Our smartphones, operating systems and apps are dominated by Google & Apple. "[...] these two Silicon Valley profit-driven companies decide which apps are or aren't allowed, and moderate what our mobile software looks like." says @danlammerhirt from @waag working on the Mobifree project (together with a.o. @efoundation@fdroid@NGIZero@murena@microg@delta
And yet it’s been sliced and diced, features added and removed, distributions created for many devices since its inception by countless developers of varying skill level. It’s a lot more like regular Linux distros than not.
You don’t get to choose the direction Debian takes on what init or sound daemon they ship. The Debian organization does. You might be able to observe their deliberations, but your input is unlikely to be a part of it. In the end the result ends up in the repos. You can take that and change it, just like people have done with Android for many years.
Anyone around who has experience with magnet valves? I got one here (in a coffee machine) that buzzes loudly when active, is that a sign it's going to bite the dust soon? Any suggestions for fixes, like repeated descaling, or simply giving it a good whack? Or save myself the hassle and just get a replacement part?
I know some folks open them, clean them and change o-rings, etc. If it’s not hugely expensive, I’d personally replace it when it goes. I don’t know if buzzing is a sign of death but the ones in the espresso machines I’ve handled did not emit audible noise other than the loud clicking when they switch.
During a presentation by an executive with Google’s Israel branch on Monday, a Google Cloud engineer stood up and shouted, “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide or surveillance.” They were later fired.
I’ve seen very similar use of loop devices in an automotive app management implementation. Each app has its own filesystem image that gets mounted on a loop device on installation, then runs from it. It’s annoying on the command line but it’s not a bad use case of the facility. ☺️
I understand the sentiment. That said, you’re forced to use deb files from Ubuntu’s repositories. 🫠 There are some fundamental choices that are made for you by the OS developers. Sometimes you have more leeway, sometimes less. It’s not the first time and this isn’t the only system component people have complained about. Ultimately if a user disagrees with a choice that the OS developer has made about a system upon which the OS developer depends to ship a working system, it’s probably wiser to switch OSes than fuck around with the system.
They work pretty well on 22.04 LTS too. That’s the beauty of them, they can much more easily be updated cross-OS-release. I switched my snapd to snap as well and now the whole stack is updated independently of the rest of the system. I haven’t used PPAs for a few years now as a result. Following that, OS upgrades have been completely trouble free. No more broken packages left behind from forgotten PPAs.
Makes sense. I’ve been pretty excited about snap on desktop since 2014-15 since it promised to deliver Android-style unbreakable software update capability that finally unlocks updating parts of the system out of band and safely. I switched to snap from all the PPAs I used in 2016. GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think I was able to get rid of the remaining PPAs in 2018. No package breakage since then, trivial OS upgrades. My main machine has been upgraded through every LTS since 14.04. It’s glorious. Yes there were some bugs with snap itself and missing features, cough… “pending update notification” …cough, but that’s par for the course for any system under development and I’ve never seen a real showstopper so far. Flatpak is also useful of course and I do use it but it can’t do system components as far as I know.
The security sandbox provided by snap is a major point to allowing packages “from anywhere” that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Like 3rd party vendor packages. The deb installer runs the package installation of debs as root and it allows them to do anything. I’m not even talking about running the software, a deb can run anything and do anything to the OS at install time. Its security model requires trusted repositories where someone gatekeeps what packages can reach your computer. Snap had the sandbox design since its inception to solve this problem. It wasn’t something tacked on later.
The Firefox snap rollout was a shit show. The snap package itself had defects such as lacking important performance optimizations that were done in other snap packages for example. Then there was the update notification that bugged people to close the app only to show again if they reopened it soon after. Those were ultimately solvable problems but Canonical let them trickle into most users’ desktops during an LTS release… And this was many people’s first impression of snap - those few annoying bugs - even if the system has been solid and running, solving real use cases for years prior. A.k.a. a shit show.