> People deciding not to eat something because "it has chemicals in it" is a pretty ignorant take.
When people say this they are obviously not referring the the definition of "chemical" that a chemist would use. Pretending otherwise is exactly the "nerd-snark" mentioned above which makes people distrust experts because they clearly aren't intending to use the term "chemical" in a sense that would include substances like water.
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.
Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
The Nixpkgs repo is a Git repository. I forked the repository and I merge in updates using the normal git workflow. I've tried flakes and stuff, but none of them are as convenient as directly modifying files.
All large organisations have huge amounts of "useless" overhead. When this overhead is removed, you no longer have a large organisation. Sometimes, having a large organisation is worth the overhead: organisations quietly solve a great deal of issues. But, since they do this quietly, it can be hard to tell which issues they solve; and they loudly create a lot of issues, too. This means it can be hard to tell when they are or aren't worth it, and when organisational reform would actually be expected to improve things.
I see it as a reduction in overhead in many ways. Right now moderation doesn’t fall under the elected structure that runs the rest of the project. Bringing it in line with everything else ought to result in less drama.
Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.
> What does it accomplish?
As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.
Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".
For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.
It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.
The Holocaust does not justify committing a genocide against another population. Some people having inaccurate, or even immoral, views about what occurred on October 7th does not justify genocide. The fact that Hamas engages in evil acts does not justify genocide perpetrated against innocents.
In short: Two wrongs do not make a right.
It is also worth noting that you are not portraying the matter fairly. You are transposing certain radical elements, i.e. those who actively defend Hamas, on to people who simply oppose the ethnic cleansing and genocide being perpetrated by Israel. I don't support Hamas, and I also don't support Israel.
Furthermore, you falsely assume that people are generally ignoring the evil actions perpetrated by Hamas, which is not the case. It is a false dichotomy to present the issue as supporting either Israel or Hamas. Hamas undeniably has engaged in terrorism, but that has no bearing on whether or not Israel is acting properly in response. The fact of the matter is that Israel hasn't merely been attacking Hamas targets that happen to also have civilians present, but rather that Israel is going beyond that to willfully engage in a near-indiscriminate extermination campaign against unjustifiable targets.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right” misframes the issue. Hamas murders civilians deliberately; Israel targets Hamas while taking steps to limit civilian harm. Civilian deaths are tragic, but tragedy is not genocide. The moral difference is intent.
“The fact of the matter is that Israel hasn't merely been attacking Hamas targets that happen to also have civilians present, but rather that Israel is going beyond that to willfully engage in a near-indiscriminate extermination campaign against unjustifiable targets.”
Calling this “indiscriminate extermination” ignores Hamas using civilians as shields and demands an impossible standard of zero casualties. It also drains the word genocide of meaning. The Holocaust was genocide, the systematic extermination of Jews for existing. That is not what Israel is doing to Palestinians.
>Israel targets Hamas while taking steps to limit civilian harm. Civilian deaths are tragic, but tragedy is not genocide.
Israel does not merely target Hamas with incidental civilian deaths, they have been documented actively targeting civilians. This has been indisputably demonstrated at this point. Early on I was much more skeptical since it's similarly indisputable that Hamas does engage in terroristic behavior, but as time has gone on we've had report after report confirming that Israel isn't merely targeting Hamas.
> The moral difference is intent.
Hamas intends to eliminate Israel, Israel intends to eliminate Hamas (justifiable) and exterminate the Palestinians (unjustifiable) to continue their long-running expansion operation and further their grip on the region at the expense of the other native populations.
> Calling this “indiscriminate extermination” ignores Hamas using civilians as shields and demands an impossible standard of zero casualties.
1. I've already explicitly acknowledged the distinction between attacking Hamas, inadvertently harming civilians in the process, and the active slaying of the civilian population which is taking place. The former is regrettable but unavoidable, the latter is evil and it is what is also taking place.
