pretty unpopular opinion i believe, but i loathe them. they feel like installing apps from the windows store, but worse. i use them on steam deck and my laptop, but they often fail to launch with no feedback[^1], won’t accept drag&dropped files, store their dotfiles in weird places, take up much more disc space (and therefore take literally almost 10x as long to download), won’t inherit the theme (i think because plasma stores the gtk theme in a non-standard place), etc. they feel like they’ve been designed to flout what os developers have built up over many decades and are just a struggle to use.
[^1]: on steam deck particularly (so i know it’s not a configuration i’ve screwed up) no flatpaks will launch unless i launch them twice. even after that, there’s a long delay (~1 minute) and then two instances launch. i know this sounds like i should just wait until the first one launches, but that doesn’t work
The Flatpak theming issue is really annoying, yeah. There’s a rather limited pool of GTK themes to choose from in Flathub, but as long as you’re running one of those themes in your DE (assuming GNOME or other GTK-based), themes will inherit. Can’t speak to KDE as I haven’t used Plasma as primary.
Other than that, Flatpak has been great. I use it reasonably heavily on a laptop that’s slower than a Steam Deck (Ryzen 5 3500u, 8GB DDR4, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus) and haven’t run into performance issues on multiple distros — EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS, LMDE, Fedora, an early version of Vanilla OS, and most recently Debian 12. On my desktop I don’t feel a performance difference between Flatpak and native.
Speaking as someone who uses OpenRC on all my machines . . . no, systemd is not necessarily slow, and personally I don’t care about the speed of my init system anyway. Thing is, systemd also has nothing that makes it more useful to me than OpenRC, so I have no incentive to change. Plus, I dislike the philosophy behind it, the bloat, and the obnoxious behaviour the project showed when interacting with others in its early days. I’m a splitter, not a lumper, and systemd’s attempts to absorb All The Things strike me as rather . . . Windows-like.
So, in a technical sense I have no reason to believe that systemd is inferior to OpenRC + sysv, and it may be superior for some use cases which are not mine. I don’t spend a lot of time ranting about it, and I see no point in trying to convince people not to use it if it fits their needs. But I still won’t use it if I have another option.
I agree. SystemD is a great service daemon (or, sigh, unit daemon in the stupid parlance). I like unit file syntax and I like the ergonomics of systemctl. It’s solid and I appreciate the feeling of consistency that systemd lends to the otherwise chaotic landscape of Linux distrobutions.
It’s for this reason that I’m willing to forgive SystemD overstepping the boundaries of services somewhat. System init/mounting? Sure, that’s a blurry line after all. Logging? Okay – it does make sense to provide a single reliable solution if the alternative is dealing with dozens of different implementations. Network resolution & session management? Fine, I’ll begrudgingly accept that it’s convenient to be able to treat logins/networking as psuedo-services for the sake of dependencies.
If that’s as far as the scope crept, SystemD and I would be cool, but the so-called “component” list just keeps on going. SystemD has no business being a boot manager, nor a credential manager, nor a user manager, nor a container manager, nor an NTP client. I understand why they can’t deprecate most of this junk, but why can’t they just at least make this cruft optional to install?
Systemd (PID1) is not your boot manager, network deamon, resolver, user manager or ntp service.
Those are entirely independent deamons that happen to be developed under the systemd project umbrella but can be exchanged for equivalent components.
Tkey are gully optional.
In many cases, the systemd project’s one is one of the best choices though, especially when used with other systemd-developed components.
In some cases, there is no other viable choice because the systemd-* is just better and nobody wants to deal with something worse.
Nope. None of this affects Fedora. Fedora is upstream from RHEL, meaning code from Fedora is contributed towards Redhat Enterprise Linux, and not the other way around
The problem of systemd is that it hasn’t been just a replacement of init as they initially claimed, and now deny they ever did. Things like Mono, Gnome and systemd are bad for the ecosystem long term.
