Sorry Arch (EndeavourOS), it's not working out any more and hello Fedora

I really like Debian, OpenSuse TW, and recently, Manjaro.

All three really showcase some of the best things I like about Linux and have a few cool things to add as well.

Not that there aren't others I've tried, or other worthy distros to use, those just happen to be the ones I'm most fond of.

I'm using Debian for my home server, same install for almost ten years ( I'm not really sure how to tell since everything in the server has been replaced a few times). I love it because it's stupid simple.

I recently switched to Manjaro for my PC and laptop after several years of OpenSuse. No major problems with OpenSuse, but I was surprised at how fast and snappy Manjaro ran on my old laptop. XFCE is my preferred DE, so I like that it's the default on Manjaro.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TuxeeI did a benchmark. But you claimed it to "be fake", because it didn't meet your... well, expectations. But indeed I do few benchmarks, I prefer to work (or game) on my machine. And if "absolute browser speed" would be my thing, I'd probably use Chromium. Even the snap version is faster by quite a margin in these benchmarks than any version of Firefox.

I just have a hard time believing your result, because it doesn't match the motionmark result of the two articles, where motionmark is getting significantly slower on the Snap packages.

Sigh. Whatever...

Quoting: GuestI have already given three links where people talk about incredibly bad results of the Snap packages. Here are two other
If I have time, I'm going to do some extensive benchmarks myself and compare these Snap apps on Ubuntu with the performance of the exact same apps in Debian and Arch Linux. I'm probably going to make some unprecedented discoveries.

Don Quixote rides again...
Just a heads up: Comparing the same browser on different distributions will be completely pointless.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-distros-50cpu&num=2

Quoting: GuestRegarding Firefox, this is my result in Speedometer 2.0 with a very old i3-3240 and without a dedicated GPU on FreeBSD: https://i.ibb.co/tJTnbZq/Screenshot-2022-03-25-14-57-10.png
And I get this result in Chromium on the same system: https://i.ibb.co/9vkMVg6/Screenshot-2022-03-25-10-38-48.png

So the difference is 4.94% in FreeBSD. Speedometer is seen by both the Firefox team and the Chromium development team as the benchmark that has the most relevance in reality.

I can probably make Firefox go as fast as Chromium on FreeBSD: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/build/buildsystem/pgo.html

You can ask yourself, why is Firefox on my Linux system so much slower than Chromium, when Firefox is almost as fast as Chromium for people who use FreeBSD, and why is Chromium also faster on FreeBSD than on my Linux system?

No. I won't. I am definitely not inclined to choose FreeBSD as my OS of choice because some random dude on a mission suggested that Firefox might then run just as fast as Chromium. It has been said before: This site is about gaming on Linux.
Why not head over to Phoronix, where benchmarking is king and FreeBSD gets its fair share of attention. However, the results there are still bleak.

Quoting: Gueststuff

If you're capable of an objective look at *BSD and comparing to some aspect of Linux, perhaps write an article and submit to GOL instead of ranting in the comments here. Clearly you are capable of writing well formed sentences and can provide sources. Hopefully you'll take this opportunity to enlighten our community.

The dilemma flatpak or snaps is illusional and misleading. Do you prefer playing games installed in your PC or streaming them from servers like Google Stadia? This is the question you have to ask yourself before it is too late.

Things are very simple. If you use flatpaks and snaps you are killing the Desktop in the long run, which means you are killing the Personal Computer as we knew it for 40 years, and the dominant corporate Linux companies (Red Hat, Ubuntu) who only care for IoT, cloud computing, their $$$, have brainwashed you perfectly.

A perfect example for the latter is reading OP going to a distro that updates itself biannualy! in order to... use flatpaks! there (snaps the other corporate equivalent)

Package managers following UNIX/GNU/Linux tradition were written with and respected the KISS principle, containers are adding unnecessary complexity with tons of issues and all this is being done by corporate companies, who are using fanbois of trademarks as a battering ram.

If you keep being lazy using the Windows/Apple paradigms, if your argument is "that's how Google with Android does it", if you keep playing their game with containers which were initially intended for servers (& immutable devices) but they found ways into "convincing" you -by youtube influencers and general ignorance, especially using Linux newcomers who are presented with Snap versions of Firefox and Chromium by default-, soon your PC will be just another console, I can see already those youtube influencers and probably OP in a year talking about how great Fedora Silverblue and the equivalents are, Shells (your Personal Computer in the Cloud) is already here.


Last edited by sudoer on 11 April 2022 at 12:53 pm UTC

Quoting: sudoerThe dilemma flatpak or snaps is illusional and misleading. Do you prefer playing games at your PC or streaming games from servers like Google Stadia? This is the question you have to ask yourself before it is too late.