2. I intentionally said "near-indiscriminate" rather than just "indiscriminate" for a reason. Unlike many people, yourself included, I don't view this conflict as a completely black-and-white matter. Israel is instrumentalizing their legitimate efforts in order to implement a wider effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
You keep saying it is “indisputably demonstrated” that Israel is targeting civilians, but you have yet to explain anything other than your feeling. If the evidence is so overwhelming, name the specific proof. “Reports” from Hamas-run ministries or partisan NGOs are not indisputable, they are contested like all wartime information. Overstating your case makes it weaker. UN councils with 50 some odd member states share this same bias.
The crux of genocide is intent. Hamas openly declares its intent to erase Israel. Israel declares its intent to eliminate Hamas. If Israel’s goal was exterminating Palestinians, explain why it has repeatedly supported two-state proposals that Palestinian leadership rejected. Explain why over 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab, voting in elections, serving in parliament, even sitting on the Supreme Court. That reality is incompatible with a state bent on extermination.
Your “near-indiscriminate” phrasing is just a rhetorical trick. If you admit it is not indiscriminate, then you acknowledge Israel is targeting Hamas, not carrying out genocide. Civilian deaths are tragic, but tragedy is not the same thing as a systematic plan to wipe out a people.
Israel drops leaflets, issues warnings, and opens corridors. Hamas embeds in schools, hospitals, and residential blocks. That doesn’t absolve Israel of responsibility when civilians die, but it does show intent matters.
> That reality is incompatible with a state bent on extermination ... Civilian deaths are tragic, but tragedy is not the same thing as a systematic plan to wipe out a people.
Same energy.
"We could have killed all the Jews in Germany yesterday, but we did not do it. The demonstrations in Franconia were, in general, disciplined, clear, and farsighted."
- Julius Streicher, in a speech the day after Kristallnacht.
> If Israel's goal was exterminating Palestinians, explain why it has repeatedly supported two-state proposals that Palestinian leadership rejected.
"The behavior of the Führer and the Reich in these days of continuous Polish and English provocations were remarkable. No other nation would have been as patient. It would have done what the Führer finally did on 1 September much earlier."
Such a good faith conversation. I pose legitimately honest questions and your "gotcha" is irrelevant nazi quotes to assassinate my character and points. I challenge the double standard being imposed and you try to relate it to kristalnach when the hypocrisy is 10/7 is closer in relation to the event.
It's not similar at all, I don't accept your poor framing, and you clearly don't either because you refuse to do anything but low quality adhom attacks. I don't know if you are a troll or what, but clearly you don't have interest in truth or discussion, just bad faith labeling and insults.
The documents presented here reveal an important, and, until now, unknown aspect of the efforts the Israeli government made to deflect criticism over human rights violations which were part of the occupation since the very beginning. The documents describe events that took place during the first decade of the occupation, but they echo a practice that is still in existence today – manipulative efforts to undermine the work of human rights organizations.
"The report concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza since 7 October 2023, covering the period from that date until 31 July 2025.
It said that Israel has committed four acts of genocide:
Killing members of the group: Palestinians were killed in large numbers through direct attacks on civilians, protected persons, and vital civilian infrastructure, as well as by the deliberate creation of conditions that led to death.
Causing serious bodily or mental harm: Palestinians suffered torture, rape, sexual assault, forced displacement, and severe mistreatment in detention, alongside widespread attacks on civilians and the environment.
Inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group: Israel deliberately imposed inhumane living conditions in Gaza, including destruction of essential infrastructure, denial of medical care, forced displacement, blocking of food, water, fuel, and electricity, reproductive violence, and starvation as a method of warfare. Children were found to be particularly targeted.
Preventing births within the group: The attack on Gaza’s largest fertility clinic destroyed thousands of embryos, sperm samples, and eggs. Experts told the commission this would prevent thousands of Palestinian children from ever being born."
Genocide can't be measured by intend, because we can't look into someone's head. It's measured by the actions that are taken. And while I do agree that Israels actions are a mixed bag, I feel too many lines are crossed to assume only good intend.
You have unfortunately been misinformed about both examples that you brought up.