An init done by constructive people wouldn’t be a problem at all.
The problem of systemd is that it hasn’t been just a replacement of init as they initially claimed
Apart from the PID 1 part of systemd, almost all tools are optional.
Although I have a positive opinion about the systemd project, I used netctl instead of systemd-networkd for a long time without any problems. And even today I don’t use systemd-resolved because I use a combination of unbound and Pi-Hole in my private LAN. And so on.
So you can’t say that the systemd project has replaced various solutions in such a way that you don’t have a choice anymore.
Honestly, that looks like a fairly short list and half of the tools interact closely with useful functionality that didn’t even exist at all before systemd came around.
I decided to go with Da Vinci Resolve for video editing and I might migrate to something to replace Lightroom in future, can’t now, because I have all my Lightroom catalogues at work.
I mostly use photoshop to remove objects from photos, place in images rendered with blender and retouch them to look like they were part of the photo, I think Darktabke doesn’t have tools similar to healing brush and patch tools in photoshop. Although photoshop is working perfectly so far, it would be nice to find a native application that is up to the task. I haven’t really tried hard to look for linux alternative that can do that.
EDIT:
Wait, I just looked into it and there are such tools! Thank you for suggestion! I might try it!
If you can’t switch, wait until Fedora is forked to a new project, which is inevitable at this point given how dependent Fedora is on Red Hat for governance (source: docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/), and it seems that Red Hat no longer wants Fedora (source: recent pivoting away from the community, and laying off the Fedora project lead in May and terminating the position).
I expect within a few years, you will be able to just change repositories and a signing key, and load whatever community-based Freedora replaces it.
I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.
Arch, Debian, EndeavourOS, Solus, NixOS are community driven and unlikely to have some kind of corporate/hostile takeover.
Seconding Endeavour - Gives you all the benefits of Arch (the wiki, the freakin AUR) without so much of the… Assembly required part. They give you a desktop, a web browser and a firewall and you’re off to the races. A perfect in between, IMO.
About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.
As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”
So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.
This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.
In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.
I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.
That’s disappointing to hear. openSuSE is pretty much my go to to recommend new people exactly because from my experience with it it is well maintained but not entangled too much in corporate bullshit. What have they done?
I don’t think that Fedora will be affected by the changes RedHat has made with RHEL in the near future. It’s still a Community Distro. So there is no need to switch right now.
I’m using Silverblue currently, but i’m thinking about hopping to VanillaOS when they switch to Debian as a Base.
Fedora is 100% community distribution with Red Hat as a sponsor and large contributor. Fedora will always be 100% free and open-source and will never charge to make source-code available if that concerns people. This reflects heavily on their Freedom foundation: “[…] a completely free project that anyone can emulate or copy in whole or in part for their own purposes.”
Red Hat may have a grip on resources and funding for the project, but neither IBM nor Red Hat have ultimate decision-making powers.
If you’re playing competitive FPS games then Wayland still isn’t there, use X11 instead. Outside of it, I’d say it’s worth a shot, it goes especially well with FreeSync monitors.
Your experience will vary from your GPU vendor too. I have an AMD card so Wayland is a smooth experience for me, if you’re on Nvidia then you will most likely face issues.
I’ve noticed a bug where in GPU bound scenarios entire desktop is lagging. This issue happens for me on Wayland but not X11. I don’t know what’s causing it, could be my graphics card running out of its 4 GB of VRAM.
TL;DR give it a try, you can easily switch between X11 and Wayland.
I would say the exact opposite if you’re playing competitive FPS. Xorg tears and is super jittery like a motherfucker. Wayland is the only thing that properly drives my 240hz monitor.
I play exclusively on kde wayland and I am really happy with it, I don’t have to mess with anything and everything works. The only thing that comes to mind is that Steam isn’t wayland native so you have to set an environment variable to set scaling on hidpi screens. Other than that everything works really fine!
