There have been apps that set up a chroot with a desktop Linux distro for around a decade, maybe longer. Some of them don’t even need root. But this one definitely sounds more integrated and is interesting for that reason
This is just me being pedantic, but I keep seeing this mistake when UTM is mentioned (specifically in headlines), so I feel like I have to say something:
UTM is not an emulator. It is virtual machine software that uses an emulator (QEMU) to virtualize operating systems.
The difference: emulators emulate hardware. On which, the virtualized operating systems run.
I’m sure the EU will love that bit of malicious compliance that apple have shown they will use to remove non-malware that they just don’t approve of using the same mechanism…
Yes, but this case here is not a problem of Open Standards. It’s misusing the power to exclude certain type of applications from the eco system. That can even happen with companies following open standards, they could still misuse their power and position to exclude what they want to, according to their policy.
The vast majority of Linux users consider systemd as a good thing because it apparently makes system administration easier. They also don’t agree that systemd is monolithic, because it’s actually designed modular.
But of course there are detractors. The only thing I like about systemd is its declarative service definition and parallel service startup. But if I wanted to run an OS with bloated and inscrutable software (even with the source code), my choice wouldn’t be Linux or Systemd.
I also routinely switch parts of my OS. This is harder with systemd. Although it is modular, the modules are so tightly coupled that it will prevent the replacement of modular components with alternatives. Frankly, I think systemd is killing the innovation in system component development.
I use Gentoo with OpenRC. So my position in this matter should be clear. Anyway, check the last paragraph again to see what I think about systemd’s modularity.
Yes. I agreed with you. But I made it sound like something else. Bad wording on my side.
As I’m too Gentoo openrc user. I also use seatd+greetd instead of (e)logind and replacing sysvinit with openrc-init. The availability of choices made me do it!
However, a thing I try to remember and wish others would as well is simply this: Canonical is a company. Their goal is to make money. They are not out to create the ultimate free as in freedom Linux distribution.
This does (to my mind) not make them evil, and ESPECIALLY doesn’t make the folks who work there evil. It makes them participants in the great horrible game that is Capitalism, and expecting anything else from them is going to lead to heartache, as you’ve seen.
If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and won’t try to jam snaps down your throat, you might consider giving Debian a whirl as many others have.
Continuing to ride the Ubuntu train and raging against the dying of the light when it continues chugging in the direction it’s been headed for YEARS seems … futile :)
Nice to see that KDE is so well supported! I’d been running Manjaro KDE the last time I had Linux installed on my desktop but I may give Debian a try this time around.
There’s no way to install a snap except through Canonical’s snap store (or snap store proxy, which gets them from Canonical’s snap store).
They’re charging for kernel security live patches. They charge for LTS. If they get enough buy-in re: snaps, they’re going to do the only thing a for-profit company can do.
No, but they actually do write some patches and they also do all the menial work, testing and verification to keep a piece of software serviceable for 10 years
If you think it’s easy, go and attempt it yourself. The greatest cure for people talking shit about needed effort, according to my experience…
Money is literally the very incarnation of evil via the Talisman it bears.
If they trying to make money then they are, not a fiber of otherwise, Evil.
You’re decision to not recognize the blatant & obvious Talisman does not make you correct. It’s not your choice. It’s the choice of that occult chant and signature.
Humans are inherently evil. There is but a thin veneer we call “civilization” that stops of from beating each other to death with whatever object can be brought to hand.
And what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? :)
It’s basically Chrome. It’s not a real application, it’s a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.
If Firefox could allow their engine to be packaged like this I’d use it. The problem I see here is chromium. Everything is a trade off and we need more ways to build maintainable cross platform applications.
Slack, for example, is Electron and it runs great. One of the best apps I’ve used. And it works better than the browser version…
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. Yeah it uses more ram than is necessary but again everything is a trade off. Not everything can be a hard to maintain rust app. Let’s try to embrace cross platform solutions, though yes fuck chrome/google, so sure criticize that part of it.
Let me get this right… you’re complaining about Chromium, but you use Slack? You do realize Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox? Also, the Chromium sandbox is superior to Firefox.
Android being based on Linux prob has something to do with Chromium’s strong Linux support, but Mozilla has consistently prioritized Windows/Mac. Despite it still be challenging, building Chromium from source has always been a lot easier IMO than trying to create a custom build of Firefox.
Regardless, when it comes to privacy, Chromium itself is pretty stripped down and has policy-based integrations that put it on par with Firefox in terms of security. Even with Firefox, you’d have to modify quite a few policies to improve security. Tor/Mullvad Browser though do a better job in many ways and there is no equal to those privacy enhancements on Chromium that I know of, unless you’re using something like GrapheneOS.
Point being, people like to complain about Chromium a lot & act like Apple fan bois for Firefox, when in reality privacy is nearly the same with both with some minor configurations.
What the heck are you talking about? Chromium is one of the hardest packages to build and it takes forever. Firefox has FAR fewer dependencies. Chromium’s privacy enhancements are a joke.