> when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people"
Trump did not call the killer a fine person, nor did he call everyone involved on the right fine people. He explicitly stated that there were, "some very bad people in that group." The "very fine people" was referencing those who were peacefully protesting both for and against the removal of historical monuments. If you watch the original video instead of the selective reporting this is all made very clear. You can watch or read the transcript of the "very fine people" press conference here: https://www.veryfinepeople.info
> When they killed Brian Sicknick, he called them heroes and pardoned them.
Brian Sicknick was not killed by anyone. The medical examiner ruled that he died of natural causes. There is no evidence that he was killed, which was reflected in the difficulty the prosecutors faced, and its why nobody was ever convicted of murder.
You don't seem to understand why the "very fine people" remark was unacceptable to many of us. Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.
On the topic of Sicknick, I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted. The timing alone is strong evidence that the two are related.
Even if it was "merely" an assault on a police officer, it's political violence and it's acceptable to every Republican voter. You opened this door.
> Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.
I again strongly encourage you to go watch the video or read the transcript since it directly contradicts what you are continuing to claim. Trump explicitly said that that the neo-Nazis should be "condemned totally." A total condemnation is exactly the opposite of your claim that he was "excusing" or trying to "minimize" the events. I will also note that I find it quite odd that you claim to be upset about Trump allegedly downplaying violence, but then go on to downplay and minimize left-wing extremist violence. I believe that all political violence should be condemned, its unfortunate that you appear to believe otherwise.
> I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here, I don't find it likely that I will be convinced to ignore the medical expert who examined the case and the corresponding documentary evidence that points against the idea that Sicknick was killed.
Please take a look at the transcript in its entirety. Shortly after the part where he says Nazis should be condemned, he goes on to say that there are "fine people on both sides", undercutting his earlier claim.
I and the other poster looked at the transcript in its entirety, and called upon you to do so as well.
The argument being used to rebut you depends on understanding the transcript in its entirety. Yours depends on taking a few words out of context and misrepresenting the party to whom they refer.
The thing about Trump's speech pattern is that he says word-salads. In both the transcript and the video of the speech, you can see him basically trying to make both points at the same time (as he often does when he's scrambling to figure out what to say). The most charitable steel-man interpretation I can give of his words is
- the specific people who killed a protestor are condemnable
- people were engaging in passionate political demonstration for the issue they were invested in before the killing occurred. They were Americans participating in the American tradition of protest and demonstration, the "fine people" on both sides
Problem is, that second point clashes hard with the footage of the event that showed white-shirted white men carrying tiki torches chanting "blood and soil." Most charitably, Trump wasn't talking about those folks; he was talking about some more moderate, reasonable pro-Lee-statue protestors who were there before the tiki torch mob showed up.
I think people's skepticism that such a moderate protest group actually exists varies, and if your skepticism is dialed to 100%, it's real easy to conclude Trump meant the "Jews will not replace us" crowd were the "fine people" because they don't see any other people he could be talking about.
> The most charitable steel-man interpretation I can give of his words is
In my view, he said this and more, plainly and as comprehensibly as can be expected.
> Most charitably, Trump wasn't talking about those folks; he was talking about some more moderate, reasonable pro-Lee-statue protestors who were there before the tiki torch mob showed up.
He said very directly and explicitly that he was talking about the non-violent protestors:
> There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I'm sure in that group there was some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest — and very legally protest — because I don't know if you know, they had a permit.
He draws a very clear contrast between who he considers "rough, bad people" and who he considers to have "innocently protested".
> Problem is, that second point clashes hard
Only because of a human tendency to assign people to ingroups and outgroups and commit the fallacy of composition. Logically speaking, there is no contradiction whatsoever.
> I think people's skepticism that such a moderate protest group actually exists varies
It shouldn't, first off because they were seen and documented (even if some of the footage may have been suppressed) and second because of a general base-rate assumption that protests have a reasonable basis and are mostly conducted by non-violent people (and fair, intellectually honest discussion doesn't throw that assumption away just because the idea expressed is in the "wrong" general direction).
