skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering it's something you use for many hours every single day I'd say the price isn't too exorbitant.
Remember that snaps solve the problem of third parties wanting to ship software directly to users.

If you don't want to consume such software, then you don't need to use snaps, and don't need to care that Ubuntu 20.04 supports snaps. The system works perfectly well without them. Snaps aren't being "forced". If you insist on using curl piped to sh to install third party software, you can still do that, or use any other third party mechanism in between.

Too often snap critics conflate the installation of the third party software use case with the distribution itself. Ubuntu 20.04 itself is based on debs, not snaps, and the distribution itself continues to work using apt as always. Claiming that installing another distribution to "solve" this nonexistent problem is disingenuous.
> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.

And how do you remove those incentives?
How do folks here fix the drastic scrolling and acceleration that seems to come with using any mouse _except_ apple ones on their mac?
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that hidden-variables theory was considered in scientific literature, and was experimentally disproved.

'Disproved' is a bit strong. Bell's theorem is the most used to tool to attempt to rule out hidden-variable solutions. Whiles it's true that experiments thus far support Bell's theorem, they all contain loopholes[0]. It's not even clear if an entirely loophole free test can exist, so far no one has been able to come up with one.

I have personally come across two camps of people on this: Those that ignore or discount the loopholes and thus claim that hidden variables have been disproven. Or those that consider the loopholes important, or that the loopholes seemingly being unavoidable is a clue itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopholes_in_Bell_test_experim...
Earth's 'lost species' only the tip of the iceberg
I wish anarchist thinkers could explain their thoughts as well as they could provoke me.
In Matlab's defense, it has become a much better language over the years.

They even introduced first class functions more than a decade ago.
USA, a big one.

Much of Europe for the second place?

As for Asia, Taiwanese are quite low despite high bar, South Korean, and Japanese were more or less equal to average white collar job. Malaysia can be though of as a mid income country, and their local government salaries lag behind white collar jobs.

China... is a special case
I'd been happy with KDE Neon for a while, but since the upgrade to the Ubuntu 20.04 base, snap became so annoying that I switched all of my machines to openSUSE.

Snap is an endless source of frustration. Unless you jump through a bunch of hoops, apps can't access network mounts, you have the obligatory ~/snap folder, startup times are atrocious, and I'm seeing a number of weird glitches especially in Chromium.

Flatpak is marginally better, but has a lot of similar issues.
What you're saying looks a lot like reform, not anarchy.
I guess it raises the question - in the instance of say FDW (Foreign domestic workers, who live with a number of families in Singapore) - just because it’s legal, does it make it right?

I don’t know.

Majority of maids live in 1.5m x 1.7m rooms, get paid ~450USD a month (anecdotal guess), are female and see their own kids for maybe two weeks a year, work 6 if not 7 days a week.

Is that a society we should aspire to?
Thanks Steve for sharing this. I am sorry to hear about your condition. I am sure as you survived Big C, you will survive the small C as well. Take care and thanks.
My MX does everything I want under KDE. About 2 years ago the ability to tell me (and warn me) about my mouse battery level just appeared. It was quite nice to have an update that brought changes you wanted.
You don't need snap-style distribution for sandboxing.
What's the best Ubuntu alternative out there?

I dislike Snap, but I like the stable / out-of-the-box nature of Ubuntu.

I don't like distros where I take a week to setup it the way I like.
All of this was there from the earliest conceptions of anarchism.

The difference is one of degree. Moving to another country requires means to do so, and immigration procedures imposed on you by others that means inherently you have rules imposed on you wherever you go.

It also involves the state you move from imposing rules on you that you have never been free to consent to, and a central aspect of anarchism is to e.g reject that the state has a justifiable claim to regulate property in the first place, and so that unlike a flat share where you share a space that is actively used by others, the state attempts to monopolise commons with threats of force.
And which countries have the abundance of wealth and opportunity available to afford those social programs?

There's only one developed capitalist nation shirking the mantle of social responsibility, but the rest of the socialist democracies are enjoying the fruits of capitalism.
One problem is, that those open source principles have not been codified somewhere. With free software we have its licenses guarding the principles. Like copyleft and the requirement to share modifications if distributing software etc. With many open source licenses we have almost nothing in the way of protecting the principles, because licenses like MIT basically say "I do not care.".
Open source will be exploited, until people learn, that they have to protect it.
I never noticed this. Very cool, and very accurate
If anarchists are anarchists, they shouldn't be cowed by "top down" rules, they should be able to find a way round them, to suit themselves, without destroying themselves. So that it's "not easy" to change countries shouldn't stop an "anarchist" because they're all about negotiation, personal responsibility and choice, and freedom right? Anarchists shouldn't be people crying in the streets how unfair it is that "big brother" is ruining their pathetic little lives. They should be the men and women of action, calculating and executing their next move for their maximum benefit, and possibly for humankind too.