You should go tell that to the maintainers of GrapheneOS, which is known as the most secure mobile OS… which uses a custom Chromium build, because of Chromium’s superior sandboxing.
Chromium is not stripped down at all, just use googerteller and see. It contacts Google everywhere, on the password list, on the account list, in some settings pages, and just randomly sometimes.
It is very crazy. And also it is not fingerprint resistant at all.
I am using all flag settings, policies and GUI settings possibly existing and it still is like that. So no, it is not the same privacy-wise.
Oh really, what policies are you using? Cause my Firefox does all the same things you mention regarding calling Mozilla services for all sorts of things, including telemetry. Oh, and it isn’t fingerprint resistant either… so please, share what you’re doing.
I realize Firefox business practices aren’t total garbage for humanity and that they are constantly working to improve it on like .1% budget of Google. And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers. So yeah let’s only care about the technical aspects, or something
And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers.
That isn’t true. You’ve got WebKit-based browsers, LadyBird/LibWeb/LibJs, Goanna, and others. Why choose Mozilla to lead the efforts, when another open source community/foundation may be better? You can also participate in the various new web specifications yourself too if you’re not happy with the direction they’re headed.
They said competition, not alternatives. As things are right now, and knowing people, not just trying to make a technical point, Firefox is the only competition.
What do you think alternatives are exactly? Firefox has what, 3‒5% usage across all platforms? What did Mozilla do to fix that other than exploring Pocket, a iOS only Password app, and now reselling a crippled VPN & email/phone relay? At some point, people will have to move on from anything Mozilla-owned. Want a better browser, then find a community you can donate to that is focusing on building a better browser. It’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses.
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me
The issue is mainly developers using Electron when things like React Native and Flutter exist. I don’t know a lot about Flutter, but React Native uses native UI widgets and feels a lot nicer than Electron.
No, one Chrome tab does not eat that much RAM. Yes it is not as good as native, but it is more platform agnostic, and an Electron app does not really go above 300 MB RAM.
I’m a web developer. I think there’s a misunderstanding here. The person I responded to said that slack purposely made the web version worse than the desktop app, which I’m doubting.
Because I have used both versions of slack and they’re almost exactly the same. The desktop version only works better imo because of small factors such as having its own window so it does not get buried in tabs, and the notification options are (or at least were) more robust. Have you not used the two versions?
I don’t really understand your comments. Are you implying that there would be an advantage for slack to “cripple” the web version, when they are essentially running probably 99% of the same code in the electron version? They’re never going to get rid of the web version, and if you’ve used slack for ~9 years like I have, you can easily observe they’re actually one of the few app makers out there to make mostly positive changes to their app. They aren’t suddenly going to make the web app shitty.
Also, obviously yeah when it makes sense to, app makers in general make the web app version shitty on purpose. Reddit mobile for example. But just because that’s a thing in the world doesn’t mean it is what slack is doing…not sure why you seem to be implying it’s a universal practice.
Slack is one of those apps which lags in a week on any hardware, it might be better than web version but it still sucks ass compared to fucking ICQ clients. Source: using it in the company I work for, for about 7 years already.
I don’t often have trouble with slack being slow, or buggy. Been using it like 9 years myself. Interesting you’re comparing slack to icq. Are you referring to a current version of icq, or the one that existed in the early 2000s?
I am not sure I understand comparing an app designed to do video/audio chat seamlessly, threaded conversations, channels, filesharing, plus has dozens of subtle nice features that make for a rich experience and a… Chat app, that worked fine for sending plaintext messages but didn’t really do anything else.
I compare it to qip or similar with voice calling support about 10 years ago. But still, Slack loses to pretty much anything on the market regarding performance, be that Element, Telegram, Skype or even Discord. It literally battles with biggest IDEs lol
Now that Chromium has persistent File System Access permission support, what benefit does Electron have over a PWA other than “Native-looking” menu bars?
Yeah, I was dissapointed, but at least it is a controlled browser and not reliant on your normal browser which could change or have malicious extensions
Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It’s easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it’s essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what’s been built in to the local app.
Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.
Electron runs a core Chromium Browser + NodeJS + a bit more.
Unlike Chromium itself it is not backwards compatible and removes a ton of things like its sandboxing capabilities.
I am not sure how it is less secure, but it may use more RAM (also not always but generally yes of course), doesnt allow hardening (unlike android WebView apps) and breaks LD_PRELOAD-ing another memory allocator.
This is only a big problem in special cases, in general it makes apps strictly dependend on GNU glibc and others, no idea how it works on Alpine or others (that actually try to make a secure system).
If somebody knows more about security concerns about Electron, please add.
There are other options like Tauri that do the same thing as electron, but instead of bundling chromium with the app, it relies on the OS provided web view. It’s also built with Rust, which tends to be faster.
As an example, Mac would use Safari, Windows would use Edge (chromium), and Linux would likely use WebKitGTK, which is what safari uses.
