mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Oh, I agree, it looks from the photos like she's got a point. Without knowing much more than the photos in her filing, my first reaction is that she should get paid for a couple different reasons. I'm just saying Hershey's is overall so shitty that the lies on the packaging should be the least of her worries about it.

On what is your doubt based? Like what devices do you have that you think are violators? Like I say I imagine that careless violations aren't, like, un-heard of, but correcting them once things are explained is almost always the response. I mean, correcting the violation is usually free and easy. I'm not real familiar with the SFC, but I know they're actively suing Visio right now, and I know the FSF is happy to bring cases to trial if it comes to that (they kind of like doing it it seems like).

Link to the Best Buy case

I have no idea. But it's a little weird that the article seems to take it for granted that the officials were actually corrupt, instead of just unpopular with Xi or some other powerful person. To me, either one is possible.

There are lawyers that make their whole living taking big companies to court for petty stuff like this. Honestly, to me, it's perfect. Lawyers get paid, companies have to be honest in how they present their product, and all the rest of us get to move on with our lives without having to care.

To me this solution is so much better than either "the government has an agency that inspects everyone's packaging to make sure it's honest" and "no one cares, put whatever you want on the packaging" that I'm having a hard time seeing what the down side is.

They were selling TVs with GPL-licensed software inside without complying with the terms of the GPL. When challenged, their defense was some version of "But it’s completely free for anyone to use!"

They didn't have to give up every one of their TVs of any model, just the infringing models (the ones that used Busybox without complying with the GPL).

You know what? Fuck 'em. I don't know what she was expecting other than chalky, chocolate-scented paste that only vaguely resembles the already cheerless designs on the packaging. But if she wants to wring some money out of the behemoth that's hoovering up cocoa beans from half of Africa for pennies, grown by people who've never tasted chocolate in their lives, and use it to buy herself a boat, I say go for it. Fuck 'em up, petty chocolate woman. From the photos it kind of looks like you have a point.

I support you in your unpopular quest sir! Yeah for end users it's often not ideal. I actually like Debian for my own desktop use but I've been recommending for decades to people that know me that they not install Linux as a main computing machine to use every day, because I know they're gonna be in for some rough riding if they do.

Oh, .debs are great. When you install them using apt, they work great, because they're provided by your distribution and designed for it. When you download them from somewhere on the internet and stick them into your system, they may or may not match with your system and they may or may not have been well packaged. They might break your system, or they might just not work. In general, I wouldn't recommend doing that as a new user. For Google Chrome? It's probably fine, Google pays enough attention to it that it'll work. I still think it's just a bad habit to teach.

If i have to describe gaslighting, i would give this as an example. The websites of linux application offer deb packages mentioning explictly they are for ubuntu. The ubuntu site itself says “Deb packages are the heart of ubuntu”. I try to install one, the linux community: “are you stupid? What gave you the idea that downloading a deb package that said it was for ubuntu and trying to install it was a good idea?”

I am not the Linux community. The more I learn about how Ubuntu does things, the more I don't like it. That's fine -- you're welcome to think they are right and I am wrong.

I mean -- I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong or illogical in just looking for software and downloading the .deb that said it was for Ubuntu. I'm just saying that that's not the easiest way to do it.

I’m trying to install a package the way the developer says i should, and the distro says is the very heart of the distro. And you find it strange that your replies come across as blaming the user and a bit ridiculous?

All this then says to me is that i should find myself a linux teacher to teach me the arcane linux knowledge, since the most direct documentation of app developers & distro developers is the exact opposite of what i should do?

Ha. This is fair. But, I mean, kind of, yes, that's exactly how it works. It's not like an "end user application" you can just pick up and start clicking stuff. Some people have been lying to you and telling you that it is, and now it sounds like you're discovering it's not and you're understandably unhappy about it. When I went to school, they spent a whole semester teaching us Unix before starting to teach any kind of computer science or programming applications, so we'd understand the environment and the tools in a lot of detail. Once I was familiar with it, it was fuckin magic, and still is. But yes, I think a lot of what Ubuntu in particular wants you to do, in service of making it "easier to learn" even though in reality it isn't, is more or less the opposite of what I would do.

