Canonical Releases "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview"

[Guest]

Basically, yes.

You don't need to bother with running those pesky Linux OS's on your hardware. Run Microsoft Windows on your hardware. Then, if you want some Linux, you can layer it on top in a neat little package.

The whole WSL thing is clearly a strategy to keep Windows as the primary OS. Literally all of Microsoft's efforts involving FOSS are to maintain their vendor lock, by positioning Windows OS as the primary OS, with Linux as some secondary containerized little thing. In Microsoft's worldview, they want to make Linux into an App that runs on Windows.

Yep, exactly this. Yet many people tell me I'm being paranoid and anti-Microsoft. I mean, it's plain and obvious what Microsoft is doing. Why else would you implement OpenCL and OpenGL on Direct3D 12?

These people even claim that Windows isn't important to Microsoft anymore, it's not their main revenue stream........and yet here's all of the evidence that Microsoft is pushing hard to get people on Windows.

I have a sneaking suspicion that SecureBoot + Pluton will be wielded to crush all OS competition. Usual suspects like the EU have done absolutely nothing to stop Microsoft's anti-competitive moves.

[Guest]

When your company forces you to use Windows to manage Linux servers, it may help.

True, plus if your company is a Windows only shop for some reason, you can atleast have access to *nix command line tools which is nice.

[Guest]

If you don't care about freedom, use Windows with its 80% user base! Those who use Linux do it for freedom and we give a damn if we are few or many, Linux on desktop is not a commercial product. If I develop an application for Linux, will it be free to make it available from wherever I want? What do you want user who does not pay a shit and you also have to tell me where to put my application?

Yeah that's a good point. I haven't earned money for the past 3 years, and while I did contribute a bit to open source software, major work like Wayland support, video decoding/encoding etc. is something I really want to do, yet can't spend major amount of time on it instead of focusing on what earns me money.

[Guest]

Last time I've tried WSL it has no gui but I needed it to edit/run scripts, which completely messed up line endings.-

BTW my app only supports Ubuntu, as I don't have to time to test other distros for the sake of ca. 1-2% users only.

Ugh, that line ending bullshit. Windows, MacOS and *nix each doing their own thing for simple text files. And messing up the life of anyone who works cross platform.

[Guest]

I don't understand your question. Of course you are. You are also perfectly allowed to run your own Snap distro if you want to. And more importantly, users doesn't have to choose between snaps and flatpaks. They can have both and if you want to, you can package your app in both formats.

Yeah, but the whole point of Snap and Flatpak is to avoid dealing with multiple packaging systems. So the presence of two big ones forces some devs with limited resources to choose between them. And given that Snaps is only pre-installed and supported on Ubuntu systems, it means that if developers choose Snap, that application is only easily installable on Ubuntu.

Whereas if it was Flatpak, it's installable on almost any Linux distro.

[Mez']

Yeah, but the whole point of Snap and Flatpak is to avoid dealing with multiple packaging systems. So the presence of two big ones forces some devs with limited resources to choose between them. And given that Snaps is only pre-installed and supported on Ubuntu systems, it means that if developers choose Snap, that application is only easily installable on Ubuntu.

Whereas if it was Flatpak, it's installable on almost any Linux distro.

That's just Pareto.
Going for snap is the 20% effort for 80%* reward given Ubuntu(-based) market penetration.
If you want to tackle a 1-2% market share fragmented at that, you're going for the most financially beneficial first.

* Probably not 80 but please don't nitpick, focus on the gist.

[nado]

That's just Pareto.
Going for snap is the 20% effort for 80%* reward given Ubuntu(-based) market penetration.
If you want to tackle a 1-2% market share fragmented at that, you're going for the most financially beneficial first.

* Probably not 80 but please don't nitpick, focus on the gist.