By using the default browser, developers save a ton of space—at the risk of compatibility issues, which are very very rare nowadays.
It’s what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It’s a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.
All that with the help of Google’s telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.
We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it’s own browser shell. We have come full circle and we’re now using 10x the resources.
Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.
Wow. That sounds horrible. Do you have a source about the system level access statement? I would like to see people’s thoughts on it, if it’s as bad as it sounds, I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before
Do you have a source about the system level access statement?
Electron apps are native apps with the Chromium browser embedded in their windows, so they can do anything a native app can. It supports Node.js modules for things like filesystem access, and can interop with C++ code by writing an add on (nodejs.org/api/addons.html)
I am actually sort of worried that now that they put this out they will retire bridge. We will have to wait and see. Is having a browser tab open really that bad… ?? I suppose but I still like programs over web pages.
This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?
It seems a fairly explicit goal of systemd to redefine Linux as a unified platform rather than as a kernel that can run any one of many implementations of many different services. I assume this is not just the systemd lead but also a goal of Red Hat.
Personally, while I am ok with systemd defining itself as a single source for all this functionality, I hate that they are taking away ( or making it hard at least ) to have independent implementations of these services.
What Chinera is doing with dinit and turnstile is really interesting. It would be nice to have feature comparable approaches to the systemd monolith that distributions could choose from.
What Chinera is doing with dinit and turnstile is really interesting. It would be nice to have feature comparable approaches to the systemd monolith that distributions could choose from.
Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.
Yeah, if all those complainers want something more modular, they’re free to push for protocols that allow to leverage existing components while also allowing for them to come from multiple vendors.
Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects,
I dont get the hate for this - Linux is full of projects that do the same thing: coreutils, busybox, kde, gnome, different office suites, even the kernel itself. It is very common for different related projects to be maintained together under the same project/branding with various different levels of integration between them. But people really seem to only hate on systemd for this…
What standards? The old init systems were a loose collection of shell scripts that were wildly different on every distro. Other tools like sudo also broke the established standards of the time, before it you had to login as root with the root password.
Even gnome and KDE have their own themeing standards as well as other ways of doing things. Even network manager is its own standard not following things that came before it. Then there are flatpack, snaps and app images. Not to mention deb vs rpm vs pacman vs nix package formats. Loads of things in Linux userland have broken or evolved the standards of oldern times.
Systemd breaks its own standards. Oh, were you making a replacement for this component of systemd that does some things the systemd version doesn’t? Well the latest version of systemd just changed the Unix socket protocol that it uses to communicate with the rest of systemd from text based to binary. Sorry for the lack of warning.
@AVincentInSpace@nous I've always disliked the arrogance of the lead Dev & the inexorable incremental usurping of Linux functionality. I'm deeply uncomfortable with so much being absorbed into a big binary black box
I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.
Except desktop environments - they are far from a simple loosely collection of simple stuff. They coordinate your whole desktop experience. Apps need to talk to them a lot and often in ways specific to a single DE. Theming applications is done differently for every toolkit there is, startup applications (before systemd) is configured differently, global shortcuts are configured differently by each one… If anything it is something you interact with far more than systemd and has far more inconsistencies between each one. Yet few people complain about this as much as they complain about systemd.
Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things.
They used to be simple things back when hardware and the way we use computers were much simpler. Nowadays hardware and computers are much more dynamic and hotplugable and handle a lot more state that needs to persist and be kept track of. www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo is a great talk on the subject and talks about why systemd does what it does.
Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.
One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.
There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.
Did they think about how far I would have to move my hand to type it? Sudo is only in two easy to reach places on the keyboard, run0 is 4 separate areas of the keyboard, one two rows from home and none on the home row.
Between this and the pip install break all system packages
This has to be about the dumbest change I could possibly gather in the last 20 years of computing. I can’t even imagine breaking this many things all at once. I’m still dealing with the side effects of people’s installers from docker-compose and the pip problems - ansible will just never be the same again. Now this.
Sounds good. It’s a win win. People that doesn’t like the system d implementation can use doas or keep sudo. I Hate the name though. Run0 is dumb can’t they just steal the name doas
There’s actually an rtfm package in Arch’s aur, but it just opens the archwiki for you which just adds that tiny bit of… of That Arch Way Of Doing Things I guess.
Oh yeah I know about tldr. It’s pretty great. I actually use a Rust version of it called teeldeer. I also have a whole lot of “disputable” aliases, for example rtfm for tldr and rtfmp (read the fucking man page) for man. I also use fucking for sudo. There’s nothing better than running pacman -Syu, realizing the mistake and then typing in fucking pacman -Syu
Well, since doas has a Linux implementation, stealing that name would cause lots of issues to users who already use it or want to use doas instead of run0. This will be a default part of systemd; not a new package. The reason it’s called run0 is because it’s just a symbolic link to systemd-run, and instead of executing as an SUID binary, like sudo or doas, it runs using the current user’s UID.
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