Things are very simple. If you use flatpaks and snaps you are killing the Desktop in the long run, which means you are killing the Personal Computer as we knew it for 40 years, and the dominant corporate Linux companies (Red Hat, Ubuntu) who only care for IoT, cloud computing, their $$$, have brainwashed you perfectly.

A perfect example for the latter is reading OP going to a distro that updates itself biannualy! in order to... use flatpaks! there (snaps the other corporate equivalent)

Package managers following UNIX/GNU/Linux tradition were written with and respected the KISS principle, containers are adding unnecessary complexity with tons of issues and all this is being done by corporate companies, who are using fanbois of trademarks as a battering ram.

If you keep being lazy using the Windows/Apple paradigms, if your argument is "that's how Google with Android does it", if you keep playing their game with containers which were initially intended for servers (& immutable devices) but they found ways into "convincing" you -by youtube influencers and general ignorance, especially using Linux newcomers who are presented with Snap versions of Firefox and Chromium by default-, soon your PC will be just another console, I can see already those youtube influencers and probably OP in a year talking about how great Fedora Silverblue and the equivalents are, Shells (your Personal Computer in the Cloud) is already here.

You've got a pretty nice slippery slope there. The only thing your assertions are missing is causal linkage from one to the next, but I'm sure that it's not necessary when you can substitute it with hyperbole. :P

Quoting: sudoerThings are very simple. If you use flatpaks and snaps you are killing the Desktop in the long run, which means you are killing the Personal Computer as we knew it for 40 years, and the dominant corporate Linux companies (Red Hat, Ubuntu) who only care for IoT, cloud computing, their $$$, have brainwashed you perfectly.

This is probably one of the most ridiculous things I've read. Stop it.

Quoting: sudoerA perfect example for the latter is reading OP going to a distro that updates itself biannualy! in order to... use flatpaks! there (snaps the other corporate equivalent)

Uh, what? You're now absolutely just making things up. I didn't move to use Flatpaks, I noted them as a nice to have. If you keep doing these kinds of posts, I will put you into the moderation queue. Stop it.

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: sudoerThings are very simple. If you use flatpaks and snaps you are killing the Desktop in the long run, which means you are killing the Personal Computer as we knew it for 40 years, and the dominant corporate Linux companies (Red Hat, Ubuntu) who only care for IoT, cloud computing, their $$$, have brainwashed you perfectly.

This is probably one of the most ridiculous things I've read. Stop it.

Nothing ridiculous there and the rest of the post that explains it epigrammatically. Have you seen Canonical promoting the desktop (= the PC) like they did in 2004? Have you read an Ubuntu blog since 2017, when Shuttleworth announced Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence? Everything is about IoT and Edge Computing and how Snaps are perfect for both.

2017:

QuoteThe choice, ultimately, is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company. Those are Ubuntu itself, for desktops, servers and VMs, our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kubernetes) our cloud operations capabilities (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), and our IoT story in snaps and Ubuntu Core.

2019:

Quote18th April, 2019: Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 19.04, focused on open infrastructure deployments, the developer desktop, IoT, and cloud to edge software distribution.

QuoteControl decisions move to the edge with smart appliances based on Ubuntu, enabling edge-centric business models. Amazon published Greengrass for IoT on Ubuntu, as well as launching the AWS DeepRacer developer-centric model for autonomous ground vehicle community development, also running Ubuntu. The Edge X stack and a wide range of industrial control capabilities are now available for integration on Ubuntu based devices, with long term security updates. Multiple smart display solutions are also available as off-the-shelf components in the snap store.

Where does all the money flow from? Not from the desktop (PC), the desktop (PC) is getting irrelevant day by day, to be more precise, it's getting transformed by corporate Linux companies from the powerhouse running "the real thing" locally, and of which you had full control with GNU/Linux into a more and more closed, dumb terminal, which will communicate with the servers and the mainframe via a browser -it's happening already with Software as a Service and Platform as a Service- and if you endorse snap (and competitor's version flatpak) "that was originally released for cloud applications[2] but was later ported to work for Internet of Things devices[3][4] and desktop[5][6] applications"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software) you are just accelerating the transition without knowing it, that's the whole point. And what is so bad with the transition? That soon enough, in 10-20 years when your Internet would be down, you would have absolutely no power whatsoever with your black box connected to the powerful mainframe/server.

And what else is bad? From the IoT link:

QuoteThere are a number of concerns about the risks in the growth of IoT technologies and products, especially in the areas of privacy and security, and consequently, industry and governmental moves to address these concerns have begun, including the development of international and local standards, guidelines, and regulatory frameworks.

We all now how good regulations vs. Big Companies work right? Sorry, too late for tears after that.

Quoting: SamsaiYou've got a pretty nice slippery slope there. The only thing your assertions are missing is causal linkage from one to the next, but I'm sure that it's not necessary when you can substitute it with hyperbole. :P

You are already on the bandwagon as I see by your own reasons, it's OK.