It’s because Canonical has a vested interest in pushing the solution that they spent money developing.
As much as I appreciate everything that Canonical has done for Linux, this is the problem with trusting for-profit companies in the open source realm. Profit is their motivator. They don’t care that flatpak has better performance than snap, they just know they spent money developing snap, so they have to force it onto their users, despite it being the inferior tech.
I get where Jeff Geerling is coming from, but I think RedHat has a point as well.
I think a lot of people are coming at this from the perspective that RedHat themselves are just repackaging open source code and putting it behind a paywall, instead of also being one of the top contributors of software and bug fixes into the Linux ecosystem. Jeff mentions that Redhat is based on other open source software like the Linux kernel, but at the same time doesn’t mention that they’re also one of the leading contributors to it. I mean seriously, good luck using Linux without a single piece of RedHat code and see how far that gets you. If you’re entering the discussion from that perspective of “Redhat is simply just taking other people’s work as well”, it’s easy to have a biased view and start painting RedHat as a pure villain.
I also think that people are downplaying exactly how much effort it takes to build an enterprise Linux system, support customers at an engineering level, and backport patches, etc. Having downstream distributions straight up sell support contracts on an exact copy of your work won’t fly or be considered fair in any other business situation and I get why RedHat as a business doesn’t want to go out of their way to make that easy.
And it’s not like Redhat isn’t contributing the developments that happen in RHEL back into the FOSS community. That’s literally what CentOS Stream is and will continue to be, alongside their other upstream contributions.
Does it suck that we won’t have binary compatibility between Alma / Rocky and RHEL, yes it is frustrating as a user! Does it suck that we once got RHEL source for free and now we have to resort to Centos Stream? Yes! But the reality too is that open source STILL needs sources of income to pay developers to work on the Linux ecosystem, which is getting bigger and more complicated every day. That money has to come from somewhere, just sayin.
This argument that open source somehow needs to exploit users and blatantly skirt the intent of the GPL because profit must be taken from it is absurd.
Why is it assumed that they weren’t perfectly sustainable before and why is it the end users responsibility to bear the burden of making their business model viable if they weren’t? Being unprofitable doesn’t excuse you from following the terms of your software license.
No, RHEL “exploits” large companies and the public sector that require a lot of compliance certificates and long term service guarantees for the software they procure. If Red Hat doesn’t collect this money, it goes into the pockets of people with much lower upstream contributions than Red Hat.
The regular user doesn’t need RHEL. Fedora or any other non-enterprise Linux distribution is perfectily fine and they will directly benefit from the contribution that Red Hat finances through their enterprise sales.
Red Hat weren’t ever unprofitable under the old model. This is just the classic killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. They’ll get a short term boost in profit until customers start moving to competitors.
I agree that they should be allowed a profit. However calling it open source when redistributing rhel code causes them to hold the right of canceling you access to the code and binary, eventhough gpl states that redistributing is a right under gpl rubs me the wrong way.
In the video, and in the blogpost that is effectively the transcript of the video, he clearly states that though locking away the source code is within IBM’s or RedHat’s rights.
What seems to have done it for him is, the subscription terms and conditions that prevent redistribution of source code by subscribers or else have the subscription revoked. This is what he argues as being borderline illegal and that RedHat could be banking on the army of lawyers on IBM’s retainer.
And, knowing Oracle, what is to stop them from becoming a subscriber? That way, RedHat has a poster child of a subscriber, Oracle gets access to the code which they can and most likely will, with their own army of lawyers, repackage and publish as Oracle Linux. Admittedly this is my cynical take on Jeff’s.
Time to start debating moving more projects under GPLv3 or AGPLv3 which demand more innovative ways to run a business than what IBM is doing.
If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you’re in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.
I’m using Pop! OS and basically I only need to use the terminal when tinkering with Wine (because I’m stubborn and don’t use Lutris), launching StableDiffusion or doing some wacky shit like trying to install a compatibility layer for android apps.
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