Work. Software development is so much nicer on Linux and I grew to really enjoy the power and flexibility of the terminal. I started with dual boot on my PC and eventually deleted my Windows partition and went full Linux.
Many things have substantially improved significantly in the last 10 or so years such as gaming, drivers and overall desktop user experience to the point where I dread trying to use a Windows machine. Plus I’m pretty comfy now and like that I have full control over my machine when I use Linux vs whatever spyware MS is trying to shove down people’s throats.
It still qualifies as community driven since they have no financial incentive to keep maintain their version of the distribution, but they would certainly be affected by the upstream messing with how the source is provided. What they could ultimately do would be “hard forking”, i.e. taking the available state of the original project and keep developing their own version on top without ever keeping in sync with, say, Ubuntu anymore. Instead they will become their own thing that at some point will have strayed from the original significantly enough to be fundamentally different in their packages, configurations, repositories, etc.
Thank you. So in theory the community-driven derivatives are always free, at least in theory, not to depend from the upstream corporation-driven ones. So it’s more a matter of possible implications in the workflow, than in not being really community-driven.
Linux needs better multi-monitor support. It’s better than it’s ever been, but it’s still janky and giving black screens on tertiary screens at times.
EDIT: It’s funny how the comments are all over the place. “works for me”, “it’s broken on KDE but works on XFCE”, “it’s broken on XFCE but works on KDE”, etc. I think that’s a good sign there are problems with multi-monitor support.
Xfce have a hard time recognize recently plugged in monitors. I have to restart the PC with the monitors plugged in to have a 50/50 chance to make it work. Or just switch to Cinnamon and make it wok right away.
I haven’t had any multiple monitor problems since switching to KDE that weren’t actually Nvidia driver issues. My “TV” is a third monitor on a long ass HDMI cable.
My only remaining issue is that wayland has slightly more input latency when playing games, enough that it’s noticeable (or a very convincing placebo effect).
This makes it so that I have to use X11 and that I have to disable compositioning when playing games as my displays have different refresh rates. All in all, not a big problem but looking forward to be on wayland for good soon.
Plasma is probably the worst out of the few bigger DEs. If you don’t replug the monitors the same way to the video card, the toolbars you have configured disappear and you cannot copy it from a different display or even make all toolbars identical on all monitors…
How many people total do you think use more than display? How many Linux users or users that would be willing to use Linux would want more than one display? I’m betting it’s a lot if not most. So while it may not be a big factor it probably is a factor that applies to most. Then you add up all the other stuff that just doesn’t quite work right and you lost the incentive or motivation to switch.
Funny because Plasma was the only desktop I tried which game me weird monitor issues Even Windowmaker worked flawless for me, and my XFCE(Desktop) / i3wm(Laptop) never failed with 3+ monitors
Yeah, KDE was also my first DE but immediately switched to Gnome for 3 Years. Till now after having an AMD card. I guess a lot has changed, i also got way too much issues years back then with Nvidia.
I also saw a difference shortly before switching to AMD with animations on KDE (Gnome went nice with Nvidia). They were either loading, caching or just lagging or smth when hitting the Overview feature (Similar to Gnome super button). This small uncomfy issue instantly went away with AMD for unknown reason.
I’ve been messing with this on and off for a few years now and I still haven’t seen support for multiple monitors running at different scaling levels (like running a 4K monitor at 125% alongside a 1080p monitor at 100%). This is a feature I use in Windows on one of my setups. I hope this gets some attention soon. I run Linux on most of my machines but this problem still gets in my way on others.
Plasma on Wayland can do that I’m pretty sure, and if you don’t have an Nvidia GPU Wayland is fine nowadays. Hell, even if you have an Nvidia GPU it’s mostly fine nowadays.
I had the reverse experience. I have had no issues with multi-monitor (OpenSUSE, nVidia driver direct from nVideas own maintained Opensuse rpms) but on Windows I’m having Windows open black, or delayed, not recognizing external display, etc. Too many variables to make proper apples to apples comparisons.
