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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

    If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

    You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

    Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

    That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.







  • In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

    In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.






  • Because FOSS shouldn’t add burdens. You publish your work and let everyone else use it. That shouldn’t add extra obligations on you. Usually, you’d also write some docs - after all, without them nobody will know how to use your program, so why bother publishing - but it shouldn’t be an obligation. Make it easy for people to open up their code without this attaching strings.

    Documentation is nice, but it’s kind of different thing that open source: a program can be open and undocumented, or closed but well documented - and I don’t see why we’d want it different for models.