What the HECK man

I'm starting to agree with you on assessment of Ubuntu. I don't think "the desktop experience" is really a priority for a lot of the people who actually get the work done to make Linux, so this is likely to remain an issue to some degree with whatever distro you decided to choose, but I agree, this is pretty poor. The fact that it was persisting across multiple major versions would irritate me as well as it does the people in the bug reporting.

I mean, the main developers don't "work for you" in the same sense that people at Microsoft kind of do "work for you" in your position as the consumer. I think it may be that Ubuntu doesn't make much money and can't really fund the development to make their software meet the goals they set out (end user friendliness), and most of the core developers elsewhere who do real work don't care about it all that much.

I mean, I don't think it's a shit experience at all. It's different. If you're not aware of the strengths, then weaknesses like this are going to turn you off a lot. For me, I would never try to run Windows as my main desktop unless some weird situation came up that really required it, but some of the stuff you're picking out as issues are real issues, yes.

And the strength you see in linux… ok, WSL in windows is probably a bit less efficient, but for most usages all those windows downsides are now moot with WSL & docker. if i want to install a web server and wordpress, it’s just as easy as any linux server.

I'm such a dickhead that I literally just spun up a totally fresh Debian server just so I could type time apt install apache2 wordpress and can report that it took 46.314 seconds including me starting blankly at package lists for a little bit before hitting enter. Go install a web server and Wordpress on a fresh-installed Windows machine and come back and tell me how long it took and how many steps. The point is not that one literal example -- it's that once you learn how to use it, you'll be able to work faster and more happily on it than you will on a Windows machine. If you need something in the domain where Linux shines, networking or development, it'll be as far ahead of Windows as Windows is on things like consumer-hardware support and end-user experience. If you don't need that, then it's not relevant to you and its weaknesses will piss you off and of course you won't like it.

Of course i know the main advantage of linux is no spyware crap, but it’s kind of sad if after all these years that’s pretty much still the only advantage.

This is a very strange statement.

But it seems i’m still not ready for the linux desktop experience, no matter how often it’s repeated on the fediverse here how good it is now…

I mean... maybe those are the same people telling you to download Google Chrome .debs so I'm not sure I would put much stock in their statements. I've been hearing for over 20 years that Linux is obviously ready for the desktop, and I'm honestly not really convinced (with experiences like yours as pretty good examples of why).

I feel like I'm sorta repeating myself here, but you didn't answer the questions from before:

Browsing to a network share

Worked perfectly for me 20 years ago. What was the error message you got, again?

not having the stable version of the OS suddenly lose its installer for a specific kind of files

You said later that when you did it via the command line, it didn't work anyway. Which was more or less what I told you might well happen because downloading .debs from the internet is a bad idea.

IDK, man, I'm a little reluctant to continue this because I keep trying to tell you about how you should use Linux and you keep seeming to think that I'm trying to trick you or something. Like, hey I think Rancher might work more simply, what do you think of that? And it's like no that's a trick I want to keep failing to install this other thing!

I typed in the exact error message i got in google, and found the issue is that it tries to use SMBv1 to get the list of shares, and if it’s disabled on the server, you’re out of luck.

What was the error message? I want to investigate this a little bit.

It was running 24fps video on 30hz refreshrate. It’s subtle for sure, but easily noticable. It means every 5th frame last twice as long as the others. If the camera pans, you just see it isn’t perfectly smooth.

Hm, yeah, I could see that, actually. I just didn't expect it to be running at 30Hz is part of where I was coming from, I assumed minimum 60Hz.

Yeah, I mean, all I can really tell you is what I said before -- this is a down side, yes. A lot of the people who build the technology aren't too invested in solving this type of problem, and in general there's no one with money at the center of it trying to ensure a good end-user experience, so you may have to just set 60Hz and hope for the best.

seem to be under the impression that Ubuntu is supposed to install .debs you downloaded when you click on them

Dude, it is. Google it yourself.

Hm, I was just indicating my personal opinion on it. I don't think recommending to anyone who doesn't have the knowledge to muck around with the command line to mess around with .debs they found on the internet is going to end well. I see some people on the internet (this is a good example) saying they recommend it for stuff like Google Chrome, but I just think that's a recipe for trouble.

