Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed Due To An OEM Install Issue Leading To Broken Snaps

[AmericanLocomotive]

The program's documentation made no mention of that library. The program itself gave no message indicating it needed that library when clicking the icon it placed on my desktop. I had to open up a terminal window, manually type in the path of executable (hoping it would actually give me some feedback), interpret the feedback, go hunting around Yast2 and hope whatever OpenCL package I install was the right one.

The program itself requiring that library isn't dumb. The fact that the library isn't automatically installed with the program, is dumb. The fact that the program gave me no immediate feedback when attempting to start it, is dumb. The fact that I had to manually hunt around for the library in Yast, is dumb. DR is not a Tumbleweed package, so reporting that to the package maintainers isn't going to help anything.

In Windows, I install the program and it comes bundled with any libraries it needs. Same thing on OSX, same thing with Flatpaks.

Traditional package management is a failure because of maintenance burdens and the amount of software packages out there. You can't keep every package updated constantly, and you can't have every single piece of software in your repositories. You will ALWAYS run into the issues I described above with traditional package management.

[adoptedPenguin]

The program's documentation made no mention of that library.

1. Linux is a kernel, the program requiring a specific OpenCL lib is a userspace program with a documentation issue and dependency requirement.
2. there may not be many users who are experiencing your specific failure.
3. Perhaps you can be constructive and let them know. (or not?)

GNU/etc/Linux is about people working together openly to make things better. If you just complain on phoronix and don't let them know about your specific failure, maybe it goes unnoticed.

In Windows, I install the program and it comes bundled with any libraries it needs. Same thing on OSX, same thing with Flatpaks.

that's nice. then stick with windows? nobody is forcing you to use GNU/systemd/snapd/Linux.

though, when i used windows many aeons ago i used to encounter issues with missing dotNET requirements, mfcXX.dll, and it didn't always tell me they were needed, but i digress. this is a Linux news forum.

You will ALWAYS run into the issues I described above with traditional package management.

no, the word you are looking for is not ALWAYS, but SOMETIMES. and when it SOMETIMES happens, it SOMETIMES is due to a specific failure from an uncommon setup, and SOMETIMES people never report it to the appropriate channels and SOMETIMES it goes unnoticed/unresolved.

linux runs on 100% of the top500 supercomputers, windows now runs 0% of them, Linux runs on Steam deck which is great, and i run it on my desktop and servers with no problems (using the package manager! native repositories! includes using blender, gaming, and the amazing feat of watching videos with hardware acceleration).

feel free to continue plugging Windows on a Linux news forum though.

[AmericanLocomotive]

People are working together to make things better. They came up with a solution, and it's called Flatpak

In 2022, any desktop experience that requires the user to parse through documentation to figure out exact software dependencies is a failure. In 2022, any desktop experience that require a user to manually search through a package manager to find libraries and manually install them is a failure. If you have to TOUCH a command line to get basic troubleshooting feedback (or to install/run a program), it is an automatic failure in 2022.

I've been an avid PC user for well over 20 years now, and I can't even remember the last time I had to manually install a library on Windows or OSX. I vaguely remember needing to install .net back for something in the Windows XP days, but that's about it. Every piece of software I've downloaded, installed, or used for the past ~15 years has come packaged with any dependencies it needs.

Flatpaks give me that same experience. Like I mentioned earlier, installed the Firefox Flatpak, and all my issues disappeared instantly. It just works.

Relying on teams of people to keep software updated and packaged for every single distribution is just a tremendous waste of manpower, and they'll never be able to keep up with the pace software is updated at. Needing to constantly keep track of the dependencies every single software package needs, keeping that all organized, updated, relying on user feedback, etc... It's just insanity in 2022. It's far simpler for the software developer to push a single package that works on every distribution, that contains everything the program needs. Traditional package management had its day, but times have changed.

There is a reason why the Steamdeck uses an immutable filesystem and only allows flatpaks (by default).

[adoptedPenguin]

I'm indifferent. I see exactly zero reasons to use either Snap or Flatpak. Unnecessary complexity, increased RAM/disk/CPU usage, dubious benefits, a solution in need of a problem. Docker makes sense, these two? Barely any.

exactly my thoughts.

though docker only for isolated environment/security reasons (such as running something that is not tested and not in the native repositories), as it also eats up RAM/CPU and many times is a solution looking for a problem, and many times is just for convenience for people not wanting to go to the length of manually configuring things on bare metal.

native package management is working well for me.
native repositories should be the first priority.

