This article is frustratingly non-specific. What are they actually planning to do? From the article it seems they’re trying to create a mobile ecosystem to compete with Google and Apple, but on the Mobifree website the “What” section only mentions using “workshops and pilot-tests” with the aim of figuring out how to best improve some existing projects (with the only one specified being /e/OS).
You asked how it works, the post states how it works. You also asked if it’s slow, which is clearly answered in the post (though you didn’t quote that part). You also asked if there’s some “secret sauce” allowing it to be fast, which is also a weird question since everything used is listed in the post.
If something wasn’t clear to you, why not specifically ask about it? Even in this comment, you still don’t specify what you don’t understand. What kind of answer are you expecting to get?
Why not click the link and find out? It’s literally a Mastodon post, you don’t even have to read much.
(Note that the immutable distros will only be represented by Fedora, GuixSD and NixOS. The others are either too niche or immature)
This was my issue with your original comment - I’m aware most of the work on features like these is based on immutable distros, but just being immutable doesn’t mean it will have those features.
When it comes to reproducibility and declarative system management, I think you’re right that they’re only available in immutable distros.
The security benefit of a read-only filesystem isn’t very significant IMO, and for some immutable distros, interesting parts (to attackers, like /etc for example) are mutable anyway.
And I don’t use any snapshot solution currently, but don’t most of them only store the parts that change between snapshots? According to the Arch Wiki, Snapper’s “default settings will keep 10 hourly, 10 daily, 10 monthly and 10 yearly snapshots”. This doesn’t seem like much of an advantage for immutable distros, really.
There’s no need to go over the “consequences” as they’re (as the name implies) consequences of what has mentioned earlier. Hence, as their causes are better than the one found on traditional distros, so are the consequences better than how they’re found on traditional distros.
I disagree with this though. “Better” is very subjective - I for one consider being able to have an up to date system that can have parts of it updated without rebooting to be much nicer than using something like rpm-ostree, even if it is safer to use in theory (I can’t remember the last time I had an issue when installing a package; rebooting to apply an install atomically will likely make no difference to me other than wasting my time). I know I can use containers to get around this, but once again, this just adds to the hassle.
I guess I’d define it as a distro where the base system is read-only and changes or updates to it are done by replacing it atomically.
Fact of the matter is that the immutable variants of these features are far and wide superior over their counterparts found on traditional distros.
How exactly? Just saying it doesn’t make it true. Except for atomic updates (which are basically the main point of these distros, and why they’re also called “atomic”), what can they do that you can’t on a normal distro?
(Note that you won’t reap all of these benefits on all atomic/immutable distros.)
That’s because most of these benefits are not a result of a distro being immutable.
Ultramarine Linux was created out of frustration with the legal limits of Fedora. As Fedora (and Red Hat) is an American entity, there are legal restrictions on what software can be packaged in the distribution due to the US patent system.
The Ultramarine team aims to make Fedora a little more user-friendly by allowing users to install or package any software they want as long as someone maintains it in Flathub, RPMFusion, or Terra.
In addition to this, we provide various UX improvements around the system, and in the future, custom apps.
In case anyone else was wondering what this is
Yeah cause my favorite thing to do when programming is debugging someone else’s broken code.
Unless you have a very bad PSU, this doesn’t actually matter.
Sekiro feels much more approachable but it doesn’t have the replayability of other Souls games.
Interesting perspective; I actually have double the hours in Sekiro (164) compared to Elden Ring (86) and DS1 (88). And I also didn’t really like Elden Ring (though I really wanted to).
Honestly, I disliked Souls-like games until I played Hollow Knight (at that point, I tried Dark Souls but didn’t get very far). It isn’t a Souls-like game (2D Metroidvania), but as it shares some of their themes and elements, after finishing it I was motivated to try Dark Souls again (and ended up doing a full playthrough).
As far as I’m aware, no launcher (in the style of KRunner) exists which has all those features.
