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.
This is like the modern equivalent of the encyclopedia that added wrong “facts” to prove the makers of Trivial Pursuit infringed on their copyright.
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.
Obviously I’m not referring to that, but to what large tech companies call AI. And they are in fact trying to convince people these AI systems they are developing will soon be clever enough to be considered general AI.
A much larger problem is that the energy consumption is several orders of magnitude larger than that of our brain. I’m not convinced that we have enough energy to make a standalone “AI”.
This is a major issue I have with basically anyone who talks about current “AI” systems - they’re clearly not even close to AI, as they require an extreme amount of energy and data to perform tasks which would be trivial to an actual brain. They seem to lack any ability to comprehend their input, only mimicking it through brute force, which is only feasible since computers got fast enough and we can currently keep up with the energy demands.
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/
They didn’t close Campo Sango though, and haven’t closed other studios they bought historically (like Turtle Rock, which eventually became independent of Valve again and released Back 4 Blood).
Why are we quoting each other? I remember the comment before yours. I made it. Idiot.
Grow up
Here is a response without any quotes, I’m sure their ommision makes this comment much clearer:
Valve hasn’t done this.
At the end of January, Xbox fired 1900 employees:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activision-blizzard-layoffs
It’s Phil Spencer’s fault that they released Redfall at 70$. It is his fault that he promised the game will be polished. It is his fault people who paid for the DLC will never get it.
He also closed Tango, which made a critically acclaimed game.
They list something that every single large game company does: buy studios, move talent around, close the old studios.
Not every large game company acts this way. This is also not what he did at all - he didn’t restructure the studios after buying them, he closed them and laid off their employees.
They also talk about how he claims to champion preservation and emulation, something we all agree with.
He’s a known liar (just a year ago he claimed Arkane will continue to polish Redfall, now Arkane Austin has closed before giving people DLC they already paid for)
Phil Spencer has been the head of Xbox for a decade, a decade where Xbox consistently got worse. The only smart decision they made this entire time is Game Pass IMO.
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
/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.