble.

In their defense, why should they have to care whose fault it is that messaging sucks on Android? They just want a pleasant experience, and iMessage has been the best experience for Apple users for like 15 years. It’s also as much Google’s fault as Apple’s, if we want to get nitpicky about it. I wouldn’t spend a lot of money implementing the protocol Google wants either, because Google will abandon it and back three competing new ones before your next good bowel movement.

I still create a swap partition, partly because I'm old and now it just feels so wrong not to do it. But yeah, hibernate doesn't seem that useful to me. A huge part of what we do today is in a browser, and browsers already save their own state to disk anyway.

I’m saying the very idea that you need to ever even think about this as a defense against the enemy is the hobby. There’s only a battle to be fought here if you want there to be, and most people don’t want that. The impact on their lives is not actually tangible. Ad tech doesn’t really hurt anyone. No one likes it, and at best, it feels a little gross, but feeling vaguely icky is not the kind of tangible impact that reliably drives people to action. What happens to you when Facebook or Google bundle you into anonymized groups of eyeballs and promise advertisers that they’ll show you ads relevant to the profile they’ve built of you? Nothing really. If you think about the way they built that profile by tracking your every move online, then yes, it feels creepy, but that’s it.

Certainly it's possible to be a Linux user without learning the things that we would say mean you "know Linux", but I think the most effective way to learn them also requires being a "user". Using Firefox on Ubuntu instead of Windows doesn't teach you Linux, but If you don't have X11/Wayland and a browser and you can't do your online banking and social media and Youtube, then you won't actually learn the "real" stuff, because you'll spend all of your time in Windows and Linux will feel like homework. Instead, get a full Linux desktop experience that you can do all the things you want to do with, and as you're doing those things, also seek out opportunities to learn the shell and userland utilities, etc.

But that’s not the kind of privacy we’re talking about. Privacy discussions are largely about ad tech and tracking. The post here isn’t calling people idiots because he thinks Threads is more likely to leak your credit card numbers and nudes. He’s calling people idiots for not caring about tracking the way he does. And the reality is that there’s no real reason why they should care. The argument boils down to just, “c’mon, don’t you think it’s creepy?”. And if I say, “not really”, we’re kind of at an impasse. There’s just no obvious pragmatic harm you can point to to reason them over to your side. You may as well being trying to convince them to enjoy pineapple on pizza. If they don’t already, the game’s pretty much over.

I’d also say that those health issues are much more practically impactful than Instagram showing you ads for luggage when you’ve bought a plane ticket.

Caring about ad tech is a hobby. It’s as good a hobby as any other, but that’s what it is.

Mostly good advice. I disagree on the headless server part though. Most people who are interesting in learning "Linux” have a much less reductive idea of what that means than you do, I think. Specifically, I think becoming a comfortable, fluent speaker of a typical Unix/Linux environment and userland is probably the most important thing. I think the best way to start doing that is to just live in Linux, and you’re not going to do that on a headless server. Learning the GUI that your distribution uses to add users isn’t important, but having a GUI where you can run standard browsers and photo editors and such is important, because otherwise, you’ll spend all your time in Windows and never have the chance to develop fluency in all the stuff that is actually important.

Limiting yourself to only using command line stuff I suspect does more harm than good, unless you’re hyper-motivated to learn fast. For most people, the smoother path is probably more gradual. Start with Gnome or whatever and just use the computer. Over many years, you’ll learn a lot of piecemeal things just by becoming frustrated with some problem and learning how to solve it. I do think it’s good advice to do as much from a shell as you can from day one. Instead of using the GUI to copy files, learn to do it from a shell. Just don’t feel like you aren’t allowed to use Firefox to browse the web.

I’m not in front of a computer to test, but the man page would suggest that chown -HR would do the trick.

Just replace command in your script with /usr/bin/command or whatever. It’s generally good practice to full path anything run from a script anyway just to remove any unintended environment dependencies.