josefshame that something like "make a linux distro which is 1) quite normal and approachable, but 2) everything is statically linked" is sufficiently outside the overton window that nobody who wants 2 would care about 1, so they will never coincide and and i am condemned forever to DLL Hell
while im on my They Should Change UNIX crusade im still annoyed that nobody will make Upside Down LSB. imagine if you could just have a root-level /programs directory containing subdirectories, one for each program on your computer. each one has a /bin and /src and so on, like the way people actually organize their software while developing it. $path contains everything in /programs/*/bin/* per-user settings go in /home/username and per-program settings go in /programs/*/etc/
the UNIX filesystem layout makes sense if you view the entire OS as a single piece of software with thousands of components that all work together and depend on one another, and can be composed together using scripts. but after using computers for decades i am now fairly certain that, for me at least, this is not, in reality, actually what an OS is or does, and package managers and other such tooling are really just square-peg-in-round-hole management utilities
when i'm actually using a computer i'm just wrangling a bunch of shit i don't like and don't trust and i want to keep everything separate and portable and have access to random different versions of things like some weird fork i made from an old version from nine years ago and tiny elegant command line tools and gigantic bloated professional software packages and hacky scripts and so on. and it all has to work without conflicting with itself somehow
i can see how docker and virtualenvs and everything are very robust square-peg-gatherers but im not really asking for that, as im sure you can see
Paul Lalonde@jk have a look at Plan 9's namespace composition mechanisms.
I can't say the UX is fantastic, but it achieves isolation, distribution, and mobility.
I can't say the UX is fantastic, but it achieves isolation, distribution, and mobility.
jwatt@jk Can confirm that these are just awful. They do not follow Unix conventions or philosophies. Better off with lxc or podman, but podman copies a lot of docker's ux for "drop-in" compatibility. A lot of projects don't need any kind of virt, lightweight or otherwise, and I'd much rather just build everything in tree and setup an environment to use it instead of using docker or even virtualenvs when I can avoid it. I'm surprised that I can't find more people complaining about the use of virtualenvs in Python and scripts. It causes a ton of problems.
@jk Like imagine the simplicity, "build a tree of stuff and set your root there." You can do that without docker or venvs, really. And, shoot, you could probably build Python and everything in that "root." Don't even worry about venvs; use that local Python install in your root, etc etc
anyMouse@jk "Let's user DLLs for everything, it's so lean and lightweight"
"Oh everything's actually impossible to get to run at the same time, let's just ship everything with its tiny OS full of DLLs"
"Oh everything's actually impossible to get to run at the same time, let's just ship everything with its tiny OS full of DLLs"
@jk I agree with these points so much (except for system directory capitalisation, lol).
Since I started using Linux I've felt that the whole software management thing of it is like it's made for huge 80's mainframes with hundreds of users, all using only software provided by the admins.
Like, does anyone realize how insane it is to expect to be getting word processors and games and graphics software from your OS vendor?
I regularly want to go back to just downloading .exe from software website.
Since I started using Linux I've felt that the whole software management thing of it is like it's made for huge 80's mainframes with hundreds of users, all using only software provided by the admins.
Like, does anyone realize how insane it is to expect to be getting word processors and games and graphics software from your OS vendor?
I regularly want to go back to just downloading .exe from software website.
halva@anymouse_404 @jk i mean it kinda works if you offload some stuff to user repositories (copr, ppa) or having a giant place with all install scripts known to mankind (aur) but it's basically just downloading executables from random sites at that point
Johnny@halva @jk @anymouse_404 Flatpak is also decent in this context. Having some sort of auditing/trust in a repo is still a big factor for me, I'm not willing to go back to exe hunting on the web
@johnny @jk @anymouse_404 yeahh same, exe hunting sucks, especially when we're talking about old and rather specific software
medium rare bird@anymouse_404 @jk tbh this is where I have beef. distributions as the source for software solve *so many* problems with incentives that make the Windows world into a hellscape. it means you no longer need to worry that software is malicious!
you can imagine a system where software is untrusted and heavily sandboxed, but no OS has actually made that design production-ready. certainly not Windows, and OS X is coming closer but SIP is more of a system-wide straitjacket than a program-scope sandbox