Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 9, 2022 11:08 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Distributors entering Flatpakland by NYKevin
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

Indeed. We live in a world where the majority of users wouldn't be able to excercise these all-too-essential freedoms anyway: they are not developers themselves and they don't have money to pay the developers.

We have to accept that. It's just how life is.

But that means that things like licensing and even the distinction between free software or proprietary shouldn't be shoved into the new user face.

If Flathub doesn't allow one to filter FOSS-only packages then it's bad, I suppose: some people do want to avoid proprietary apps and while they are in the minority (and would always be in minority) they deserve adequate treatment. As long as they not try to impose their will on the majority, that is.

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Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 10, 2022 4:48 UTC (Sun) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (5 responses)

> Indeed. We live in a world where the majority of users wouldn't be able to excercise these all-too-essential freedoms anyway: they are not developers themselves and they don't have money to pay the developers.

That isn't right: the majority of students in the US are learning to
code. A large fraction of people will know some basics. Practical
software freedom is useful and important.

I've shown to 10-12 year old kids that they can open a terminal with
just one command to download and two to build, can get sources to any
package in the entire trisquel repo, make a small change, and run the
result. They are amazed and inspired. Someone in these comments told me
a command to download flathub sources from, but it doesn't seem to be
documented anywhere, and I don't know how to build them. So, I still
consider this a major regression from free packages in debian based
distros and I'm going to avoid it in general.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 10, 2022 13:55 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> > Indeed. We live in a world where the majority of users wouldn't be able to excercise these all-too-essential freedoms anyway: they are not developers themselves and they don't have money to pay the developers.

> That isn't right: the majority of students in the US are learning to code. A large fraction of people will know some basics. Practical software freedom is useful and important.

I'm sorry, but you're living in cloud cuckoo land ...

As a professional software developer, I all too often find myself in the position of being unable to exercise those freedoms. As I said, I would like to have Reveal Codes in LO, but I lack both the skills, and money, to be able to do anything about it.

Just because it's a mandatory part of education, it doesn't mean students are even *capable* of learning, and even if they are capable, doesn't mean they have the *desire* (which is massively important!).

You can have the brightest students in the world, and if they want to be musicians, or artists, or lawyers, it's a pretty safe bet they won't be able to code for toffee BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO INTEREST IN IT! (Or their skills will be crap because it's a necessary but unwelcome requirement. I see that daily in my job.)

RMS by all accounts was a software prodigy. Mozart was a music prodigy. Other people are prodigies elsewhere. The majority of people are either below average, or tend to be prodigies hopeless at fields outside their expertise. "Jack of all trades, master of none" springs to mind. Or "Master of one, hopeless elsewhere". The freedoms are great for professional coders or software prodigies, useless for other people.

Cheers,
Wol

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 8:50 UTC (Mon) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (3 responses)

You don't need to be a "software prodigy" to change a couple of things here and there. And on Debian systems that's really really easy.

apt-get build-dep xxx
apt-get source xxx
[do your thing]
dpkg-buildpackage

You don't have to figure out the specific way that package builds, the compiler options, the configure options, the dependencies… it's all done.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 10:13 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> You don't need to be a "software prodigy" to change a couple of things here and there. And on Debian systems that's really really easy.

> apt-get build-dep xxx
> apt-get source xxx
> [do your thing]
> dpkg-buildpackage

You're missing a very important point.

For the typical man on the Clapham Omnibus, they don't have difficulty following instructions, they have problems with "[do your thing]".

Let me list the languages I know - FORTRAN IV, Fortran 77, C, Forth, DataBasic, Perl, VBA ... (to dramatically varying abilities - 77, C, VBA, DataBasic I've seriously used ... and I've probably missed a few ...) and still I have major trouble even trying to UNDERSTAND the code base of various projects I want to get involved in - lilypond, LO, ScarletDME. I can build it easy enough - FFS my main distro is Gentoo!

If I, a seriously bright programmer, have trouble then your average guy isn't going to stand a hope. Yes, a lot of my problem is lack of time, but then that's true of average bloke, who DOESN'T WANT TO KNOW unless he's forced to.

You forget we are a self-selecting minority. To 99% of the people out there, all this is an irrelevance, a distraction, something they would much rather not know about even when they are forced to care ...

Cheers,
Wol

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 10:36 UTC (Mon) by ldearquer (guest, #137451) [Link] (1 responses)

Some software is way too big for doing casual modifications. Such is the case of LO -you will spend hours only to figure out where stuff is located (some documentation is provided for this though)
However many other packages are more manageable. My wacom was triggering a zoom event by accident on some drawing program, which was pretty annoying, and there was no config option to disable this behavior. But it was on a debian based distro, so getting the sources, searching "wheel", commenting out the wheel event and rebuilding the package was quite straight forward.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 16:05 UTC (Mon) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

+1 I agree