Put another way: the consensus estimate is that the George Floyd protests in 2020-2021 caused close $2 billion in damages (mainly to property), including over half a billion within Minneapolis–Saint Paul, along with (per Wikipedia) 19 confirmed deaths and over 14,000 arrests. However, this became a global phenomenon with protests spread across thousands of cities and towns, with probably millions of people involved (I can't readily find an estimate) directly in the streets and many more simply taking actions such as putting BLM logos on their webpages. So even with that extent of violence and damage, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that a "moderate protest group actually existed". Right-wingers like to meme about news networks (CNN in particular as I recall) speaking of "mostly peaceful protests" against a background of widespread arson and looting seen on camera; but as it turns out this is not actually a contradiction.
> if your skepticism is dialed to 100%, it's real easy to conclude Trump meant the "Jews will not replace us" crowd
I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews". In some cases, the "Y" may have sounded somewhat like a "J" because of interference from the trailing "s" of the previous iteration of the chant. But I didn't hear an "s" on the end of the word. That would come from a mental auto-correction after already hearing "Jew" and realizing that "Jew will" is ungrammatical.
I concur with most of this, with one minor exception.
> I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews".
I believe your personal experience, but you didn't see the whole story. Both chants were given. Hilariously, one possible explanation is that a subset of the protestors performed mental auto-correction: hearing the "you" chant coming from other protestors, filtered through their own biases, they heard "Jew," went "Oh, we're finally doing this!" and started chanting "the quiet part loud," as it were. Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted, it may be reasonable to infer that at least a subset of the protestors had mental priors that would make that substitution likelier than not.
(Not terribly important, but as a sidebar: your pull quote is an excellent example of what I mean when I say "word salad" regarding the current President. "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee." is the kind of thing that would make a sentence diagrammer light their own hair on fire. He has a speaking style that leaves his words very open to multiple interpretations).
Entirely plausible. I don't think we have solid evidence, though. People showed me chants where they believed "Jews" was said and I didn't really hear it. At most it sounded as if a minority of them might have been saying it. That would make you technically correct, but I don't think the claims that are generally made accurately represent the situation.
> Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted
I agree that this originates in hateful, extremist circles. I also think that people who hear it could validly assign different meaning to it and use it with that different meaning, and may validly feel that extremists don't get to decide what it means.
In my experience, very few people who oppose immigration (in majority-white or formerly-majority-white countries) consider themselves to hold a belief in the inferiority of non-white races. Certainly many more of them say things that understandably give the impression of such a belief. But many of them are of those races, too, and give no impression of an inferiority complex. If anything, they resent that they abided by rules that are now (in their view, at least) not being enforced against others of the same race.
----
As regards "word salad":
> "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee."
This is just Trump speaking the thoughts as they come to mind rather than taking the time to organize them into proper sentences. Taken literally the overall structure is ungrammatical. They are not a prepared speech being read aloud. But it takes little effort to refactor them. I understood this quote as:
> There were people in that rally who were very quietly protesting the fact that a statue of Robert E. Lee was being taken down. I know this because I looked into it the night before. If you had looked into it, you would know this too.
The part you quote is a logical fallacy. (This does not invalidate Snopes' refutation of your point; that would be another logical fallacy.) A group led by extremists can contain moderates, and there is ample evidence that this group indeed did contain moderates. I assure you I am very well informed about the event. It was a subject of very intense discussion in my circles at the time.
Please stop following me around to post about this. I already explained why I was not willing to continue the discussion before, and one of your comments in those other threads has already been flagged and killed.
I can see particular applications of the law being unconstitutional, i.e. improper rationale for designating a group as being a foreign terrorist organization, but generally speaking I don't expect there would be any constitutional issue with preventing people charged with materially supporting terrorism from being able to flee the country using a passport.
Is there any section of the constitution that you think would be violated by the letter of the law?
It seems people believe it to be a 1A violation, at least that was the consensus on many different reddit threads, but I have no idea if a judge would agree.
It's not impossible, but I find this to be very unlikely.
Nick Fuentes has repeatedly condemned political violence for years, he and his followers have also been trying to get Kirk to debate him, so killing is counter-productive from that perspective. Furthermore, the "attacks" by Laura Loomer that I've seen don't get anywhere near calling for violence.