Because for what it was made to do and what I want to use it for, it’s utterly ideal. It’s easy, it’s direct, it works seamlessly with any program’s command line, and I can run anything network-wide on any linux machine on my network out of box with no fiddling around. No check for version, no missing packages to hunt up, no libraries to download and verify; I type, I save, it runs, I’m done. If I need to integrate command line tools on six separate programs and/or five to eight scripts in two languages to do a stat/resource/network check on my Linux machines, I can do them all from one script and I can do it to six separate machines over ssh in a loop in under 200 lines of code and throw the results up on a webpage in apache with another thirty if I want to make it pretty in html. Then I set it to a cron job to run once an hour and forget it for months; it keeps on keeping on, I just check that webpage to see everything is fine, in separate tabs even. And I can do all that very very very fast and literally out of box; if I add a brand new machine, all I do is copy my base bash library over and set permissions and it’s ready to go.
Those scripts will always work, on every linux machine, every time, in the same way; they will run in ubuntu, solus, fedora, arch, debian, raspberry pi, probably slackware I haven’t checked, the scripts do not care. Ones I wrote ten years ago are still running just fine.
Bash is kind of like the general of my script and cli army; she does not need to know everything herself, she just needs to organize the troops to do their jobs, and tell me if someone’s slacking off because python decided to be a dick about a package or php is being cranky or apache just won’t speak to anyone no idea wtf is going on there or otbr vanished into the ether or all my wifi drivers are in revolt after an update. She does not stress me at all; she is the finder of my stresses before the drama hits critical, and this is why she is my favorite.
I accept that I’m in the minority on these things, but I value simplicity really highly, and I mean “simple” as a very specific concept that’s different from “easy”. It can be harder to resolve library dependencies on a system where everything is installed using the native package manager and common file systems, but nothing is as “simple” as ELF binaries linking to .so files. Nested directories branching off of / is “simpler” than containers.
Do I have any practical reason for preferring things this way? Not really. There are some ancillary benefits that come from the fact that I’m old and I already know how to do more or less anything I need to do on a Unix system, and if you tell me I need to use flatseal or whatever, I’d rather just use users and groups and tools that have been fine for me for 25 years. But that’s not really why I like things this way. I have no issue with embracing change when it otherwise appeals to me --I happily try new languages and tools and technology stacks all the time. What it really is is that it appeals to the part of my brain that just wants to have a nice orderly universe that fits into a smaller set of conceptual boxes. I have a conceptual box for how my OS runs software, and filling that box with lots of other smaller little different boxes for flatpack and pyenv and whatever feels worse to me.
If they solved practical problems that I needed help solving, that would be fine. I have no problem adopting something new that improves my life and then complaining about all the ways I wish they’d done it better. But this just isn’t really a problem I have ever really needed much help with. I’ve used many Unix systems and Linux distributions as my full-time daily use systems since about 1998, and I’ve never really had to spend much effort on dependency resolution. I’ve never been hacked because I gave some software permissions it wouldn’t have had in a sandbox. I don’t think those problems aren’t real, and if solving them for other people is a positive, then go nuts. I’m just saying that for me, they’re not upsides I really want to pay anything for, and the complexity costs are higher than whatever that threshold is for me.
Your knowledge of Unix systems is incredibly powerful, and I highly respect that. You are in control of your system, which is the ultimate goal of personal computing. It is even more powerful that your mental models are reflected in your system. That is super cool, I hope to get their some day.
I am also very happy you enjoy trying out new technologies, and don’t have the grumpy jadedness of just using what you always use.
For me I thoroughly enjoy learning new skills that unlocks the power of all my many computers, and put them to use. Computing should be fun and empowering, and too often people deprive themselves of fun.
I like flatpak because it keeps everything more orderly. My OS fits into one box, and my userland applications all get their own little box. I don’t have to worry about the choices I make for my OS dictating the options I have for applications. And I don’t have to worry about installing an application polluting my OS with libraries that only it will ever use.
The same is true with containers like Docker. Sure, I could install web apps directly on the server, or make a VM for every service I wanted to spool up, but with Docker Config(or the many other ways to wrangle docker) I have a predictable input/output. I never have to worry about the requirements of one service conflicting with another. And the data and logs generated by the service rest in an exact place that I can ensure is uniform for all services, even if the developers do wacky things.
Taken to the extreme you get NixOS, which I really like the concept of, but can’t bring myself around to learning, as I know it will take over my life.
/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.
I agree that launching flatpaks outside of a GUI is stupidly verbose. I certainly would never use flatpak for cli tools, and I think that is a problem for it. I would love to see more tools bundled up that way, but flatpak is far from the solution. And Docker has the same or bigger problems.
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
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.
That is a great point. I use the shortcut ‘code .’ to launch VSCode when I’m on the terminal a lot. Can’t do that with flatpak without an alias. I don’t live on the terminal though, so it is rarely an issue for me. It is a problem flatpak should solve though. Seems like they are focused on GUI apps and GUI launching.
