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Debating A Software Center For Fedora

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  • Hamish Wilson
    replied
    Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
    Also lol at those who believe that programmers are not lazy sons of bitches. Hint: we are. We cut corners whenever we can and we write inefficient corner if we can get away with it. If a program appears slow, it's your fault: get off your lazy ass and upgrade your hardware already.

    Do you know how freaking inefficient C++ is? How much overhead it has? We can make a program run 2-3x as fast by abandoning this bloated inefficient language in favor of raw assembly, but we are fucking lazy and don't do that.


    At any rate, as someone who has been using Fedora as my primary system for nearly five years, I have not noticed any significant problems with package management. I started out using YumEX, which is okay and is still being maintained I believe, but quickly dumped it in favour of the command-line elegance of plain yum. And I have never looked back.

    The only real time I had any trouble was when we were still using Pirut, which was a piece of shit and locked down the system preventing one from using yum proper. Packagekit is fine and is becoming a growing standard, and in my experience is certainly better than synaptic, which in my limited use is clunkier and harder to use. But I still prefer command-line yum for most of my package management needs.

    Plus Fedora as far as I know is the only system that offers DeltaRPM's and yum presto, which does make my life a LOT easier sometimes, though I could be wrong and some other RPM based distros could have it too. I do know there is nothing in the DEB world like it.

    And I think a lot of people seem to be ignoring the idea that makes the USC popular and at the same time makes it incompatible with Fedora: the fact you can distribute paid apps through it. Fedora will (rightfully) not distribute any proprietary or patented code by default in its distribution, so do you really expect it to sell you closed-source commercial applications?

    And for the most part, the only paid apps people really would want sold through such a service on Linux are games (as the amount of commercial proprietary software your average Linux user uses that are not games could be counted using the fingers on one hand), so why not get Desura and be done with it? It runs fine on any distribution, you are not locked to a certain distro when you purchase something, it does not contain DRM, its client code is going to be released, and the Desura guys have a better shot at promoting our platform than the USC people ever could.

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  • BlackStar
    replied
    Lol at the usual trolls trying to turn a Fedora software center thread into a programming language war.

    Also lol at those who believe that programmers are not lazy sons of bitches. Hint: we are. We cut corners whenever we can and we write inefficient corner if we can get away with it. If a program appears slow, it's your fault: get off your lazy ass and upgrade your hardware already.

    Do you know how freaking inefficient C++ is? How much overhead it has? We can make a program run 2-3x as fast by abandoning this bloated inefficient language in favor of raw assembly, but we are fucking lazy and don't do that.

    But if we did, you'd be fucking amazed at how much *faster* your button clicking would become. Those 2 second pauses you are talking about? They'd be fucking eliminated - but nooo, we just keep using stupid inefficient C++ stuff such as virtual functions (thrashing your L1 cache), exceptions (bloating the binaries and thrashing the L2 cache), new/delete/malloc/free (fragmenting memory) when we could, you know, just use lea eax, [eax] directly and bypass all this cruft.

    In fact, that's the problem with synaptic. It's written in C, which is why it is so slow and bloated. That's also why it's now abandonware that hasn't received a proper update in half a decade. But what did you expect when its source code uses Bzr source control (python)? Good riddance, I say, apt-get is faster and more efficient.

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  • DaemonFC
    replied
    Synaptic and apt have ports to RPM.

    That being said, they're poorly maintained and almost anything else is better, I prefer Yum but urpm (Mandriva/Mageia) isn't bad either.

    PCLinuxOS has issues, depending on an unmaintained port of Debian's package manager to their fork of Mandriva is but one of them.

    Leave a comment:


  • dsmithhfx
    replied
    No major problems with Fedora's current system

    Originally posted by Tiger_Coder View Post
    I use Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Arch at home. Fedora at university labs. Fedora package management GUI just sucks. Many time even command line yum don't work for lock of packagekit with some unknown package manager(updater may be?). I mean I like fedora's stability, Gnome3 and developer friendliness. But you can all achieve that with a good package management front-end.
    I haven't experienced any problems with either yum, or the gui Software Update and Add/Remove Packages for years (apparently there is a bug in the just-released FC16 installer, requiring a double-reinstall of bash -- if you aren't already aware of it, and are totally inept with google, it could cause some head scratching).