And if it's voluntary, isn't everything voluntary? I voluntarily accept the social contract, or I end up in jail. I voluntarily accept the laws of physics, or I end up maimed or worse. Voluntary speaks to choice, which everyone has. But negotiated...I don't expect most sharehouses (or workplaces, or schools, or whatever) that you enter as a fresher will make their rules negotiable to you. But to another extent, in "advanced" society, the "law" is negotiable through he courts and lawyers, and blackmail, and in "less developed" society, negotiable through bribes and so on. I don't get where anarchism fits in.

It seems like, either it's something that doesn't make sense (no rules) but people believe it zealotly and use it as disguise for violence, or it's something that can work (rules and choice) but not something that works as some standalone organizing principle of a society that is somehow in opposition to the world today. I mean if anarchism is against society, isn't that oxymoron, because if you're anarchist, you can just exercise your choice and negotiate your way to a better situation for yourself? So you don't have to "change the world" just bend it to how you want it locally.

Am I being too sophist? I don't think so but I seem to be missing some point to anarchism. I might just not get what anarchism is, or maybe I don't want to get it. But it seems like it doesn't make sense to me.

It might be me, but anarchy seems to be having an identity crisis.
If you’ve installed Chromium, lxd, (or in prior releases the gnome calculator), even with apt, you’ve installed snaps. Even without using the snap store. That’s the sneaky part that bothers a lot of people and makes it seem like snaps are forced on users.
The public are only given a reflection of the candidate and even that is mediated by the media. Why worry about being accountable when you can spin the truth to suit your party agenda while half the media or more go merrily along with it. The public don’t see truth surrounding our leadership but a reflection that’s often far removed from reality. And it’s been this way since the beginning.
I've enjoyed Pop!_OS
Well, I'll be that guy: I don't get all the complaining about snaps.

First, I use the command line for package installation and couldn't care less if the store experience is suboptimal.

Second, I use Firefox and anything that discourages people from feeding the Chrome monopoly, frankly, that sounds like a good thing to me.

Third, for some desktop apps I want auto updates. Having an option for some software to be on the latest is pretty slick and previously could only be solved with PPAs, which had their own problems (maintainer headaches, dependency issues, etc).

Would I want them on a server? No.

As a desktop (well, laptop) user, do I want all my software deployed with snaps and auto updating willy-nilly? Also no.

But as a desktop user, I appreciate that I have the choice.

And by lowering the barrier for maintainers who no longer have to worry about multiple distro versions, dependencies, etc, it means I get more software options. Sounds good to me!
fedora+rpmfusion+flathub

silverblue effectively gives you the ability to have the benefits of a rolling distro and the benefits of a distro that does releases (stability focused).
That's a great idea, let the private markets front the cash for infrastructure projects and let local gov bodies set the rate of return over a set period (using the tax fund). This means a small portion of tax money can go towards repayment and states/counties get their infrastructure upgraded faster. Can anyone weigh in on why this is a bad idea? I have no idea why this isn't already the case.
Will PWAs Replace Native Mobile Apps?
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. [...] But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

So you're telling me they don't behave well on their own?

Also:

> Do you believe [...] that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?

Doesn't really go well with:

> Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest?

So, all are equally good, unless you're rich or a politician, in which case you're a pig. What could possibly go wrong?
Get a mouse with an unlockable scroll wheel like the G502 and it works fine.
Just in case anyone thinks of signing up for TDA, they have terrible software and they are also being merged into Schwab soon. I would look elsewhere.
You want to do both. If you only play good hands then other players will fold any time you play.
Because if they become popular they'll be picked up by The Empire too. E.g. .org TLD debacle.
Unrelated to the main thread, but

> "I have a soft spot for it, especially the amazing Unity days."

I found that funny since unity was why I left ubuntu (sort of, cos Linux mint) until I discovered i3wm and came back without unity's stupidity.
Something that people forget often is that they can use speech recognition to give their hands a break. Especially if they write a lot of prose, such as email or documentation.
> what is the main problem this snap thing is looking to address ?

Third party software developers wanting to push their latest software releases directly to users, and for users wanting to install such software.

For users who are happy to use the traditional distribution-curated model, getting all "feature" software updates when doing a distribution release upgrade only, snaps are not necessary and you can use Ubuntu 20.04 perfectly fine, as normal, without using snaps.
That is incorrect. In 20.04, among others the Chromium package is a blank .deb file that installs a snap package instead.

You can't choose to install the .deb version instead, unless you add an unofficial repo.

