As an internal implementation detail, it’s fine and pretty standard. Exposing it to the end user so that they have to know whatever janky-ass domain and capitalization you picked to run your application is braindead.

I agree with you. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to do something. We all start basically every endeavor not knowing how to do it. My complaint is specifically with people who march into that thing they haven’t learned yet with an attitude of “and you’re all wrong and stupid for not fixing it for me”.

Well, we’re here on a web site discussing it, and the top two recommendations are “build one yourself from parts” and “buy a used one in cash”.

Seems to me that it’s the very definition of unrealistic if the real world has almost no examples that do it.

Or just use their built in sync and sign in one time, and all your addons will be installed and enabled for you.

If your argument boils down to “none of the browsers are exactly pre-configured for me, one of the 7 billion not special people on the planet”, I’m not sure there’s a productive conversation to be had here.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of “if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems”. The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

That’s a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company’s field sales operation, I’m not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That’s just how the world works.

There are lots of problems here. First, if you have to “hack” something to get the code, then it likely invalidates your own defense that you thought you were allowed to release it. Second, even if you can prove that nVidia knows that they should have to GPL their code, you still have no legal right to hack something to get it. If the hacking is illegal, then it’s illegal, even if it’s done to enable an otherwise legal activity.

For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can’t replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.

That’s definitely not the norm. Used to be that installing Windows would wreck Grub, but you just needed to but a rescue disk and reinstall Grub one time to fix it. Most people dual booted for decades without any issue there.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Windows machine, but doesn’t Windows index the content of files as well as their names? If so, that would have fairly profound differences from slocate.

I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

So your solution on Windows requires me to move all my files out of where they belong to process them? How do I get them all back when I’m done?

I knew how to write that find command. Didn’t need to search for anything. And because I know how to do that, I can also search for every pdf file modified since last month. I can spit out a list of the gps coordinates for every photo I’ve taken, ordered by latitude. I can find every Python script on my computer that uses Pandas. I can do a million things that boil down to “find every file that matches some complex filter and do something to it”, and I learned one tool. I don’t need to learn one point and click app that converts comics, one that messes with photo metadata, etc.

I can sympathize with the idea that there’s a high learning curve. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to provide ways for people to use their computer that require less knowledge. But recognize that you’re asking for a crutch here.

You can set MAKEFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf to something like “-j8” (where “8” should be something like the number of cores you have or maybe number of cores minus one or two if you want to leave some CPU capacity available.

However, the build instructions for a specific package can override these defaults. You’d have to look at the resolve-davinci package files to see if it does that for some reason that might be important.

Mostly you’re paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else’s fault.

I’m a bitter, stagnant, arrogant old man. That this guy also can’t write for shit is coincidental.

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I’ve found to pretend it’s 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they’ve all been busy trying to solve problems I don’t have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I’m just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is “well the compositor should do that” and the compositor doesn’t in fact do that yet, then I don’t want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively “why do you want to do that”, and well…I do want to do that, so I guess I don’t really want to use Flatpak yet.

That’s just me. Like I said…I’m a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I’m not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I’m too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I’m OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I’ll be just fine. But you can’t do it by just saying, “no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn’t work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you”.

It’s not that I’ve never had any problems. It’s more that those are infrequent one-time problems, and if something happens once every two years that takes me 30 minutes to solve, I’m willing to do that if it makes the day-to-day use of my system smoother. Flatpak feels like I’m rubbing just a little bit of sandpaper across my face 20 times a day, and the promise is, “yeah, but look how you’ll never have to solve this minor one-time things again”, and that’s just not a trade I want to make.

And in a way, everything is a CLI tool on most normal systems. Evince or Acroread or whatever you prefer to read PDFs is not “a CLI tool”, but if I want to use LaTeX to create a document, I want to be able to do something like

$ xelatex myfile.tex
$ evince myfile.pdf &

I don’t want to have to build my document, bring up my app launcher, click on the Evince icon, hit Ctrl-O, navigate to my pdf file, and double click it.

/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.gnu.emacs/current/active/export/bin/org.gnu.emacs is not what I expect a Unix system to want me to type if I want to run Emacs. Nor is flatpak run org.gnu.emacs. These are tools built by someone whose mental model of running Unix software is “click the icon in the Gnome launcher”. That’s one aspect what I’m describing as not being “simple”. I don’t want my mental model of how to run Unix software to include “remember how you installed it and then also remember the arbitrary reverse-FQDN-ish string you need to use to tell flatpak to run it”. If I’m honest, that alone is sufficient to signal it wasn’t built for me. I could work around it for sure with shell aliases, but I could also just not use it, and that seems fine for me.