For me, I would tell them to install Chromium through apt and explain that it's the same without some Google crap. I think people's natural tendency is going to be to try to install software on Linux by finding it on a web site, downloading it, and clicking it, and I think if you're teaching someone Linux, part of your job should be to educate them out of thinking that way. I get why the Ubuntu people would want to emphasize that in service of a good end user experience I guess, but I would not do it that way.

You’re really gaslighting me here.

But now i complain about it being broken and you’re all like “that’s totally not expected behavior”.

Not true. What I said was "I have no idea why Ubuntu removed that behavior, but I suspect that..." IDK, maybe you're right that they want users to be able to do that, and they just managed to cock it up in one particular version of Ubuntu. In which case, I actually fully agree with your assessment that that's a bad thing about Ubuntu (on top of me already thinking that it's a bad thing if they want users to be able to do that). All I really take away from that is "Oh no, maybe the people telling you Ubuntu isn't the right 'easy mode' distribution to use" are maybe onto something.

Look, i get it, you like linux and are happy with it. But you can’t just wipe any negative experience under the carpet with gaslighting like this.

Let me use an analogy. Someone always eats at an Italian restaurant. Then, they go to a Mexican restaurant one day. They look at the menu and try to look for their chicken piccata. Then they ask where is the bread for the table. Someone says, well we can get chips if you want to start with chips, but they're not really bread. They say, no I want bread. You can see where the analogy is going. It's just a different restaurant.

Someone could say, well, you're just trying to gaslight me into saying that bread wasn't terrible. It was hard and stale and thin and there was no butter. It was salty and horrible, I barely wanted to eat it. I'm trying, right now, to get you to eat the salsa. I'm actually happy to talk with you about all kinds of bad things about Linux and the reasons behind them, but you have to understand why things are the way they are and the upsides before. Or, I mean, you can do whatever you want, but it'll lead you to a better experience (whether or not you keep it on the desktop, it'll probably help you with the headless servers in some regard).

Haha sure. So one of the biggest weaknesses of Linux is that it's a big patchwork of stuff that was all put together by some particular person to solve some particular problem at some particular time. On Windows, it really is as simple as what you're saying: Make an API, these are the functions, done. It might not be simple under the hood but it's all at least under one entity's control, and it's clearly a nice thing to have, so they have the organizational will to make it happen.

On Linux, you might have three or four pieces of software all which have to interact, some of which were designed decades ago. The video player is maybe using Qt or SDL or something like that. It needs to call library functions in whatever it's using. Those functions need to exist (and the video player's developers have to know which one to call, and make the changes). In order for those to actually work, the library API needs to make calls to Wayland. Oh wait, are you using Wayland? Or Xorg? Depends on your distro. Once it makes it to Wayland/Xorg, it's probably good. But there are already three different APIs that need to have the calls added to them, and the people involved have to all agree on getting it done, and if at any point something changes, it all falls down.

(That's also the explanation for your back-mouse-button sadness. It honestly gets worse than that; I had some toolkit the other day which couldn't understand mouse scrolling which really should be a solved problem at this point. Actually, that was a python / matplotlib problem now that I think about it -- this type of problem impacts pretty much anything that comes from the free software side of the fence.)

If your software is centrally organized, and the people putting it together are profit-motivated, you don't have issues like that, because no sane person would centrally organize it that way, and as you pointed out, end users tend to hate it. On the other hand, if your software is put together by people who want to be able to use it every day, you can say "install me a web server" "now put Wordpress on it" "now install GIMP so I can edit photos" and each of those is a single apt command which takes a few seconds, which is way better than the installation process on Windows. You don't have to hunt around on different web sites, and it all keeps up with security updates automatically. But the down side is that sometimes simple things turn into a big pain in the ass if they happen to cross over multiple boundaries of where different entities' softwares intersect. And as you've discovered, they genuinely don't care at all if you want your back button to work right; they're happy with how their machine works and consider it your problem if yours doesn't. Some people in the corporate-Linux space have been trying for a very long time now to make it "beginner friendly" but in my mind that's always going to be a pretty extreme half-measure just because it's not designed to be so.

Does that help?

I'm currently typing this on a Mac. I literally went into the settings and couldn't immediately figure out how to change my refresh rate at all, let alone how to make my video player change the refresh rate automatically to match the fps of each video file it was playing. Does that mean MacOS isn't ready for the desktop?