That is absolutely forcing snap on people, since Chromium was a standard .dep package in the previous releases. And it's not the only package where the transition to snap is forced.
So I asked that question a couple months ago and the response that sounded most like a drop in replacement (and better in a lot of ways) was Pop!_OS.

I haven't had the time to try it out yet ... maybe a good weekend project. I've been using Ubuntu for over a decade now so it might take some time to switch over.
I haven't dealt with snaps yet. Isn't there really any way to disable snaps? Not even an obscure one?
Dynamic linking certainly doesn't work for Steam et al.
I think you do understand.
> What's the best Ubuntu alternative out there?

Debian.
If you dislike Snap but like Ubuntu, you can continue using Ubuntu. Just don't install any snaps! The system is perfectly usable without them - right out of the box. No customization required.
Debian. It’s Ubuntu without the commercial parts and without snap.

Or jump ship for a BSD if your hardware is well supported or this is for servers.
At work I do amalgamation builds where I `#include` 10s of files into 4 .cpp files so I can do `make -j 4` and end up with 4 compilation units.

It's stupid. It messes up `using`. It doesn't do incremental rebuilds. But it does clean builds fast for the release script, and it saves me from setting up cross-compilation on a faster computer.
Humans having been living without so called governments or police for millions of years. The perfect anarchist world would have happened by now if it actually worked.
The proper solution is for upstream to behave.
Diamond Batteries Unlikely
Quick Update: new versions now support email login and Apple sign in (iOS) too.
Please, everyone, do this more often! So simple and so powerful.
Your assumption that people must behave better in the presence of authority - and therefore worse in the absence of it - is exactly the assumption that is under question.
You will notice how all those giant servers are all located in first world countries where the infrastructure and political stability is good.
You're essentially saying "I don't care because nobody tried to trick me specifically into installing a snap if I wanted a debian package" - I hope you know that on the way forward, Firefox will be snap-shimmed too.

The Enterprise Linux ecosystem is a solid alternative to Ubuntu. Fedora for desktop and either CentOS or Fedora for servers, depending on how stable they need to be and how much maintenance you're willing to do.
I wonder why anarchists rarely critique the dynamics of FOSS, particularly those projects with no commercial backing. You have a bunch of people in a naturally leaderless setting who, at least apparently, want to cooperate and build something in an environment where violence is largely irrelevant, and yet:

>Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?

Well, yes, but what a pain! Everyone goes off in all different directions and boring stuff often doesn't get done. Sometimes I find myself wishing we had a dictator.
It's not.

For instance: the Pinebook Pro just got gles3 support via upstream mesa, but all the flatpaks with mesa haven't or won't update with any alacrity.

Users are left having to abandon sandboxing in order to get necessary updates.
Erlang processes (Actors) solve this kind of problem naturally, with code that is concise, asynchronous and parallelized. For example, look at solutions for 'Sleeping Barber'. It's possible to write a full solution in <40 SLOC.

Starting 1000 processes is trivial and fast in Erlang. See the first few pages of Joe's presentation from 20 years ago: process creation time ~10us (up to 30k processes); message time ~1us [1]. The code is in his book and the email thread [2]:

[1] https://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/armstrong.pdf

[2] https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2007-July/0280...
A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 – and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged
How often do you find yourself needing third-parties to arbitrate your interactions?

Because for me, outside some formal processes I do for my job, it has been well over a decade since I needed someone to mediate my interactions with someone else.

People are very good at conflict resolution. They only see the cases where it doesn't work out.
Have you seen these preso slides

https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/aysylu/q-con-sp-software-s....

They walk through one of the workflows (end state is deploying to k8s).

Grafeas is a metadata store, Kritis is a policy engine that plugs into k8s as an admission controller- blessing the "admission" (running) of an image in a namespace.

There are existing tools for each language/runtime that produce known vuln lists for individual artifacts in the language ecosystem. These you feed into Grafeas. And you have your CI pipeline providing manifests for each of your built images that contain all upstream dependencies (these produced from each app's build tool). Then at deploy time, Kritis checks the manifest on the image, and for each artifact in the image, checks for vulns and determines whether the vuln should keep the image from being deployed.

Hope that helps. There are many other workflows but that one is the most direct.

Cheers.
They haven't been on my radar since the Amazon Lens integration, but in light of snap, what does Canonical's near-future goal for Ubuntu Desktop look like?

Also, why snaps?
Quick update: new versions now support email login and Apple sign in (iOS) too.
There used to be helicopter service from JFK to the top of the Pan Am building in NYC.

So "Air Taxis" aren't new

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/panam-building-helipad

It took a tragedy to end this service....
> The way open source is straying further and further from its principles is highly annoying.

I do think that's why the distinction between "free software" (copyleft) and merely "open-source" matters.

