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Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamersWhy Steam on Linux matters for non-gamersPosted Sep 22, 2013 20:19 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
> 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.
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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?
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