Good luck! And let us know how it goes!

Thanks! That page was exactly what I was looking for.

This is a concern I hadn’t really thought of before.

Stuff I read in the past that I think is important here:

• https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html
• https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/04/A-culture-of-stability-and-reliability.html

As per Drew’s article, I think the main defense we have is the idea of finite scope. In a free alternative to twitter (or another social media platform), there is not an infinite set of features that are desirable. If we pick our feature set wisely, we can build a platform that feels as though nothing is missing, and if we do this, they won’t be able to do the “extend” part because it would be obvious that anything they could add would be making the experience worse, not better. Some of our solutions may have already achieved this - if that’s so, the strategy becomes convicing enough people of that.

For one example I’d name quote tweets. This is a feature that I think is probably an anti-feature. Compared to replies, it is a “third person” form of engagement, which naturally breeds toxicity rather than understanding in disagreement, and encourages people to engage with the worst people on the platform. It also biases people toward having less realistic and less optimistic views of those who disagree with them by showing them only the worst members of the opposing camp. See Shamus Young’s “This Game is Bad For You” - very insightful on this topic.

If we can identify and avoid all such anti-features, and convince enough people to see them as such, we foil the middle E in EEE.

I think all of these arguments are really bad, and I’m someone who hates universal package managers.

“Fragmentation is not an issue”

t seems, they all agree that all of the different packaging formats and managers are a problem. However, is it really so?

Well, duplication of effort is always a downside.

As a developer, by simply using a free licence, you can just sit back and let all of the distros build binaries and do all of the work for you.

The whole complaint being made is that this doesn’t always happen in a timely fashion, and even when it does, it requires a lot of work to be done by each of those distributions.

“There is no need for universal package managers”

Yet, there is a universal package manager that has been around longer than even traditional package managers. BUILDING FROM SOURCE! Many people forget that all of their software is a git clone, make, and make install away from being installed.

I wish it were that simple. In practice, most projects are much harder to build than that. Many use build systems other than plain make such as CMake or Meson and Ninja or GNU autotools (and every project that uses autotools has different levels of intermediate files committed so different commands are needed to build it), and you’ll need to install whatever bespoke build tools they have. I almost always run into arcane error messages that can give me a lot of trouble even as an experienced Linux user and programmer. This is especially true if you’re on a distribution (like anything Debian-based, in other words most newbie distros) where header files are in separate packages, so trying to build anything will give you errors as if you have nothing installed.

A story I always share when this comes up is of my GTK patch that fixed a GObject Introspection annotation (affects generated bindings for other langauges). I spent twelve fucking hours trying to compile GTK and failed. I gave up and submitted the patch without having seen a successful build (it got accepted).

Again, I am an experienced Linux user and programmer. If even I have so much trouble compiling programs from source, expecting anyone who doesn’t have my skill set to do it is crazy.

“Universal package managers are inefficient”

Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are just not as fast as conventional package formats. Try using any modern version of Ubuntu, and just see how slow their Snaps are.

I have never noticed them being particularly slow, either to install or to run, though I can’t comment on Snap specifically as I’ve only used Flatpak and AppImage.

But, that isn’t really even the worst part. Because of the nature of universal package managers, they require much more space than traditional packages. Every single app, instead of sharing the dependencies of all other apps on the system, is bundled with all of its dependencies. This can add gigabytes of space to many apps, and slow down older HHD’s.

I mean, sure, reducing space requirements is noble, and universal package managers probably take up a little more space (I haven’t analyzed it myself). But it’s far from a chief concern in a day where even low-end drives have hundred of gigabytes of capacities. And as for " instead of sharing the dependencies of all other apps on the system" - blaming static linking is a serious mistake. The space impact of static linking is not a large cost and it easily makes up for it with its advantages in simplicity and reliability. I would blame dynamic linking for a lot of the headaches we have with packaging and compilation. Dynamic linking introduces the need for complex dependency resolution algorithms, tying each executable to a huge amount of environment it has to carry around in order to work, breaking the portability of programs and crowding your package manager output with obscure libraries you’ve never heard of and shouldn’t have to.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

I don’t know very much about this topic, but I think that building a binary yourself can be faster because it can make optimizations involving non-standard CPU features (distro packages have to be compiled without these because the user’s CPU might not support the extension)

I was actually the only employee

Okay, thanks

I would also love to own a RISC-V computer for daily driver use. Drew had a story about using one, though he stated it wasn’t very practical. I’m desperately hoping they become practical by the time I have to replace my current laptop, ideallly in laptop form :)

Exciting! I dream of owning a RISC-V laptop as a daily driver :)

Nitpick, but imagine making a color coded graph and choosing 3 shades of the same color :)

OMG really 🤣 🤣 🤣

Holy fuck I’m angry at these people

I for one am super excited about the potential of RISC-V to liberate our computer hardware :)

This. Also I heard someone say that everyone who works “normal” 8 hour shifts actually has 1 of those hours dedicated to lunch break so it’s not paid, I don’t know first-hand because I’ve never worked that kind of job

Also shouldn’t they be accounting for taxes? One of my jobs I do have an hourly wage but it’s before tax (and the tax is ~8.8%)

TIL

I just don’t think it’s appropriate for a chat protocol to have built-in video and voice conferencing tbh. I think that’s best left to a separate protocol (like jitsi).

So… they reinvented Jitsi?

Increasing prices isn’t a one-way street to making more money. The amount of money you make is the price times the number you sell, and you sell less if the price is higher.

That isn’t how inflation works. Inflation is when the value of currency decreases, meaning prices as measured in currency increase to stay equal in value.

that username tho