I just read the whitepaper. I didn’t understand everything, but it sounds pretty good. I’d try it out, but sadly looks like they don’t have any desktop clients :/

What a terrible article.

Whenever I read the claim that copyleft ideology is hypocritical because it imposes a restriction on acceptable use of the software, I pretty much just stop paying attention. The ideology of copyleft is very clear and consistent: making non-free derivatives isn’t a valid freedom because it takes freedom away from others. No, just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it hypocritical. Compare copyleft to defensive force: everyone agrees that it’s wrong to punch someone, but everyone also agrees that you can punch back against someone who punches first.

Keep the word. That word is important: http://humaniterations.net/2017/06/14/your-freedom-is-my-freedom-the-premise-of-anarchism/

Thanks! That page was exactly what I was looking for.

I think all of these arguments are really bad, and I’m someone who hates universal package managers.

“Fragmentation is not an issue”

t seems, they all agree that all of the different packaging formats and managers are a problem. However, is it really so?

Well, duplication of effort is always a downside.

As a developer, by simply using a free licence, you can just sit back and let all of the distros build binaries and do all of the work for you.

The whole complaint being made is that this doesn’t always happen in a timely fashion, and even when it does, it requires a lot of work to be done by each of those distributions.

“There is no need for universal package managers”

Yet, there is a universal package manager that has been around longer than even traditional package managers. BUILDING FROM SOURCE! Many people forget that all of their software is a git clone, make, and make install away from being installed.

I wish it were that simple. In practice, most projects are much harder to build than that. Many use build systems other than plain make such as CMake or Meson and Ninja or GNU autotools (and every project that uses autotools has different levels of intermediate files committed so different commands are needed to build it), and you’ll need to install whatever bespoke build tools they have. I almost always run into arcane error messages that can give me a lot of trouble even as an experienced Linux user and programmer. This is especially true if you’re on a distribution (like anything Debian-based, in other words most newbie distros) where header files are in separate packages, so trying to build anything will give you errors as if you have nothing installed.

A story I always share when this comes up is of my GTK patch that fixed a GObject Introspection annotation (affects generated bindings for other langauges). I spent twelve fucking hours trying to compile GTK and failed. I gave up and submitted the patch without having seen a successful build (it got accepted).

Again, I am an experienced Linux user and programmer. If even I have so much trouble compiling programs from source, expecting anyone who doesn’t have my skill set to do it is crazy.

“Universal package managers are inefficient”

Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are just not as fast as conventional package formats. Try using any modern version of Ubuntu, and just see how slow their Snaps are.

I have never noticed them being particularly slow, either to install or to run, though I can’t comment on Snap specifically as I’ve only used Flatpak and AppImage.

But, that isn’t really even the worst part. Because of the nature of universal package managers, they require much more space than traditional packages. Every single app, instead of sharing the dependencies of all other apps on the system, is bundled with all of its dependencies. This can add gigabytes of space to many apps, and slow down older HHD’s.

I mean, sure, reducing space requirements is noble, and universal package managers probably take up a little more space (I haven’t analyzed it myself). But it’s far from a chief concern in a day where even low-end drives have hundred of gigabytes of capacities. And as for " instead of sharing the dependencies of all other apps on the system" - blaming static linking is a serious mistake. The space impact of static linking is not a large cost and it easily makes up for it with its advantages in simplicity and reliability. I would blame dynamic linking for a lot of the headaches we have with packaging and compilation. Dynamic linking introduces the need for complex dependency resolution algorithms, tying each executable to a huge amount of environment it has to carry around in order to work, breaking the portability of programs and crowding your package manager output with obscure libraries you’ve never heard of and shouldn’t have to.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

I don’t know very much about this topic, but I think that building a binary yourself can be faster because it can make optimizations involving non-standard CPU features (distro packages have to be compiled without these because the user’s CPU might not support the extension)

I was actually the only employee

Okay, thanks

Government-imposed restrictions are illegitimate.

It would be ridiculous to change the name of our community just because some drama happened on reddit that wasn’t even as bad as people made it sound anyway. Imagine if we decided to abandon the word “socialism” just because some authoritarians use it to describe themselves, or “anarchy” just because some media dipshits used it to describe the Jan 6 rioters.

I don’t see the full interview linked anywhere (and probably wouldn’t spend my time watching it if I did), but nothing in this 1:37 clip seems that bad? The antiwork person didn’t do good but didn’t do terrible either. I don’t get why this clip was posted to cringetopia.

it’s based on chromium, a google project.