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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to “critical mass” as we’ve got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I’d probably enjoy Guix more.


  • Given encouragement to try tmux, here is what I’ve come up with as a “one-liner” (script) that does what I was originally looking for:

    #!/bin/sh
    
    tmux new-session -d -s split_screen_grep \; \
      send-keys "/bin/sh -c '$1' | tee /tmp/split_screen_grep.txt" C-m \; \
      split-window -h \; \
      select-pane -t 1 \; \
      send-keys "tail -f /tmp/split_screen_grep.txt | grep '$2'" C-m \;
    
    tmux attach-session -t split_screen_grep
    

    I use it as follows, first arg is a command, second arg is a pattern to search for:

    $ ./split-grep "cat big_file.txt" "tmux"
    










  • The short answer is “yes, but only as much as it needs to”. Flatpak had to make a decision between “do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades” or “do we minimize space” and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

    Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It’s happened to me before–for example fslint. I don’t think this can happen with flatpak.


  • It’s funny, I do almost the exact opposite–whenever there is a flatpak version, I prefer it over a built-in apt package. The flatpak is almost always more up-to-date and often has the features and bug fixes I need.

    Examples:

    • Vorta (0.8.12 flatpak; 0.8.3 apt)
    • Pinta (2.1.1 flatpak; 1.6 apt)
    • Minder (1.15.6 flatpak; 1.13.1 apt)
    • Xournal++ (1.2.1 flatpak; 1.1.1 apt)

    .

    I don’t think it’s fair to expect the distro maintainers to be up to date with every software out there–the universe of software has grown and grown, and we just can’t expect them to wrap/manage/test every new release and version bump.


  • The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).

    That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).