I'm actually trying to substantively address what I think is the actual root of your complaints, which I actually think is pretty valid. But this specific detail is a bonkers thing to seize on as something holding back Linux from desktop adoption.

How hard could it be to provide an api to let an application do the same…

Great question. Are you interested in a substantive answer?

expecting the stable version of ubuntu to not just have thrown away its installer for one of the main ways of installing things on it

Not at all what I said. Distros are generally made as coherent wholes; the stuff that comes through apt install generally works great, and you never interact directly with a .deb. The whole model of "I found this thing on a web site and I want to download and run it on my system" is going to be a little more difficult on Linux. Since that's the only way on Windows, since Windows doesn't come prepackaged with thousands of different packages you can install through package management, it'll seem to a Windows person like that's "the way," and when it's not easy on Linux, it'll seem to you like a deficiency in Linux.

and for it to have disabled a protocol that was used in ransomware attacks almost a decade ago is

You didn't answer my question. What steps did you do that led you to conclude that SMB v1 was the issue? I actually agree with you that that's pretty bad and needs to be fixed in Ubuntu if it's true, but I'm not convinced based on your description that that was what was making it not work. It sounds like maybe it didn't work, and when it wasn't working you decided it was trying to speak SMB v1 and didn't test your conclusion. No?

Regarding the refreshrate: this also connects to a projector, and i don’t think it’s able to wait for frames, it’ll just push out x frames per second, and if it doesn’t match your video source, you’ll see smooth motion isn’t quite that smooth. It may be an “advanced” usecase, but if supporting something like this is “expecting ubuntu to work like windows”, then yeah, maybe i better stick to windows… I had expected linux to also be good for htpc usage, but maybe not then.

Like I say, I'm not trying to tell you not to have that as a feature if you want it or that you're wrong for wanting this to work. I'm just saying that this seems like getting pretty far into the weeds of weedy things to raise as criticisms.

Was the video quality noticeably off in any way? It might have been that there was a genuine issue, unrelated to the frame rate. Given the history of interlaced video and vsync in video games, I'd be pretty surprised if the average human could even tell the difference between 24Hz and 24Hz-sampled-at-60Hz even paying close attention.

But for real, i’ve got multiple headless linux machines here, i ssh in to them, got docker containers on them with some complicated usecases too, i know what to expect from linux and i don’t expect it to be like windows. But for the very first 3 things i try on a popular “beginners distro” to be this awful.

I'm gonna be a little harsh. Having several Linux machines doesn't mean you know what you're doing. You say stuff like:

Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn’t replace it yet. Wouldn’t want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?

not fucking up something as major as a package installer in a “stable” version

Regarding the deb files not being the way to do it. I’m sure that’s why plenty of sites have install instructions for ubuntu be like “here, install this deb file”. You say this is not the way to do it, SO MANY APPS say it is. can this community please make up its mind??

You, just like the person who wrote this thing you linked to, seem to be under the impression that Ubuntu is supposed to install .debs you downloaded when you click on them, and that not doing that means they "removed" it. That's wrong. I have no idea why Ubuntu removed that behavior, but I suspect that it's because installing some .deb you downloaded from the internet is almost never the right thing to do. The underlying package management can definitely still do it. If you know enough for it to be a safe thing to do, you'll be able to do it without the GUI, and understand the messages you might get back and be capable enough to get it done to the point that the .deb you downloaded might actually work. If you just want to download and double-click and don't know how to use the relevant tools, then it's extremely unlikely that what you were doing was ever going to get your software to install and run in the first place.

I know this is kind of gonna be offensive me saying this, or unhelpful, or "see this is why it's not ready for the desktop!" But I'm honestly just trying to communicate, this is how it works. Linux is designed as more of an integrated whole; in a lot of respects, that's a really good thing. It sure is a pain in the ass when you want to install certain types of third party software though, yes, definitely. Windows (of necessity) has pretty good support for installing third party apps as self-contained entities. Again, on Windows the whole model of how you install software is to download something from some random internet site, so it's even a little hard to process the concept of doing it some other way, or why that way wouldn't be simple.