If you were going to have an organized hit from some kind of unnamed leftist extremist group, I could think of a dozen more impactful targets than Kirk off the top of my head. So I don't know how much sense that theory makes either.
If it's a lone nut, that could come from anywhere.
> It's not impossible, but I find this to be very unlikely.
Now that it turned out to be a groyper, you'll have to recalibrate your priors. Turns out it's the people who buy the most guns who are the most violent.
> Now that it turned out to be a groyper, you'll have to recalibrate your priors.
It did not "turn out to be a groyper". There is zero substantial evidence for this claim, its a complete fabrication. Elle Reeve, a journalist at CNN who has followed the far-right since the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in 2017, said of those claiming that the shooter was a Groyper that, "It’s like they’re grasping at vapor."
Saying "there is zero substantial evidence" is cope at this point, they caught the guy. There was zero substantial evidence for it being a leftist/immigrant/woke/trans person. Now that they have the person, all evidence is pointing the other way: terminally online/incel/white/Mormon/rural/gamer/gun nut. Those people aren't leftists, they're groypers. So you have to update your estimate from "very unlikely" to "actually pretty likely".
> There was zero substantial evidence for it being a leftist/immigrant/woke/trans person.
I've did not claim it was someone who is trans, an immigrant, or woke, however all evidence currently available points to him being a leftist. Some people early on were lead to believe that the shooter was trans due to reports of "trans-ideology" being found on the casings, but that was a rash, pre-mature extrapolation. The relevant text can be attributed to a wider array of groups/online sub-cultures (notably, the text cannot be clearly attributed to the groypers).
There is, however, evidence that the shooter was on the far-left.
1. Terminology used by the radical-left-wing to slander Kirk found on the casings ("hey fascist! CATCH!"). No Groyper would ever use such a phrase, they don't think of Kirk as a fascist and themselves get accused of being fascists.
2. Reference to an anti-fascist song most often played by far-left figures, particularly those identifying themselves as "anti-fascist".
3. A high school friend described the killer as being left-leaning on issues and that he was the only member of his family who was a leftist. This is hearsay so I take it with a grain of salt, but its still important evidence which fits perfectly with the other points.
Furthermore, all of the "evidence" you put forward cannot be considered by any reasonable person to be evidence that someone is a Groyper.
1. Being online a lot isn't evidence that someone is a Groyper. Massive numbers of apolotical, right-leaning, and left-leaning people are "terminally online".
2. I am aware of no evidence at this point that the killer was an "incel" in the sense that the term is typically used.
3. Being white does not make someone a Groyper. Funnily enough, on the contrary, among the online far-right the groypers are often accused of being non-white due to their relative openness to other racial groups.
4. Being Mormon is not evidence of being a Groyper. On the contrary, Catholics are most represented among the groypers with only a few figures being Mormon.
5. Playing video games is not evidence that someone is a Groyper.
6. I am aware of no evidence at this point that the killer was a "gun nut". Furthermore, even if he was, this would not be evidence that he was a Groyper since guns are not one of the primary issues addressed by groypers and would only tangentially be related.
In summary, none of what you said is evidence of your claims. I am begging you, and others, to engage honestly about this instead of spreading false claims.
An individual remix of a song added to a playlist, which most people have never heard of, multiple years ago does not make it a "groyper meme".
Before the other day when this misinformation campaign began, nobody ever associated the song with groypers. Its always been associated with anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi groups, which contain a completely different set of beliefs. In recent history the only people to ever use the song for political purposes have been left-wing groups: Protestors against the AfD in Germany, communist priest Andrea Gallo, movement against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, left-wing protests against Meloni in Italy.
Combining the lack of substantial evidence of association with groypers with the history of the song being used by left-wing movements, in addition to the evidence in my post above and elsewhere, its clear that this cannot be reasonably associated with groypers by any evidence-oriented person.
Here's the shooter in a groyper halloween costume that his sister says is "from some meme": https://imgur.com/XeYByuq
"hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow, right arrow, three down arrow" is a video game reference from a video game called Helldivers 2 that groypers use all the time.