With some effort, you could implement a lot of this functionality using a “generic” launcher (like rofi, for example), but integrating a system tray will be close to impossible (unless you’re willing to write a program which acts as a system tray and provides those launchers with enough information to display a useful representation of the tray, could be cool).
Network effect.
Using GitHub as an example, choosing any alternative (as a small project) will reduce the amount of contributions and will make the project less discoverable. Especially if you consider projects where the technical barrier for contribution is lower, it is much more likely for a potential contributor to have an account on a “mainstream” platform.
I used to think that this was less of an issue in more niche communities, but a recent post by an Emacs package developer (Protesilaos Stavrou, won an FSF award a few years ago) changed my mind: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-30-re-emacs-github-freedom-microsoft/
Why do they need to make a full time living from working on these projects?
I don’t understand why this is suddenly an issue - I use a 40 year old free program daily (Emacs), which has always been developed for free by volunteers (including me).
Think about the software you use - IME software created to make someone richer is usually worse than software written out of passion.
But this is contrary to what is actually happening - when ElasticSearch changed to a “fair code” license, Amazon forked the last version and now maintain OpenSearch.
If you created a new project from scratch which is uniquely useful then sure, companies will probably pay. But what happens if a free competitor pops up? Or if one already exists? I don’t see corporations paying for stuff they can get for free.
I dont expect to get paid because I use a certain license.
Then how are you expecting to get paid? It’s not like with these licenses you would automatically get paid when someone uses your code. You still need to do non-trivial and non-development related work to form some business relationship with these companies
With a free license I could get paid though (and the maintainer and project could, too), I would just have to do the work myself to make it happen (by starting a company offering enterprise support for businesses using the project, for example).
Don’t expect that just because you use a “fair code” license you will be paid - it’s likely that companies would just prefer to use a free software project instead (just like today when companies almost never use AGPL licensed code).
I feel like most people arguing against this stuff dont really play these scenarios through and always have the big scummy company in mind that coopts this honest idea.
In practice it has been scummy companies using these licenses so far.
If you use these licenses as a maintainer and don’t require a CLA, basically no one (including you) can profit off the code. This is obviously worse than the current situation IMO.
Requiring a CLA will reduce contributions (especially when using these licenses IMO), which will hurt your project.
In this fictional situation where you write noteworthy amounts of code for the software I maintain alone, which already gets used by revenue-producing entities and earns some money, you would rightfully ask to be taken on as maintainer and become part of the group profiting from the software, no?
I would rightfully ask, but you could just refuse. You will become (in this scenario) the company leeching off a developer. And if I’m passionate about the project, I’ll probably keep contributing, since I won’t be able to profit from a fork anyway.
There are many more issues with this idea - what if the maintainer disappears? (say someone forked the project and continued development - with these licenses the fork can’t be monetized)
What about the fact that once you sign a CLA you basically have to trust the maintainer/company to not just relicense the code under whatever terms they want (this is not theoretical, ElasticSearch used this method to change to a “fair code” license).
The licenses are legal and allow you to monetize code - but they place restrictions on how it can be done, by design.
A restriction common to all those licenses is that you must own the code to monetize it.
If you create a project with a license like this and require a CLA for contributions, why would I not look for a different to project to contribute to? You’re literally telling me only you are allowed to profit from the code I write. Some people will be okay with this, but many won’t (note that current FOSS licenses allow you to monetize the code even if you did sign a CLA).
OTOH, a company trying to get free cotributions while hampering their competition will greatly benefit from such a license.
So these licenses benefit scummy companies, and make the lives of independent maintainers harder, while lowering the potential for contribution. They are objectively worse than what we have now, and are clearly not free licenses
You missed my point - a fair code license doesn’t change copyright law, so if you’re not the sole developer you can’t easily commercialize your own code, by design.
This is in contrast to free software licenses, which allow anyone to commercialize the code.
/e/OS always seemed kinda pointless to me (the OS itself is just LineageOS + MicroG, which is easily available at https://lineage.microg.org), but I didn’t realize they are actually being malicious, too.