Have you ever decided to do something truly devious with your Linux computer? I’m talking the elite hacker shit. I’m talking the stuff they don’t dare talk about at Defcon. I’m talking crossing a line you can’t uncross, the things that get your civil rights revoked and summon the black helicopters. Things like watching a DVD or inkjet printing a photograph you took with a digital camera.
Normal people can’t just do heavy shit like that, man. A lot of them won’t even make it through installing VLC, watch them try to grok the difference between Fedora repos, Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub. Then, how many of them do you think will figure out how to go to File > Open Disc. Your uncle that hunts and pecks at 2 words a minute can’t fit that idea in his head because “Play DVD” is taking up too much room for “Open Disc” to fit.
Then it bombs out with a cryptic error message that doesn’t even display in white text in dark mode, because your Linux computer doesn’t have the DRM shit required to play a DVD. That is going to require one of these:
sudo dnf install libvcss libvcss-data libvcss-common libvcss2 ffmpeg ffmpeg-common ffmpeg-dvdcss
and if that was an APT command, that’d be the end of it because it would work. NOT ON FEDORA. I’ve never seen one of those “install seven packages” commands work on Fedora. Ever. Because DNF is more pedantic, it’s libvcss-common4.2.2beta now, stop deadnaming the penguin flavored DLL.
Oh and your inkjet printer? No we don’t do that anymore. We do driverless basic bitch document printing now, we removed the drivers from any repos out there and made it so that DNF won’t install the ones offered by Epson themselves, because this shall not be done. You want to put a glossy photo of your house cat, in a frame, IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME?! I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional Epson XP-830 is extremely not on it because we saw what you did that one time and we won’t forgive you.
Seriously, software management on Fedora is goddamn unlivable.
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Good rant, though it could use some more caps lock. 7/10
I held down the shift key, thank you very much.
That alone is worth an extra half point for the effort.
I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional [printer] is extremely not on it because
I feel seen.
People love to tout CUPS as supporting so many printers, yet every single printer I’ve owned in the last FIFTEEN YEARS is somehow NOT on that list. Why? Because, I guess…
I feel like cups supported every printer… 15 years ago.
Today? Your guess is as good as mine.
Well, it’s really easy to play DVD’s and pretty much every video file format on earth (including relatively modern Dolby Vision .mkv’s) if you use the rpmfusion repos and follow the Multimedia tutorial.
But you have to know that it even exists and have to actively download two packages to enable rpmfusion on Fedora, which always felt extra unneccessary. Flathub is at least included by default now and can be ticked with a checkbox.
Apart from that fuckery, I never had any problems with dnf. It just works, and it’s pretty fast. Especially compared to Windows Update. Low bar, I know. :D
dnf installstands forDoes Not Fucking installI thought it stood for “Duke Nukem Forever.” 🤷♂️
Takes ten years and turns out to be a disappointment? That tracks.
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3D was the shit. Forever was shit (literally, you could grab a turd out of a toilet and throw it as a weapon).
Enjoying Bazzite for this reason. A lot of those small annoyances are just gone.
…because it outright can’t do things? Like, if the flatpak version of VLC doesn’t come with the libraries it needs for DRM…oh well. My washing machine can’t play DVDs either.
You can layer with ostree if you really need to
I think that’s the point of the rant. The setup process is out of reach for non-technical people. Bazzite doesn’t fix that problem of the packages don’t include the needed functionality. That the problem can be corrected isn’t the point; the correction process is still a technical hurdle that non-technical people shouldn’t have to overcome.
Some of this shit I think would even catch out a technical person. Like there’s “technical” and there’s “is intimately familiar with optical media DRM software as packaged by Red Hat based distributions.”
The TL;DR here might be “Look this is user unfriendly even for me.”
Okay, we’re going to compile something from Github because I’ve got a weird piece of legacy hardware I want to get running and there’s some guy with a hobby project. Build instructions: sudo apt install something something-lib, something-common fleep, fleep-utils, tonerag. Okay, I’m on Fedora, so change apt to dnf, not found, not found, already installed, not found, not found, tongerag will take up another 162kb, continue y/N? And I’ve had it do that with instructions written for Fedora. Either because the developer didn’t test on Fedora and made the same “just turn apt to dnf” mistake without testing it or it’s an Apple psy-op to make people hate open source.
If anything it should be corrected by the package maintainer, not the OSes fault.
The fun thing about having a built-in package manager provided by the OS is that the line gets blurry there. Is it the application developer’s responsibility to make sure they have a package for each distribution? Is it the OS’s responsibility to make sure they have a working package for each application a user may want? If there is a third party package maintainer, should the OS include that in an official repo if they don’t control it? Lines of responsibility for any given scenario are not clear, and there are a lot of different possible scenarios.
Because in the end, the end user doesn’t know who is actually responsible, and they shouldn’t have to know. Unlike the download-and-run-installer of Windows, the only user-facing interface IS the OS’s package manager, and it is their responsibility to make sure it works. That is why major distributions spend a ton of time testing and repackaging software in their official repos.
The fun thing about having a built-in package manager provided by the OS is that the line gets blurry there. Is it the application developer’s responsibility to make sure they have a package for each distribution?
No, and no.
Packagers take things from upstream and package them for their distro. It’s not the responsibility of the upstream devs to know exactly the millisecond when someone launches a new Arch-derived distro or whatever so they have to ready packages for it. Like, who ever packages for Hannah Montana Linux?
Is it the OS’s responsibility to make sure they have a working package for each application a user may want?
No, either. But that’s at taking the question literally.
Honestly, those two cases are not blurry like, at all, and I have no impression of where such blurriness could even come from if it existed.
Because in the end, the end user doesn’t know who is actually responsible, and they shouldn’t have to know.
It’s 2025. If your users are expecting a tiktok-like experience, Get Better Users.
Unlike the download-and-run-installer of Windows, the only user-facing interface IS the OS’s package manager,
False, but to truly appreciate it why this is not the case you have to look into stuff that includes their own package management. Luanti, Python, Retroarch, [insert programming language of the month], etc. They all have their own package management. Precisely because that’s the direct and small scope where the upstream should have responsibility and avoiding the extra costs of middlemen bureaucracy is important.
Everything else is on-point, in particular the point that distros do and should fine test and fine tune the software that they do package. But that’s only on the social contract of what makes a distro – little more than a selection of software packages carefully stitched and tuned to work together, plus a system of honour to continue to do so; and that capacity for tuning and testing is finite over a finite set. Most of everything else is
luckdown on having a decent enough API.But that’s one of the main selling points for flatpaks, agreed with traditional packages though
Some of those are even words.
Remember when conectiva gave us apt-rpm (and it worked so well it’s been used ever since) but RH was like “we need more fucking python because it’s fun to go slow and also completely go unusable when someone manages to upgrade their python” ?
Good times. It was the dumbest thing they did before Systemd.