Every bullet casing had a different groyper meme on it. It's either a groyper or a really elaborate groyper false flag. Those are the only two options.
Acting like it's all a coincidence is just spreading disinfo. Thankfully the bots don't make it to HN very often, or this place would be a disaster.
I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.
The multiplayer isn't actually used that much, since it doesn't support console players/cross-play which is expected these days. Many games will use Azure PlayFab or Epic Online Services. EOS is free and doesn't require the game be sold on the Epic Store or the Epic client.
You really missing my point here. Problem with platforms is that platform-holders are taking bigger cut from a small struggling companies than they take from likes of EA or Ubisoft. If you look at majority of small and mid-size game development studios Valve is basically taking half of their income unless your game earns more than $10,000,000.
It's totally okay to like Valve or Steam as gamer. As fellow gamers I totally agree with you.
Just next time when you wonder why you favorite studio went bankrupt or why you niche genre game never got a sequel this is why: because some monopoly took 50% of their profit.
On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either.
30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.
Nothing of what Steam provides costs 30%. Discoverability and free marketing only provided to games that are already successful and have hundreds of wishlists. That's only possible to achieve if you game already have it's own following and community.
12+ years ago if you released on Steam it was a big deal and platform provided traffic to everyone, but today it's flooded with games so basically you're on your own.
The only thing that allow Valve to charge this much is network effect. They are not vendor-locked platform like App Store, but they do have nearly monopoly on PC.
Little correction: obviously not hundreds of wishlists, but hundreds of thousands. You need at least 100,000+ to even be considered to have a successful Steam page.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. Steam's developer services can save a massive amount of time for developers, time which is especially valuable to indie studios. I still feel that the 30% is steep, I'd prefer if Steam took a cut based on how many of their underlying services you used, but its wrongheaded to deny that Steam provides many useful features for developers that can save a lot of time.
I think such model can lead to messy scenarios. Say you start without cloud saves and sell million copies. Then you add cloud saves. Now should your commission increase on past sales meaning that for while you make nothing? Or should it only apply moving forward and on future copies sold?
And I am absolutely certain that some developers would exploit this in someway.
> Others can just run a distro for people who believe in open source software.
What about Flatpak is contrary to open source software as you seem imply? Flatpak itself is free software, so is most of the software packaged with it. There are quite a few good reasons to use Flatpak, especially for developers who want to make their software available on different distributions without wanting to worry about packaging separately themselves. There are valid criticisms of it, but being somehow against open source software or being somehow related to Microsoft is not one of them.
In the spirit of conversation I will give you my take on this.
Things I hate: Flatpak, Snaps, Docker containers, SystemD (different I know, but worth a mention due to the strong emotions nonetheless). Obviously too big a topic to talk about everything, but one common theme in all of them is they are often presented as the only way to do things by the developers that use them. The projects that use them tend to be harder to customize than they should be - sometimes much harder. Some of them, like Snaps and SystemD, get shoved down my throat so I hate them with a smouldering hate! And I won't use Ubuntu or derivatives any more. If you want to make a derivative distro, use Debian, use Arch, use openSuse, use RedHat.
I don't love it when I see so many projects on github where the project is a docker image or a flatpak - instead of writing an app that I can directly install on at least some flavor of Linux, with an optional wrapper / container / package. Of course I understand why its done, but it does feel a bit antithetical to the spirit of open source if I have to do a ton of arcane work to decouple your project from these containers (all of which have obvious downsides as well as upsides) just to use it directly in an OS - which is ultimately where all this type of software runs.
Why write beautiful or useful software, and lock it in a box? Technically, of course it remains open source. Yes, I can probably laboriously take it out of the box. No, locking it in the box in the first place is not as effectively open as if it had never been placed only there in the first place. Developers who want to do this are totally free to do so - just it will rub me wrong and I won't appreciate their work nearly as much. That is a trade off I presume they know they are making for many users, so to each his own.
