KubeRoot

I think you’re actually agreeing with me here. I was disputing the claim that software should be made available in “a native package format”, and my counterpoint is that devs shouldn’t be packaging things for distros, and instead providing source code with build instructions, alongside whatever builds they can comfortably provide - primarily flatpak and appimage, in my example.

I don’t use flatpak, and I prefer to use packages with my distro’s package manager, but I definitely can’t expect every package to be available in that format. Flatpak and appimage, to my knowledge, are designed to be distro-agnostic and easily distributed by the software developer, so they’re probably the best options - flatpak better for long-term use, appimage usable for quickly trying out software or one-off utilities.

As for tar.gz, these days software tends to be made available on GitHub and similar platforms, where you can fetch the source from git by commit, and releases also have autogenerated source downloads. Makefiles/automake isn’t a reasonable expectation these days, with a plethora of languages and build toolchains, but good, clear instructions are definitely something to include.

The responsibility to figure out the dependencies and packaging for distros, and then maintain those going forwards, should not be placed on the developer. If a developer wants to do that, then that’s fine - but if a developer just wants to provide source with solid build instructions, and then provide a flatpak, maybe an appimage, then that’s also perfectly fine.

In a sense, developers shouldn’t even be trusted to manage packaging for distributions - it’s usually not their area of expertise, maintainers of specific distributions will usually know better.

Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.

I do believe it’s illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn’t care.

Maybe not a rite of passage, but a good learning experience if you want to know what goes into your system! I’d recommend trying it to those who want to get more out of their system and know what they’re using… Though I also wouldn’t recommend Arch to people who don’t want that.

Except when you’re doing calculations, a calculator can run through an equation substituting the given answers and see that the values match… Which is my point of calculators not being a good example. And the case of a quantum computer wasn’t addressed.

I agree that LLMs have many issues, are being used for bad purposes, are overhyped, and we’ve yet to see if the issues are solvable - but I think the analogy is twisting the truth, and I think the current state of LLMs being bad is not a license to make disingenuous comparisons.

That’s not really right, because verifying solutions is usually much easier than finding them. A calculator that can take in arbitrary sets of formulas and produce answers for variables, but is sometimes wrong, is an entirely different beast than a calculator that can plug values into variables and evaluate expressions to check if they’re correct.

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that argument would also make quantum computing pointless - because quantum computers are probability based and can provide answers for difficult problems, but not consistently, so you want to use a regular computer to verify those answers.

Perhaps a better comparison would be a dictionary that can explain entire sentences, but requires you to then check each word in a regular dictionary and make sure it didn’t mix them up completely? Though I guess that’s actually exactly how LLMs operate…

I think Arch is meant for people who want to learn the software - so that you can also choose, control, customize, diagnose, and fix the software!

That said, archwiki is still a great resource on other distros for when something does go wrong, or when it’s not obvious how to do something, particularly when messing with experimental or server stuff.

I don’t think that’s a good point, since they make their own immutable images, so they can use whatever versions of software they want, and you don’t normally get to update them with the rolling release

Yes, do as I say!

That’s the point of the fediverse and activitypub - posts from one platform are federated to other compatible platforms. I know this also includes kbin, but there’s probably other platforms.

Considering the word fornication, I’m not surprised fornix sounds sexual

Could’ve stopped at 1 😔

I’m pretty sure hotfixes are still being released. It’s more so that there are two release streams, stable and unstable, and when there isn’t a new unstable release, the unstable stream is just on the same version as the stable stream.

I think CSS animations are enough, no JS needed

Applications disappearing from the launcher because you changed the greeter sounds very weird… And that’s kinda what I mean. You had to give up on using this software, and instead go for an alternative, because of an issue that shouldn’t even be related.

Granted, a lot of people are probably fine with it, and it sounds like an annoying issue to debug… But it still rubs me the wrong way.

You do raise a good point about replacing software - even just in my example I neglected to mention myself switching to pipewire a couple times and figuring out how they work. Interoperability between software is valuable and knowing you can always switch out one part of your system for an alternative is indeed a useful skill - I sometimes see people complaining about things like Linux’s clipboard, or archive manager, being bad, something like that, without realizing that’s just one option you can use.

Depends on the issue, but many issues come from misconfiguration - fixing the issue can help you understand your system, what went wrong and why, and not only fix that issue ans help you fix further issues, but also reveal things you didn’t know about the software. I find it valuable to know how things work, so I can understand what I’m using, what I need, and what I can do with it.

As an example, messing around with pulseaudio and pipewire I understood a bit more about how it works. I found out I could enable the built-in echo cancel module and get rid of virtually all of my echo when using speakers and microphone. I then later also knew how to configure multiple virtual streams, so I can separate games and voice chat from my browser, so when I record clips when playing with friends, I can have those separate. And then also configured RNNoise for systemwide noise suppression for that bit more audio clarity.

I could find instructions on how to do each of those without understanding them, but when I wanted to ensure noise suppression happens after echo cancellation, I knew what to mess with to set that up.

I understand it’s not for everybody, it’s not feasible for most people - but I see the system as a complex machine you need to operate, and while having simple controls is a good idea, understanding how the machine is built can help not just with complete breakages, but also with avoiding smaller inconveniences that come from using it in unintended ways

It’s not about it being fast, it’s about it only being available for NVidia GPUs. As long as software for things like machine learning uses CUDA, you need to buy an NVidia GPU to use it. A translation layer would let you use the same software on other companies’ GPUs, which means people aren’t forced to buy NVidia’s GPUs anymore.

Not necessarily, it could be that if they put the work into something else instead they would’ve made more when you account for the fine, so it could still not be worth it compared to alternatives.

That’s the thing - none of those would’ve affected you negatively if you’ve been using Nvidia, so if you’re just playing games and not following the news, you’re more likely to just hear people complain about AMD this, AMD that, they broke it… But everything works fine for you