chuso

And that reminds me of an anecdote with one of the products our customers usually use. There was a problem which was kind of common and it had a discussion thread in the forum on the vendor’s website where somebody suggested that the solution to the problem was rm -rf /var/lib/rpm.
Needless to say, we had a customer who ran that command because they had read on the Internet that it was the solution to their problem without understanding what that command was going to do. And of course they ruined that server which needed to be fully reinstalled.
Until I notified the vendor to delete that malicious advice from their forum, that answer lasted there for years and who knows how many people ran the same malicious command without trying to understand first the disaster they were going to cause.

I think it’s that the mental effort required to read the documentation, understanding how a tool works and producing an idea in your mind of how to achieve your purpose with the learning you just got of how that tool works is usually bigger.
Even if it takes more time, the mental effort of copying and pasting examples from Google until you find the one that works is way lower.

What people? If you are referring to the people I mentioned in my example who don’t read the text next to the commands explaining what they do, that seems to be also the output tealdeer produces, so I don’t know how it would help.

Oh, yeah. I had this situation so many times in this same project. Even pointing them to the documentation and telling them to read it because the explanation was there didn’t even work because they just wanted immediate answers. Sometimes I even had to join them on a call and tell them to stop, open the link on a screenshare and read it out loud to me to make sure they were actually reading it and not just telling me they read it.
It felt like teaching to read to first-grade schoolers.

Yeah, many people don’t want to read and understand, just copy and paste.
I saw that in a lot of people I worked with on projects, they just look for something to copy and paste from the Internet without even trying to understand what it does. Just looking for some command without even paying attention to the text around it.
I remember one girl once that I gave her the link to the documentation explaining step by step what she needed to do, a link I had to find myself and pass it to her, of course, even when it was her task. Those steps included some alternatives like “if you are in this situation, run this command, but if you are in this other situation, run this other command” but she ignored all the instructions on that page and started copying and pasting every command that was found there. When I asked her what she was doing and why she was running every command there without reading the explanations around them, she said she thought she just had to run all the commands on that page.

Probably unpopular opinion: I hope that happens sooner than later.

I always saw packaging every piece of software for every distribution as a lot of duplicate work that could be better used somewhere else.

As an example, Gentoo’s default repository has ~18k packages (not to mention the many other packages in additional repositories), each one of them with its own building script, maintainers and tests.
Most of those packages are also present in other Linux distributions, again with their own maintainers, different building scripts and having passed their own tests.

Doesn’t that sound like a lot of duplicated work for each distribution that could be used instead on improving the core system and pushing the burden of packaging applications upstream as flatpaks?

Also, since flatpak packages dependencies with the application, they could fix the dependency hell problem in a big part because the developer will determine what dependencies your package runs with, instead of relying on whatever version of the dependencies may be installed in your system.

And it could also solve the quick death of Linux applications. I’m sure most of you saw how quickly applications get unusable in Linux. You find an application you like, but because it was developed for an older version of some library (like OpenAL or GTK+2) you cannot use it anymore.
Have you seen that in Windows? You can still use most of the applications developed for Windows XP in Windows 10.

That of course has its drawbacks. Because you are packaging dependencies with the application, you will have duplicates of the same library for each application, but I think that’s a fair price to pay for more stable and durable applications. That’s very similar to what Windows applications do.

I’m talking about flatpak. Like most of the people here, my experiences with snap were bad, I am not interested in it and I think it’s Cannonical going their own way.