Practically? I have opted to avoid all flatpaks and snaps, and to only use appimages - to avoid having a variety of these tools with their variety of performance, maintenance, and security concerns to deal with on my system. I chose appimage because snaps are terrible and I much prefer the fuller inclusion of dependencies in an appimage compared to flatpaks just duplicating what a repository already does - and sharing dependencies between apps. I only use appimage if I really need a piece of software and there is no other packaging available. Similarly, I only use docker off my main device, but there are a few projects that require me to use it. I will always prefer an LXC or a VM first if I can.
That's my own little world. I know it doesn't matter. But I would guess it fits pretty close to the sentiment and practice of a lot of people.
Huh. I'm sure there's some projects that release exclusively via docker or snap/flatpak, but in my experience that's pretty uncommon. Far more often I see a release page with a dozen or more options. Binaries for Arm, AMD64, flatpak, snap, a few flavors of Mac, dockerfile, and of course the venerable tarball. The advanced will have deb and rpm as well. I see these options as very much aligning with the spirit of free or open source software: everyone can pick what's best for themselves.
Obviously when the choices are removed and there's cramming down throats, that's a problem. And I'm sure being forced to shuck software from a container would leave a bad taste. However I don't see the popularity of the formats you dislike as causing a broad decline of those you do.
It's becoming more and more common in my experience, hence the long post. Ubuntu's notorious hiding snaps in apt by writing wrappers and making it hard to work around it is the next level of this trend - and it is deplorable. That type of obfuscation and attempted deception is not the spirit of open source.
That's a good point. I've stayed completely away from Ubuntu since they started down that path, which has made me out of touch with the day to day experience of its users. Deplorable is the right word.
I agree! I think the easy/simple thing to move towards is more compatible ABIs, and just... running standalone executribles, unless the program triggers a certain complexity threshold most don't.
Calling it (edit: using the term) "free software" is a great example of utterly failing to promote your own principles, and stabbing the entire mission in the face.
Let's try to repurpose an incredibly widely used pre-existing term, that means almost the opposite of the essence of our entire mission, to mean our mission. And every time people tell us that's moronic, we double down. As we continue to watch people somehow totally miss the point of the mission, but surely the fact that we're mind-bogglingly self-sabotaging at advocacy can't have anything to do with that. We should totally keep stabbing ourselves in the face.
IMHO, it is one of the most shameful failures of marketing of the last century.
Flatpak is unambiguously and undeniably free and open source software and the fact that you think it isn't demonstrates that you have been misinformed. The Flatpak project is licensed with the LGPL. Furthermore, the vast majority of software packaged with Flatpak is free and open source software.
I don't understand this. The software is free. But calling it "free software" is a mistake?
And I don't understand the advocacy angle. Is any reference to "free" or "open" in any tech-related conversation automatically advocacy (even if the author did not intend to be an advocate for it)?
Genuinely curious. Apologies if it doesn't read like genuine curiosity, I am genuinely curious.
There are specific philosophies and missions behind various kinds of software for which you might have access to the source code.
The most formalized and principled original one, was unfortunately named "free software". (Where RMS expects to be able to explain that it doesn't mean "you don't have to pay money for it" like everyone already thought, but he wants it to actually means "free as in freedom". And he imagines having this conversation, and people being intrigued by the wordplay, etc.)
Of course what happened is that everyone wanted stuff without paying money for it, which is fine, but most people never learned the principles behind the various philosophies, nor why they are that way. Installing a Linux-based software distro is the same as downloading a freebie "community version" of software decidedly not in the same spirit, is the same as downloading a cracked version -- it's all just "free".
A related thing happened with the Internet, in a sense. The early people tended to be egalitarian and principled, and actively onboarded new people into the culture, etc. But when the dotcom gold rush happened, most of that was quickly swept aside. And most of what was already known and taught about cooperative online behavior was never even learned.
When people say this they are obviously not referring the the definition of "chemical" that a chemist would use. Pretending otherwise is exactly the "nerd-snark" mentioned above which makes people distrust experts because they clearly aren't intending to use the term "chemical" in a sense that would include substances like water.