trevor (he/they)

Can someone explain why, and what to use them for?

The well deserved Snap complaints 😏

I’m a (mediocre) Rust dev, and I use GPL licenses for my projects. There’s nothing preventing you from doing so. I think the answer to your question is that it’s largely cultural.

Running x86_64 emulation on an ARM CPU is a miserable experience and should be avoided. I’ve done this on an M-series Mac with UTM, and you’re looking at ~10-minute boot times just to get the VM booted, and ~3 minutes for it to render a response to whatever you click.

It’s honestly wild that they seriously suggest doing this on their Wiki.

This is the way. The uBlue derivatives benefit from the most shared knowledge and problem-solving skills being delivered directly to users.

Between that, and using a decorative distrobox config, I get an actually reliable system with packages from any distro I want.

Oh, that’s brilliant!

By the time you’re reading this, we will have enabled microphone support on most laptops!

Awesome!

Has anyone ever explained the meaning behind the Asahi logo? It always reminded me of a cartoon anvil (in a good way).

It took me a while to get around to this so I could sanitize some of the highly-personal stuff there (mostly just a bunch of URLs because I don’t use browser bookmarks lol), but here’s a condensed version of what I like to use Espanso for.

The second half is …interesting. I wanted a way to autofill passwords from my password manager in any application, not just a browser. It’s a very homebrewed solution, and it only works on Windows and Linux because macOS blocks tools like Espanso from viewing or modifying login input fields.

Did you put in a request for this?

For a Wayland Flatpak or RPM? I haven’t looked in a long time, but I believe there’s an open issue for a Wayland RPM.

Edit: Found them: Flatpak issue and RPM issue.

Unfortunately, from trying this myself, I don’t think you can forward port 53 to the Android host, so that won’t work (easily). It seems that privileged ports aren’t allowed to be forwarded.

I like YAML, as long as you aren’t using complicated syntax. Using the | operator will get you some flexible usage that’s mostly easy enough to read. YAML definitely has its problems though. If you want, I can share some snippets of my config.

Sadly though, due to Espanso not having a working RPM build for Wayland (or a Flatpak, which they’re working on), it’s not quite as cross-platform as I want it to be. It won’t work on any of the cool uBlue-derived distros that I’ve gravitated toward, so I’m hoping we get a nice, big update this year.

Espanso is probably the most useful software that nobody is using. I can’t live without it.

I hope it gets an update soon…

I don’t disagree with most of that, but none of what you said actually addresses the problem. The problem is that there are functionally two (notable) flatpak repositories, but one of those is going against the will of the upstream software devs and shipping broken software that they have asked them to stop packaging. And Fedora users are getting the broken flathub repository as the default, without really having reason to suspect that their “flathub store” would ever trick them into installing from a different source. The “verified” badge, especially the lack thereof, does not address that.

As for users feeling “tricked”? That’s a difficult thing to say. I would like to say that users should at least know something about the distro they are choosing (ie Ubuntu users should know about snap; Fedora/Debian users should know about their stances on FOSS, security, and patents; Arch users should know its a DIY distro).

You can RTFM someone all day, but if you actually want Linux to be adopted by more people, you need to reduce the anti-patterns. Snaps are generally known about because they are infamous for also breaking packages. And they’re still major footguns when people are recommending Ubuntu to people that are new to Linux, who are the least likely to know that their apt package installations are going to be installing differently-packaged software that has its own set of problems. If we get to a point where Flatpaks have a similar problem to Snaps, we’ve taken a wrong turn, and it will only hurt Linux adoption.

The OBS and Bottles packages have been broken for a long time. Long enough that both upstream projects asked them to stop many months ago. They don’t get to pretend it was a mistake.

I answered most of this in the other thread, but I am aware that anyone can make flatpaks. What I meant is that flatpaks were supposed to make it easier for devs to get their software to end users by allowing them to not have to worry about distro-specific packaging requirements or formats.

But when someone else takes it upon themselves to make broken flatpaks, ones that you’ve requested they stop doing, now they’re making things worse for everyone involved and should be considered a hostile fork and treated as such.

They work on other distros… if they work at all. If those “strict guidelines” are resulting in flatpaks like OBS and Bottles, which are broken and the devs have tried to get them to stop shipping, then I’ll pass on Fedora flatpaks.

I dont criticize Flatpaks for allowing alternative packaging sources. I criticize Fedora for sneakily (whether intentionally sneaky or not) setting their broken flatpak repo as the default, leading to a bunch of confusion by Fedora users that don’t know they’re actually using different, sometimes broken, packages from everyone else.

The uBlue downstreams of Fedora know this, and they have the decency to present the user with that information upon installation. So thankfully, their users don’t end up wasting their time with problems that Fedora introduced.

I think a sort of Linux compatibility layer could go a long way toward making Redox more viable. It may already have one, but that seems like a good place for an ex-Linux kernel dev to work.

can they simply fork?

Forking the Linux kernel will effectively guarantee that no one will run their software. None, but the most niche distros would ship it. If the Rust people are forced to fork, their time may be better spent contributing to Redox.

Why do people love Rust so much?

Rust makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to write dangerous code, whereas C pretty much guarantees you’ll write something dangerous (and therefore insecure or buggy) at some point, especially in larger codebases, like the Linux kernel. Arrogant devs will defend keeping Rust out of the kernel by saying things like “write better code”, but if the people writing kernel code for 20 years are still writing dangerously flawed code, it’s safe to say that at a certain point, we need a better tool. That tool is Rust.

Rust also has very high-quality libraries that produce nicer finished products. I learned Rust because of clap and ratatui, which make superior CLIs and TUIs to anything else. Seriously, go use a CLI or TUI that was made in Rust. Try bat, a cat clone. You’ll get easy, great command-line completions, easy-to-read help output, optional, beautiful syntax-highlighting, theming, etc. It’s hard for me to go back to vanilla cat.

And I say all of that as someone that likes C. C is really fun, and it’s a very powerful language, but it was not designed to be memory-safe. If it was, the people complaining about Rust would just complain about C too.

Obviously, the best solution is that the gets settled out-of-court. However, Fedora has had a long time to listen to the OBS devs’ request to stop packaging broken software, so maybe they won’t listen to reason.

Fedora needs to get their heads out of their asses and kill the Fedora Flatpak repo.

The lesson is that Fedora Flatpak Repo needs to fuck off. It’s an anti-pattern to have an obscure flatpak repo with software that is packaged differently from everything else.

The entire point of flatpaks was to have a universal packaging format that upstream devs could make themselves, and Fedora is completely undermining it.