People are working together to make things better. They came up with a solution, and it's called Flatpak

(no, translation: you didn't report the issue? ok)

[AmericanLocomotive]

There is no "issue" to report.

Blackmagic Design only offers technical support for DR on Redhat and CentOS (which is now dead). You're on your own trying to use it on any other distribution.

Tumbleweed has those libraries in their repositories, but obviously do not include them for specific reasons. Reporting an issue/making a request to have a certain library installed by default, to support one specific software package, for one specific user is absolutely insane, and not sustainable.

You'll probably respond with something like "How is it a Linux problem that X company doesn't want to support Y product on Z distribution?" ...and that's exactly my point. The current way of handling software on Linux is inherently unsustainable and unsupportable by 3rd parties. Package maintainers struggle to keep up on rolling releases. Traditional releases are always saddled with perpetually out-of-date software, and 3rd party commercial developers don't want to devout endless hours supporting 75 different distros with completely different default libraries and package managers.

I'm not saying flatpak is perfect, but it solves the difficulties of:
- Dependency Hell
- Chronically out of date software
- Installing out-of-repo software
- Duplicated community man-hours
- Commercial developers limiting support to certain distros

To reiterate again: There is a reason why the Steamdeck's desktop mode is the way it is. Valve understands how Linux needs to work and operate to be accepted by the general public.

[Ironmask]

1. Linux is a kernel, the program requiring a specific OpenCL lib is a userspace program with a documentation issue and dependency requirement.
2. there may not be many users who are experiencing your specific failure.
3. Perhaps you can be constructive and let them know. (or not?)

GNU/etc/Linux is about people working together openly to make things better. If you just complain on phoronix and don't let them know about your specific failure, maybe it goes unnoticed.



that's nice. then stick with windows? nobody is forcing you to use GNU/systemd/snapd/Linux.

though, when i used windows many aeons ago i used to encounter issues with missing dotNET requirements, mfcXX.dll, and it didn't always tell me they were needed, but i digress. this is a Linux news forum.



no, the word you are looking for is not ALWAYS, but SOMETIMES. and when it SOMETIMES happens, it SOMETIMES is due to a specific failure from an uncommon setup, and SOMETIMES people never report it to the appropriate channels and SOMETIMES it goes unnoticed/unresolved.

linux runs on 100% of the top500 supercomputers, windows now runs 0% of them, Linux runs on Steam deck which is great, and i run it on my desktop and servers with no problems (using the package manager! native repositories! includes using blender, gaming, and the amazing feat of watching videos with hardware acceleration).

feel free to continue plugging Windows on a Linux news forum though.

I'd just like to point out your entire post is essentially a non-sequitur on naming schemes, and that just because someone said they "were forced to" use a viable alternative product to perform something that a product of their choice could not perform is not "plugging".
Once again, if Linux has issues, we should point these out so they can be fixed, not desperately trying to hide them under a rug and "accusing" people of not being productive with them for being "dissidents". This is not politics. Linux is an operating system. We want this operating system to be usable. If it has flaws, we should point them out and fix them, not belittle people for pointing them out.
Also, supercomputers have nothing to do with desktops, that's another non-sequitur. If you're that desperate to protect your ego, I suggest you try religion.

[adoptedPenguin]

I'd be fine with snaps if they weren't so slow... it's not just firefox but the gnome shell too.

I hate to shill youtubers, but Titus really hits the nail on the head here...

video author is exactly on point, they are slow and "pointless"
they are also a step into a walled garden. (fun places, right?)
they also have their own maintenance burden separate from native package management.

flatpaks are equally a bloat (as opposed to using stable shared libraries as per regular package management)

honestly i can't see any technical benefits from using them, unless there is some commercial software or something that is badly maintained by the vendor and does not fit well into native environments, requires libs either "too old" or "too new" (for people not running bleeding-edge natively), badly documented, will only support red hat for example, etc., closed-source so it stifles community development and support and innovation, then maybe rebooting into windows 11, running WSL, and running firefox in a snap, to download a flatpak of something, to run it there, would be a great idea. that's what the future is all about, fast, efficient, no-nonsense computing, modular, lightweight, best usage of resources. in fact wouldn't it be great if every distro just used snaps, or flatpak, that would be a great leap forward for the whole linux ecosystem.