I agree with your concern about Snaps, but I don't see what the issue is with Flatpak. This is currently a young technology which is in the process of maturing and has in no way replaced the distros native packages. It may one day be the defactor standard across most if not all distros, and I don't see the downside with them considering they don't suffer from the overhead that Snaps have with compression. Snaps are also gated by Canonical and their proprietary distribution model, which is one of the primary reasons to avoid them - they don't care what we think about that either.

[Mez']

I agree with your concern about Snaps, but I don't see what the issue is with Flatpak. This is currently a young technology which is in the process of maturing and has in no way replaced the distros native packages. It may one day be the defactor standard across most if not all distros, and I don't see the downside with them considering they don't suffer from the overhead that Snaps have with compression. Snaps are also gated by Canonical and their proprietary distribution model, which is one of the primary reasons to avoid them - they don't care what we think about that either.

One of the reasons I left Windows 15 years ago (fully for my personal use) is because of bundled packages and how much of a hassle it was to manage them and what a waste of resources they are.
Being caught up by that terrible concept in Linux feels like going back to the middle age of computing for me.

I could tolerate snaps/flatpaks for my use in the case of big players as an easy way to offer a Linux version of their apps. Between not offering a Linux version because they don't feel like dealing with each package-style versus offering a snapflak, I'd still pick the latter. But after a while, I expect them to embrace package managers in order to mutualize resources for users and have a clean system not going in all directions. And to solve theming issues (no, installing the snapflak version is not enough) and all the weird folder locations that sandboxing brings. I am not obsessed by security and it's not worth justifying the "back to the middle age of computing" design from my point of view.

If I really had to pick one, I would go for snap (just to avoid the Red Hat dependence).

[nado]

One of the reasons I left Windows 15 years ago (fully for my personal use) is because of bundled packages and how much of a hassle it was to manage them and what a waste of resources they are.
Being caught up by that terrible concept in Linux feels like going back to the middle age of computing for me.

I could tolerate snaps/flatpaks for my use in the case of big players as an easy way to offer a Linux version of their apps. Between not offering a Linux version because they don't feel like dealing with each package-style versus offering a snapflak, I'd still pick the latter. But after a while, I expect them to embrace package managers in order to mutualize resources for users and have a clean system not going in all directions. And to solve theming issues (no, installing the snapflak version is not enough) and all the weird folder locations that sandboxing brings. I am not obsessed by security and it's not worth justifying the "back to the middle age of computing" design from my point of view.

If I really had to pick one, I would go for snap (just to avoid the Red Hat dependence).

I don't see any issue with managing Flatpak applications vs native packages for a distro. Sure there are some teething problems, but that's normal for a lot of software in general.

Well for Gnome there is no such thing as a theme really, it's a hack for better or worse. As far as resources are concerned I'd say it's the opposite, maintaining a package across distros requires more disros if you use the native package manager in the distro. Flatpaks, like Electron, can be made once and will work across distributions. I'm not really sure how Red Hat is worse than Canonical, they don't force a proprietary distribution model on you (Canonical's Snap server implementation is closed source) or gate you into their app store.

I would love to be free of all large coporations having significant control over Linux, but that's a pipe dream at this point. There wouldn't be enough resources to manage Linux and its accompanying software such as Firefox in the constantly changing nature of internet and software.

We don't know if Flatpak/Snaps/AppImage are the way forward yet, just like we don't know if Wayland will be the true succesor to X, but the work and research done implementing these solutions is valuable regardless - the knowledge and experiences gained will be useful for evaluating future solutions.

[royce]

Yeah, but the whole point of Snap and Flatpak is to avoid dealing with multiple packaging systems.

Actually no. The point of both is to be able to distribute software on systems built with different base libraries without falling into dependency hell. That way you can have modern version of apps on older or mismatching OS. That's one. There's also a whole world of security features built into both to achieve containerisation of said apps off the rest of the system, and even lower level APIs built into snaps which typically don't make sense except on server-type services.

They weren't created to be a one-package-manager-to-rule-them-all solution.