Last edited by sudoer on 11 April 2022 at 5:31 pm UTC

Quoting: sudoerstuff

I'm not sure what the hell you're saying here about Flatpaks and Snaps being bad, but I get your point about cloud gaming, I suppose.

But from the enterprise perspective (I've been in tech for nearly 30 years and a geek for coming up five decades) that stuff is so cyclic. Back in the 70's and 80's everything was a terminal for big server clusters. Then we all went big desktops in the 90's. Then in the early 2000's, it was all Citrix and VMware Horizon on big clusters again. For the past ten to fifteen years, the focus has been PC's again, and now recently all this cloud gaming stuff has come along. Back and forth. Over and over.

I suppose it's a bit worse generally now in terms of "owning" stuff - music is on Spotify, films are on Netflix, and now we have games on Stadia or GFN. There's subscriptions for EA, or Xbox. Hell, you can even get a Kindle sub for "free" books these days.

But none of that stops you owning things if you want to. I have friends who still buy CDs to burn to FLAC and buy Blurays and DVDs to watch. People still buy books - actual books.

It's a stretch (and super insulting) to be calling people brainwashed or lazy just because, unlike you it seems, they actually enjoy using their PCs however they want.

Quoting: sudoerthe desktop (PC) is getting irrelevant day by day, to be more precise, it's getting transformed from the powerhouse running "the real thing" locally, and of which you had full control with GNU/Linux into a more and more closed, dumb terminal, which will communicate with the servers and the mainframe via a browser

This was happening before Snaps and their usage or lack thereof does not affect cloudification one bit. Most of mainstream cloud activity is happening around OCI and Kubernetes, someone installing a Flatpak on their system has absolutely zero bearing on that.

Quoting: sudoerit's happening already with Software as a Service and Platform as a Service

It's good to see you found Wikipedia. SaaS and PaaS are indeed a thing. We've also got IaaS and FaaS, just so that we can fill out the vocabulary.

Quoting: sudoerif you endorse snap (and competitor's version flatpak) that was originally released for cloud applications[2] but was later ported to work for Internet of Things devices and desktop applications you are just accelerating the transition without knowing it, that's the whole point.

Not even a hypothetical causal link is established. Usage of Snaps is fairly marginal in cloud and usage of Flatpaks in there is essentially non-existent. Not to mention using desktop applications from Snap or Flatpak does basically nothing to contribute to these techs being used on the cloud, because you don't run desktop applications on the cloud. You run services with web frontends. And you can do that probably easier with OCI images and Kubernetes deployments than by installing a bunch of Snaps on some server boxes.

If you are worried about the cloudification of software, you are actively doing a disservice to your cause by advocating for actions that will have zero effect on cloudification. If you want to stop cloudification, you need to either make software resistant to cloudification (heavy use of AGPL or non-OSI stuff like SSPL) or you need to provide an incentive/disincentive structure that makes creation of desktop software more appealing than cloud-oriented software. On the disincentive side you can create legal constructs like stronger data protection legislation to attack the profit margins of cloud companies. Or on the incentive side you can make creation and distribution of desktop software so easy, simple and profitable that it becomes the de facto mean to ship stuff. That makes things like Flatpak necessary, by the way, because making your software available across the various distributions is a mess otherwise. And if you want to popularize the third party desktop application as the standard, then having those sandboxing features also becomes quite important, especially when it comes to proprietary software. Unless you want to make it so that all software will be FOSS, in which case I applaud your cause and wish you well on your legislative efforts.

Quoting: sudoerYou are already on the bandwagon as I see by your own reasons, it's OK.

Fun memes. Except I am probably the most outspoken member of the GOL editorial team against cloud gaming and for the creation of a thriving, native Linux software ecosystem. But going by your raving and ranting, you probably consider anyone who doesn't agree with you "brainwashed", so really I arguing my points for the audience, rather than you.


Last edited by Samsai on 11 April 2022 at 7:29 pm UTC

Quoting: PinballWizardI made a similar transition from Gentoo; a hard drive died and I decided rather than the laborious install I would install Ubuntu and call it a day.

Curiously, I started using Kubuntu for a similar reason. I was actually in the middle of a college project when a Gentoo update decided to render my computer unbootable (yes, I know, I shouldn't have updated a mission critical computer that was working just fine), and since I didn't have a week to spend recompiling the whole thing from the ground up (this was about 15 years ago), I installed Kubuntu and was back in business in about 20 minutes.

I was very happy with Kubuntu for a very long time but recently switched to Manjora for reasons I don't entirely remember. I think I just wanted to get away from the lengthy upgrade process every six months, and I liked the idea of always having the most up to software available. Manjora has been rock solid, too (not that Kubuntu was ever unstable).


Last edited by Mountain Man on 12 April 2022 at 2:14 am UTC