If you want to say "this is a big problem, we need Flatpak and Docker to improve in X Y and Z way so they can be viable replacements for drop-in installation of third party software like on Windows," that sounds great. But -- again, I apologize about this for being a little harsh -- if your whole model for solving this problem is that Ubuntu should install .debs when you double-click on them, I don't think you know enough about it to say what needs to happen to make it better.

I'm not going to upvote this, because I can't bring myself to, but thank you for telling me.

Yeah. That's why I asked for some details. That said I think the underlying root of the complaint ("I did cool stuff on Windows, now I'm trying Linux and it can't do my cool stuff, WTF I hate this") is probably pretty valid. I think the solution is, either learn about the cool stuff Linux can do that Windows can't, and start there instead of trying to duplicate your Windows setup, or just stick with what you're already happy with.

Generally speaking I agree; I like how Perens is thinking about it.

I do think it's pretty well established that the GPL "has teeth" though. The FSF has a list of enforcement cases against fairly large defendants; it looks like their record is 2 for 2 in the US. I think it rarely comes up, just because complying with the terms of the license is so no-brainer-ly easier than trying to make the legal argument that you can use someone else's stuff for free while thumbing your nose at the terms and conditions they want you to abide by in order to do that.

I think most of the "big company ignores the GPL" things you hear about are either things like RHEL, where they're carefully skirting the line in a clearly bad-faith way that has some decent chance in court for some particular reason, or else someone breaking the GPL and then their legal department looking at it for 2 seconds and telling them to stop doing that. The cases where someone with anything to lose actually doubles down and says "fuck you" are rare I think for pretty obvious reasons.

(Also, I just learned this today: When Best Buy did this in 2009, the judge eventually made them give the plaintiffs the TVs as part of the damages when it was all done. That's the funniest thing I've heard all week.)

This is a common misconception. A couple times, it's even gone to court. Both Cisco and Best Buy had to pay nontrivial amounts of money, and in the case of Best Buy, it hilariously had to give to the plaintiffs its inventory of TVs which contained software copyrighted and GPL-licensed by the plaintiffs.

GPL licensed does not in any world mean "completely free for anyone to use". For end-users, it does. For companies that want to resell the GPL-licensed software, it means, you can do it for free if you comply with the terms of the license, and if you don't, then you can't. There's not a monetary exchange, but there are licensing terms you need to comply with which were apparently important enough to the people that wrote the software for them to apply that particular license instead of some other one.

If you disagree, that's completely fine, but that doesn't mean you can all of a sudden resell their software and use their work for free, even if there are other people (in compliance with the license) who can.

Can you elaborate on this?

I think we're saying the same thing; maybe I worded it confusingly. BSD is supposed to allow proprietary-ization, and GPL is supposed to prevent it. Apple is within both the letter and spirit of the BSD license with what they're doing with iOS. Google is technically within the letter of the GPL with how they distribute Android, just as Redhat is technically within it in how they distribute RHEL, and honestly maybe both cases are fine, but it's far from the intent. The spirit of the GPL is that people who would receive an Android phone would know that the relevant parts of their phone's software are open source and have a realistic ability to modify them, which I'd argue is true for pretty much 0% of even tech-savvy users today.

If the courts would just back that up, you would be able to recompile all the GPL’d parts of your smartphone’s firmware and run that on your phone.

Firmware? You mean kernel, right? (in addition to whatever low-level userland tools are GPLd, which I'm sure is a bunch.)

I don't think Google really did anything wrong here. The letter of the law is being upheld pretty well in what they're doing. I think the issue is the cell phone manufacturers making it de facto impossible to modify your cell phone. I don't think the GPL actually makes any requirement for modifying the software in-place being a requirement (nor should it IMO), and providing the source code is done carefully in accordance with the license. It's very different from the "fuck you I take your stuff, sue me hippie" stance that Broadcom took. Broadcom very clearly broke the law.

In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn't "be allowed to" come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld. IDK how you can write something like that into a license though. And I think that's what Perens is saying -- that we need a new model that comes closer to the spirit in terms of what the actual result is.

(Edit: Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago with signed bootloaders and things, so that a recompiled kernel wouldn't boot on particular machines unless you broke the DMCA by doing something to your hardware. I said I wouldn't like any attempt in the license to forbid that, but on reflection, it sounds like maybe a pretty good way to better uphold the spirit of the GPL with particular legal language.)