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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Have you ever heard the story of the snake?

    One evening, a man walks along a dimly lit path. He suddenly halts, his heart pounding with fear. Before him, on the ground, lies what appears to be a venomous snake. He freezes, paralyzed with dread. Only when a friend comes by with a lantern does the true nature of the object come to light: it is merely a piece of rope.

    I learned this story from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist author. He would indicate with stories like this that our perceptions shape our reality. Often, we react out of fear and misunderstanding, seeing snakes where there are none. He said that mindfulness and deeper understanding can act like the lantern, illuminating the true nature of our experiences.



  • I wonder if it would help to think back to the first time you littered? When I was 5 or 6, I remember eating a candy and not wanting the wrapper any more. It had to be someone else who saw what I did and pointed out that it isn’t good if we all did this, because then the playground would be all full of trash and we couldn’t play there. I was like, “Oh, I get it.” But if someone hadn’t explained it to me, I think the behavior could have innocently continued for quite some time. I grew up in a very rural place (northern Canada).













  • The short answer is “yes, but only as much as it needs to”. Flatpak had to make a decision between “do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades” or “do we minimize space” and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

    Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It’s happened to me before–for example fslint. I don’t think this can happen with flatpak.


  • It’s funny, I do almost the exact opposite–whenever there is a flatpak version, I prefer it over a built-in apt package. The flatpak is almost always more up-to-date and often has the features and bug fixes I need.

    Examples:

    • Vorta (0.8.12 flatpak; 0.8.3 apt)
    • Pinta (2.1.1 flatpak; 1.6 apt)
    • Minder (1.15.6 flatpak; 1.13.1 apt)
    • Xournal++ (1.2.1 flatpak; 1.1.1 apt)

    .

    I don’t think it’s fair to expect the distro maintainers to be up to date with every software out there–the universe of software has grown and grown, and we just can’t expect them to wrap/manage/test every new release and version bump.


  • The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).

    That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).