Quoting: NanobangThanks for the link, though a little explanation of why you were sharing it would have been much appreciated at my end.

Snaps are sandboxed; they can only access resources outside the sandbox through a connected interface. The interface that controls file access outside the home directory is that removable-media one, which allows access to the directories listed on that page.

I think that the snap side of the interface has to be enabled by the snap maintainer, but the user side of the interface needs to be enabled by the user. I understand from what people have said elsewhere that you can enable the connection through the snap store, but I've never tried it, as well as creating the connection with the snap command, which I also haven't tried.

The link was to show you both the existence of the restriction and the existence of the mechanism for creating the connection.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandleGood thing there might be a native version on the way. I hope they manage to make RTX work with it like the Windies version. Not sure if the Stadia build had that.

AMD hardware on Stadia, so no, not functionally.

I'd like the Linux version to have it, but I don't think it will - at least at release.

There is already a compiler (provided by Nvidia, I think) that will take DirectX ray tracing shaders and output Vulkan ray tracing shaders, so it's not necessarily a big job to do it.

The standards are in transition now, though, between vk_nv_raytracing and vk_khr_ray_tracing. They'd probably want to target the latter rather than the former but, since the vendor-neutral extension hasn't been finalised yet it can't be used in non-beta drivers. So it wouldn't work yet.

So a post-release patch that enables it, after the specification is finalised, seems possible, provided sales for people that would make use of it are high relative to the effort involved.

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Quoting: tuubiAnd if you want to convince them that snaps are a good thing

For the record, I have no intention of doing that. I don't use snaps myself, and I'll happily tell people how to avoid using them. I've done so, in fact, on this site.

Containerised applications, in general, serve a purpose, just as distros serve a purpose, but I don't really care about which containers or distros people choose to use, or not use.

What I do care about, though, is people wasting our time and energy on cannibalism, which harms our chances of achieving our objectives as Linux gamers. There's plenty of reality-based discussion to be had about the challenges we face as a community. We don't need to make up more.

As a concrete example, Phoronix has some useful stuff, but you can't send people there in case they accidentally read the comments. I don't want gamingonlinux to be like Phoronix. I'd rather Phoronix wasn't like Phoronix, too.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs a side note, why does he even know how many people are downloading PPAs from outside Ubuntu?

It's explained in the video (and, y'know, the transcript that I provided) PPAs are hosted on Launchpad, so they know which ones get the most traffic. People other than Ubuntu could have their own Launchpad instance, since they open sourced it, but no one does. They don't know who is using the PPA (again, as it says in the transcript) but they know how many.

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You're right, of course. "a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store," "back-room shenanigans [between] Canonical and Microsoft," and "filthy bloatware" represent exactly the calm and objective assessment, entirely on the merits, of a new packaging format. That's sure to have people lining up to join our community and have companies taking us seriously.

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Quoting: TuxeeFunny. So Snaps are the new systemd. Something one can complain about endlessly, bolstered quite frequently by unfound "facts".

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of any given change, people frothing themselves up because of something they read on reddit or heard on YouTube is really self-destructive. Desktop Linux, and Linux gaming in particular, has enough stacked against us without people getting distracted by apocalypse du jour. It's all just nonsense, but people like being outraged.

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Quoting: NanobangNONE of the snaps I've installed can even see my data partition exists, let alone access it.

https://snapcraft.io/docs/removable-media-interface

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Quoting: PatolaYes. The granularity/heterogenity of PPAs is commonly poised as a disadvantage, but here they are an advantage, because you can disable/enable the sources individually. You have granular control in who you decide to trust.

QuoteIt's interesting. I asked for some statistics recently from our IS people, and they didn't give me anything other than number of hits over a period of time on a PPA. I can't get any detail about where those people are, who they are, or anything like that, all I know is relatively which are the most popular PPAs and interestingly there are a large number of people who have a PPA - and I'm not going to tell you which one it is - but there is a PPA in Launchpad that is more popular - popular in terms of number of people who hit it every day - and that PPA is empty. It has nothing in it. But it's because people read documents and blog posts and instructions that say, "this is how you get that thing. You add this PPA," and so people just blindly do it, right? And so there are people out there who will blindly follow instructions, even if they are patently wrong they will still do it. And so the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it. There are no packages in it. It used to but it doesn't any more. It's a problem that people wanted solving and somebody solved it by creating a PPA but subsequently deleted the stuff from that PPA. And none of those users probably even know that that PPA is empty and they probably don't even know that they're no longer getting updates for that piece of software.

(Edit: the transcript is in the "long quote" so I'll repeat the key point: the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it.)

From the video I linked to earlier. Of course, rather than simply not having anything in, the PPA could put something else there, like the infamous case where someone changed the wallpaper of everyone that was hammering their home machine because some instructions somewhere said that people should get software from there.

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Quoting: scaineIt should be, but this is all about money.

It is, but not really for the reasons you're thinking of. A tiny indie developer benefits more than a massive AAA developer does from all the infrastructure that Steam provides. A big multiplat release is going to have their own matchmaking, their own support chain, their own marketing, their own forums, and so on, outside of Steam, so there's less of a value proposition for Valve's cut than is the case for the indie, and supporting a million players in one container is cheaper for Valve than a thousand containers with a thousand players in, so there's scope to lower the rates.

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Quoting: GuestMy main grip with snap was when it installed chromium on my Kubuntu 19.10 it was slower to start. Even with a SSD.

Yep. First run startup of a graphical application is slow. It needs to set up an entire environment of all the things that the application expects to be there to keep it isolated from the actual environment.

The other big one is that, because the application is sandboxed and the default permissions are quite conservative, users don't have access to the files that they expect to from within a snap application.

QuoteAlso i do not get The point of snaps and flatpacks for open-source software well integrated in the distro. They are maybe less up-to-date but they take less disk space.

For normally-supported stuff, don't use snaps. Just use your normal package manager and get normal package manager updates.

But people want new stuff, even new open source stuff. Containerised applications are much better, and much more discoverable, than plonking on some PPA.

QuoteFor commercial software that is compiled once and not updated i understand better.

This is the big win. Users can find commercial software in the same place that they find open source software, and it all gets updated the same, without developers having to worry about fragmentation or library incompatibilities, or any of the other things that might scare them away.

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