Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers [LWN.net]

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 18:04 UTC (Sun) by lsl (subscriber, #86508)
In reply to: Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers by khim
Parent article: Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

> Unless you are offering well-known product you'll need to spend inordinate amount of time trying to explain why you want this product

No, you don't. Almost no distribution requires a justification for packaging some piece of software as long as it complies with the packaging guidelines. "It's useful and I'm willing to do the work" is justification enough. Do you have a counter-example? RHEL et al. obviously don't count.

The single major reason delaying package reviews is packages conflicting with the guidelines. In practice this often boils down to one of the following: bad interaction with other parts of the system which the submitter did not anticipate, licensing issues, bundled libraries and, of course, broken packaging due to an inexperienced submitter.

Those issues usually get resolved but the review is stuck until then.

Also, at least in Fedora, it's the maintainer who decides in which version the new package will appear. It's just that many choose to only ship it for the current and future versions.

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Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 18:53 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

"It's useful and I'm willing to do the work" is justification enough.

You forgot to mention that it must be free which automatically excludes most of the software available. And “I'm willing to do the work” means not “I'm ready to read the guidelines and make a package in accordance to them”, but rather “I'm ready do change my package when guidelines are changing”. Not even Apple (which offers access to the most lucrative market over there) does that! It may refuse to allow newer version in the store if you don't upgrade it in accordance to the updated guidelines and it may remove it if it'll find out that you actually violated third-party license or something like this, but in general: what was added to AppStore once will be available there years later.

There is nothing wrong with trying to push FOSS, but this goal is fundamentally incompatible with the goal of having sizable presence on the desktop.

You could always contact RPMfusion maintainers, of course, but it's not part of the Fedora and there are large wishlist already which includes such pearls as Packages [which] already exist for RPM Fusion Russia and Chromium which violates Fedora's policies of handling libraries and various other issues.

Also, at least in Fedora, it's the maintainer who decides in which version the new package will appear.

I know. But Fedora is rare exception: most other distributions only upgrade packages in exceptional circumstances even if maintainer wishes otherwise.

It's just that many choose to only ship it for the current and future versions.

Which, frankly, makes absolutely no sense from user's POV. Currently used distribution model basically asks "do you want to change your wardrobe, your car and your house once per month or once per five years". Which is ridiculous: I want to change my wardrobe when it goes out of fashion but I only change my house once per few years (some people never change their house). The offer to completely redecorate my house just to get a new tie sounds crazy, but somehow the offer to break my [perfectly working and tuned up] desktop environment just to get GEGL-based GIMP is normal? Gosh.

Frankly I don't know what "problem" distributions are solving in their current form. Disk space savings? Come on: my phone has 32 GB of flash and my desktop has terabyte (wel, four, actually, but who's counting?)! Why not install all the essential components from the start and allow me to pick and choose the rest? Ah, security… but why security is affected to such a degree by just installing features I'll not use??? All these "numerous dependencies" are mostly shared libraries which represent just random set of bytes as long as they are stored on my system, but not actually used by programs.

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 20:19 UTC (Sun) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

> Frankly I don't know what "problem" distributions are solving in their current form. Disk space savings?

They provide convenience. Tons of it. Aside from my webbrowser the upstreams of virtually all the software I use ship source code and source code only. This has nothing to do with any ABI instabilities, they don't ship binaries for Solaris or OS X or whatever either.

For the majority of those programs I don't really care what exact version I'm running but just that it's recent and bugs get fixed. So I simply install it from the distribution repo und get it updated through yum/apt/zypper/pacman. I don't have to track upstream myself.

Only for some projects which I care deeply about I might want something else than what the standard distribution offer can provide. There I just pull the code from git or hg and work with that. I get to pick where to invest my time. I don't have to track the upstreams for hundreds or thousands of programs and libraries just to keep the system running. Oh, and since I'm already involved with the code and upstreams I care about why not help my distro making nice packages of it so others don't have to care?

The system works very well. Not for everybody and not for every kind of software but for many.

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 20:50 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

They provide convenience. Tons of it.

Really? I somehow don't find it more “convenient” when I find out that to run latest version of GIMP I must upgrade the whole thing with unpredictable results.

Or may be you wanted to say that they provide “convenience for packagers”? Well, may be, but I'm, as user, is not impressed.

For the majority of those programs I don't really care what exact version I'm running but just that it's recent and bugs get fixed. So I simply install it from the distribution repo und get it updated through yum/apt/zypper/pacman. I don't have to track upstream myself.

If you don't care about version of the software then why would you want to track it at all? This makes no sense! Something like monolithic Android release will work just as well.

And what do you do with a few programs which you do care about?

There I just pull the code from git or hg and work with that.

Wow. That means that if I want to just use some features from latest released version of Inkskape I'll need to become a co-developer? Thnks, but no, thnks. Most my friends are not software engineers, they don't want to be a software engineers and they just want to draw, of play or write, they do not want to pull the code from git or hg and work with that—and so, increasingly, do I. The fact that source code is available should not mean that only someone who can actually track dependencies and compile it deserve to use it.

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 21:21 UTC (Sun) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

> If you don't care about version of the software then why would you want to track it at all?

Uhm, I wrote that. I want a somewhat recent version that gets bugfixes and new features. If I just install something from upstream one time and then forget about it I don't have that. Aside from that 'yum install gimp' (which gives me 2.8.6, btw) is much more convenient than installing GIMP from upstream.

> Something like monolithic Android release will work just as well.

I don't understand what you mean here. Who is going to create a monolithic release image with all the programs I want to use? The result of just stuffing a whole distro archive with >10k packages into some image isn't going to be acceptable to most people.

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 22, 2013 21:32 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The result of just stuffing a whole distro archive with >10k packages into some image isn't going to be acceptable to most people.

Why would you want to stuff >10k packages in the image? You only need to include libraries with enough users. If there are 2-3-5 packages which need a particular library they can carry it with them, it's not a big deal. This simple procedure will shrink you list from >10k packages to 300-500 packages (or may be even less), which can easily be included in a single image.

Programs themselves can come from program authors: somehow it works for MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS, why wouldn't it work for Linux?

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 27, 2013 8:41 UTC (Fri) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link]

> Ah, security… but why security is affected to such a degree by just installing features I'll not use???

Every single piece of software you have on your system can potentially be exploited to escalate privileges. Obviously, the less cruft you have lying around, the smaller the probability of having an exploitable bug.

It's the traditional convenience vs. security trade-off.

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:54 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

That's not entirely true, only software which executes across a security boundary can be used to escalate privileges, exploiting software at the same privilege level that you start at isn't very interesting. One boundary can be remote untrusted users executing a user software like a browser or game to be able to run code as a local user, another is injecting code into the kernel or exploiting an SUID binary to execute with more privileges.