If you look historically, "open-source" became a thing as a reaction to free software where it preserves the most visible benefits, (source code in the open, modifyable by others), but treats these as purely a convenient workflow when working on code, whereas free software is more of a philosophy and so less likely to erode on principles.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted but you're exactly right.

Love or hate Roget Ver, you'd be hard pressed to find any historical accounting of Bitcoin's rise to fame where he's not mentioned in a favorable light.

Gavin Andersen was the best steward that Bitcoin core ever had. He managed to keep the more toxic contributors at bay for a long time although they eventually forced him out through highly unethical means ( https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/core-developer-calls-andrese... )

> Their subsequent ousting by a group that basically acted like trolls

Gavin thought so too ( https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-bitcoin-cores-gavin-an... )

> to sabotage Bitcoin's plan to hard fork to remove the 1 MB block size limit, and thereby prevent it from becoming a ubiquitous electronic cash

Here's part of the story as told by one of the more honest core devs: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

edit: spacing
You can remove snapd on servers, but on the desktop Gnome itself and a lot of standard desktop apps are snaps, so it becomes much harder to avoid.
Except they’re pushing first party, sometimes core software to snaps. TFA lists Ubuntu Software Center as a victim first and foremost, makes me wonder (guideline-breakingly) if you read TFA.

Now, I don’t use Ubuntu Desktop, but even in server space, lxd (again, first party) has been pushed to snap, with the deb package being a mere shim.
They don't have to behave better in the presence of authority, they are forced to, that's kind of the point of authority :-)
Limited Photos Library privacy feature in iOS 14 [video]
Credit Without Risk: An Anti-Cancel Publishing Model
The Beaglebone has the same problem, which is unfortunate. It would be sweet to have a completely open source stack on that thing that included accelerated graphics.
Mint steers away from snap by default. I like the approach, and Mint 20 Xfce has been an absolute DREAM to install from scratch. Sane basic install, auto-upgrades that lets you choose, possibility to restore OS to previous snapshots and good polish overall. Intuitive and lean interface that lets you mute all notifications.

Currently playing Elders Scrolls Online with Lutris (sorry for the internet downtime, was my first character creation ;). Also playing with minikube and docker to sharpen up some knowledge. All the modern toys easily within reach, making this another year of linux desktop use, only happier with a new nice clean install of a modern solution that mostly works very well. 1 search resolved audio issue for good, everything else was provided from OS.

Something like snap breaks too much of all these community-efforts, that I can only reject it vehemently.
The standard Model M layout is a left-handed keyboard layout. It was a right-handed keyboard layout when the Model M came out in 1984 and very few PC users had a mouse or any kind of pointing device. But for over 25 years it's been a left-handed layout and no-one has done anything in response, because so much of computing is now a cargo cult.
It works well if the developers support it as a first-class delivery mechanism (the nextcloud snap for instance is superb), but there definitely needs to be more fine grained control, if not about if to update, then when to update.
So the ‘few bad apples’ argument is valid for police force that they’re protesting, but not for the protestors?
Tau CETI Star Live
Good to see people are downvoting instead of replying and explaining the disagreement.

I happen to agree with you completely, and I say that as a 25 year veteran in the Linux world.

The open source world goes through things like this periodically. But then the change passes and we all get used to it and the next controversy comes along.
Bloomberg has a pretty good little vignette on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nbz5VFilxY
As mentioned upthread though, there's a lot of reason to believe these self-regulating small societies work specifically when they're small - once you get to the point where you don't have a personal connection with everyone in your tribe, the social cost of acting out of the established norm decreases - instead of your close friends shunning you, maybe a few strangers think you're an asshole.
Author of this post recommends Pop_OS!, but I personally like openSUSE. It’s easily configurable both using GUI and from CLI.
> Because evolution itself is randomness unchecked.

Randomness unchecked is chaos. Evolution actually specifically requires a check, in the form of the organism's environment, which is what prunes the ineffective branches.

This is also so for human organizations. Without agreed upon rules to check undesirable traits we end up with Chaos.
"Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it" (and similar) is a very common aphorism.

It's not an unreasonable position to take that we should dismantle these power structures (having extreme wealth or extreme political power), and it's not unreasonable to be cautious of those who seek to maintain those.
I wonder if snaps will actually survive. The history of Ubuntu specific innovations seems to be that they invariably fail. But it's never not for the lack of trying, so it only makes sense that Ubuntu is trying to push this on the users hard.

I do run 20.04, and one of the first things I did was disable the snap store and enable flatpaks.
And don't install Chromium, since it looks like it's installing the traditional way but, instead, will install the snap.

Is Chromium the only app that works this way or are there a set of applications where the .deb file results in a snap being installed? Right now, Chromium is the only one I've noticed.