This. Having to open a console to run a flatpak in bspwm is annoying as all hell. PWA’s are just as bad, I ended up writing a script I could run from dmenu:
I too have been using native packages for 25 years and I wouldn’t say it have been “fine”.
I’ve had to deal with outdated packages, where to have the latest version of a software you had to compile from source.
I had to deal with 3rd party repositories that broke my system.
I had to deal with conflicting versions of a library.
I had to deal with the migration from libc5 to glibc and God that was horrible.
So yes containers might be a little more complex in its implementation, but it means I can install apps from third parties without touching my system and I love that. My OS stays clean, and my apps don’t mess with it.
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.
my brother installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my desktop for me when I was in high school, and I was enamored with the different desktop layout. It got me started on the journey.
maintaining it is much easier than windows. Running one command/script to update a system is much faster than heading to the right window or menu and hoping Microsoft delivers you an update. Plus if it breaks it’s easier IMO to troubleshoot and fix.
Nearly all of the characters you’re trying to skim out are regex metacharacters. Most of them shouldn’t have any effect inside a character class, but it’s possible that the implementation you’re dealing with is substandard. The “escape everything possibly meaningful” version looks like ^[^\/:*?"<>|]+$ (MummifiedClient5000 missed the |, which is a regex “or” operator).
If you’re not given to labelling your files in non-ASCII character sets, you can always go in the reverse direction and list the characters that are permitted, something like ^[a-zA-Z0-9. -_~&%]+$ (add a few more punctuation marks at the end if you need 'em).
The other possibility, which I’m hoping is not the case, is that your regex filter is expecting POSIX regular expressions rather than the normal Perl-compatible, in which case you’ve got some more reading to do. (I doubt it, though.)
I have two kids. I have no idea what I’m doing. Everyone is figuring shit up as they go. The only thing that matters is the desire to learn and the focus to make that knowledge useful.
It boils down to who and why someone is distributing the software to you. A corporation expects to eventually get some profits out of its actions, so it’ll sometimes do things against the best interests of the users, because they benefit itself; on the other hand you expect a community-driven distro to be made by a bunch of people who just want to use the software, and have a vision on how it’s supposed to be.
Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?
Canonical can’t make Ubuntu closed-source. Most of the code in Ubuntu was not made by Canonical, but by third party developers; Canonical is just grabbing that code and gluing it together into a distro. And most of those third party devs released their code as open source, and under the condition that derivative works should be also open source (the GNU General Public License - note, I’m oversimplifying it).
What Canonical could do is to exploit some loophole of the license in the software from those third party devs; that’s basically what Red Hat is trying to do. In the short term, people would likely shift to Linux Mint (itself an Ubuntu fork) or make their own forks; and in the long term, fork another Debian derivative to build their new distros from it. (Or adopt Linux Mint Debian Edition.)
My brother pushed some buttons in Windows lockscreen, which caused assistance settings to never go away again (I still don’t know how I should’ve fixed it), that was the final annoyance with Windows and I switched to Linux on my laptop. On my PC I switched once I didn’t need Windows for work (remote desktop) anymore.
Not for a SSD. Every manufacturer has some tool to update SSD firmware. Some Samsung models can actually be updated with fwupd but I’m unsure if this covers all Samsung SSDs or only the “Pro” series. I also tend to prefer booting into some dedicated “update ISO”, first, just to be sure that nothing interferes with the update.
I’m not familiar with the TRegExpr engine and its quirks, so I could be wrong about some or all of this, but let’s try anyway:
The characters in the brackets describe a set of characters, but without any quantifier after the brackets, they will only match a single character. If you want to match an entire string, you should begin the regex with a ^ character (which means “start of string” when outside brackets), have a quantifier such as * or + after the list and then end it with $ (“end of string”).
The ^ character reverses the list, so it will match any characters not in the list. This may be what you want (i.e. to copy all the files that matches because they do not contain the characters in the list), but I feel that it should be mentioned.
I suspect that you may need to escape the / character with a . And since the error message mentions * and ? I’d also try escaping those.
So to match only the filenames that are FAT32 safe, I’d try something like this:
^[^\/:*?"<>|]+$
regex101.com is a great site for learning regex so I’d recommend that you try it out there (and keep in mind that different regex engines can have subtle differences, but sadly the site doesn’t do TRegExpr).
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