    I don't like how packages are listed in Add/Remove Software though, by obscurely generic descriptive titles, rather than just by the actual package name (e.g., "A BitTorrent Client", rather than "Azeurus"). It could also do a better job of showing real-time progress info for download and installation (actually yum in the cli does a better job of it).

    I feel it's 95% there, you could just rename it "Software Centre" / "App Store" / whatever, if that seems a tad more au courant.

    Leave a comment:


  • marwi509
    replied
    Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
    I don't think synaptic can handle RPMs. Plus, its UI sucks. The only reason people still use it is familiarity. If synaptic was released in this state today, its developers would be shot.
    Synaptic's interface is great for doing a bit more advanced tasks. Basically I think synaptic is great for managing packages, and the Software Center is great for managing entire applications.

    Leave a comment:


  • kraftman
    replied
    Originally posted by leif81 View Post
    Windows doesn't have one and it seems to be doing alright...

    However I'm in 100% agreeance that small OS's (ok anything that's not Windows) need to do everything they can to interest users and keep them excited. The amount of software available on Fedora/Ubuntu is staggering but I think most (especially new but also experienced) users have no idea. Some sort of "what's new", "what's hot" type listings would go a long way to building that connection between developer/packager and the users.
    Except it's the most trashed OS ever with dozens of duplicate crap and terrible installers.

    Leave a comment:


  • curaga
    replied
    Originally posted by pvtcupcakes View Post
    You can write fast applications in Python and Ruby.
    It's definitely possible to write a software center app in one of those languages that starts up quicker than a C++ application like Firefox.
    The reason why Java and C# apps all start slow is because they have to load their huge frameworks. And if the user doesn't have them installed yet, install 100+ mb of crap (number for java or c#). How does this not apply to other interpreted systems?

    Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
    Those evil VMs/interpreters that are stealing our precious CPU cycles, slowing down the very CPU intensive software-center GUI. Damn them! Not to mention other stuff.

    No, in fact I'd like to know what you meant by "other stuff". What other stuff do those evil VMs/interpreters do, other than "steal your CPU cyclez"? (For some reason I don't think you'll answer "improve security", but feel free to prove me wrong).
    Random pauses for GC or other reasons. Users really love it when a button press randomly takes 2 secons to register.

    Also taking ram from "real apps", meaning if a workload uses a lot of ram, desktop grinds to halt as it has to page in and out the interpreters and frameworks for n+1 languages.

    Leave a comment:


  • dfx.
    replied
    bullshit

    you DO realise that what you're proposing is to destroy all GNU/Linux distribution while creating One True GNU/Linux (hint: packages for different distribution are incompatible because they not only binary incompatible/built differently but also, well, _packaged_ differently which means that they have different sets of files put in them) ?

    also, praising interpreted languages over natively run ones is bullshit, people. just admit that you're lazy fucks and want some "magical" mumbo jumbo to take care over things you don't want to spare your brain cycle on, cutting corners and making shortcuts in your work.

    Leave a comment:


  • ajtgarber
    replied
    Software Centers in Linux

    One of the things that has always bothered me with Software centers in Linux has always been that there is no single software center, nor is there a universal package manager. Something I would love to see done (I don't yet have the skills for it, so I can't work on it quite yet) is to have a software center that isn't controlled by any one company or community, that would (or at least would be great if it was) taken up by most distributions, and have their package managers tie into it in some way so that you could interface with it almost any way you wanted to but still have access to the packages everyone else had. That way people could choose their own package managers without worrying about not being able to get a piece of software under a new manager that they could with their old. Another good thing about that would be that their wouldn't be different "worlds" under each distribution where they keep different versions of different software. I dunno, just throwing my two (or maybe three) cents in.

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  • DaemonFC
    replied
    Since Fedora doesn't promote proprietary software and Digital Handcuffs like Ubuntu does, what would be the point?

    Leave a comment:

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