regarding my appreciation of the steam deck endeavour and steam linux in general: they are also walled gardens with similar bloat but i still appreciate the work valve and other software companies are contributing to the open source packages, we as a community benefit with improvements in things such as DXVK and wine/proton to run top-tier windows games with native performance, without being locked into the walled garden, no need for a steam deck or even steam, no windows partition, and it's actually possible to achieve performance better than windows in some cases (because we have no need for any of the underlying windows or steam bloat). that is my appreciation of the steam/valve/proton/etc linux endeavours. they get to make their product, but we are not forced to use it, and there are benefits for both parties. kind of an embrace, extend, but don't dare extinguish, cultivate.

[adoptedPenguin]

nobody mentioned dissidents, or politics, but you did, and now you are bringing religion into your reply?

Also, supercomputers have nothing to do with desktops, that's another non-sequitur. If you're that desperate to protect your ego, I suggest you try religion.

supercomputers have everything to do with computing, and even handheld phones are faster than supercomputers of decades ago, so it's good to see what runs well on them, and what does not.

i suggest you elaborate on why you are referencing religion now.

what are you implying about religious folk, exactly?

are irreligious folk always better?

are you irreligious?

ego? huh?

???

[ssokolow]

flatpaks are equally a bloat (as opposed to using stable shared libraries as per regular package management)

Flatpak has multiple layers of support for sharing libraries, only some of which are possible with snap's system based on compressed filesystem images:

1. You build against a runtime, which contains commonly used libraries
2. The GNOME and KDE runtimes build on the base Freedesktop runtime, so there's no chance of them getting out of sync with it and needlessly duplicating files.
3. There are "Base Apps", like Electron, Godot, and QWebEngine, which serve to deduplicate common infrastructure above and beyond what's in the runtime. They do get packaged into your package but, as the next point says...
4. The OSTree undercarriage of Flatpak performs per-file deduplication, so no matter whether it's in a runtime, a base app, or a package, the remote repository, download process, and local installation won't duplicate things. If you already have a copy, it'll just create a new hardlink to it, rather than wasting bandwidth and storage.
5. The runtimes and base apps receive updates, so it's basically like traditional SONAME-based sharing, except erring on the side of "when we're not sure if it's ABI-compatible, better to spend the disk space on a second copy than making applications crashy".

And yes, I did say that OSTree deduplicates on a per-file level, regardless of source, for both download and storage. It's like git for the OS and that's why all the sizes listed in Flatpak's CLI when you're installing or updating something are "up to" values.

[Ironmask]

nobody mentioned dissidents, or politics, but you did, and now you are bringing religion into your reply?



supercomputers have everything to do with computing, and even handheld phones are faster than supercomputers of decades ago, so it's good to see what runs well on them, and what does not.

i suggest you elaborate on why you are referencing religion now.

what are you implying about religious folk, exactly?

are irreligious folk always better?

are you irreligious?

ego? huh?

???

Let me explain something to you. I'm honestly shocked I have to explain this, but I suppose I have no choice.
A supercomputer is not "a really powerful desktop".
A supercomputer is a massively parallel network of nodes designed to do calculations on massive datasets, like predicting the weather or training ML models with terabytes of data from a datacenter.
A desktop computer is designed to play games, watch videos, run web browsers and productivity tasks. It's not designed to do things a supercomputer can, it cannot do things a supercomputer can.
These are two wildly different domains, they could not be any more separate from each other, and require entirely different frameworks and infrastructures.
Linux is great on supercomputers because it's practically fancy firmware, it provides an excellent API to access the hardware and has a lot of excellent server software for it.
Windows works on desktops because it has extremely sophisticated and tightly integrated multimedia support, something supercomputers absolutely do not need, because they perform an entirely different task.
Linux's multimedia and graphical stacks are comparatively lackluster, and while it's software delivery systems are superior to Windows, they're also significantly lacking in potential. This combination of an outright inferior stack along with a faulty software delivery system is precisely why AmericanLocomotive had issues.

And I suggested religion because you sound like a zealot. I figured if you're going to have a religious war about software, you could at least argue about metaphysical things instead of tools.