Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Posted Oct 30, 2022 1:09 UTC (Sun) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)In reply to: Packaging Rust for Fedora by khim
Parent article: Packaging Rust for Fedora
Can you name me some awesome Windows-only applications from the last twenty years? Other than games, I had precisely zero by the time I left Windows (one of the reasons I jumped ship).
I'm genuinely curious to hear of some.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 10:43 UTC (Sun)
by ssokolow (guest, #94568)
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I keep a copy of Exact Audio Copy under Wine because, every time I need to back up some music CDs, I find that whipper, the closest Linux runner-up, still has an "if we can't do this perfectly, barf rather than supporting an option to accept a best effort" approach to aging music CDs and it's just flat-out incompatible with track 1 being a data track.
Project64 has broader compatibility with the ROMs I dumped from my childhood N64 carts (thank you, Retrode) than Mupen64Plus or the Mupen64Plus cores for Retroatch. (Notably, Donkey Kong 64.)
There's never been a Linux tool capable of creating Stuffit archives for test fodder (and Smith Micro end-of-lifed it), so I had to eBay some copies of Stuffit and run them in Wine to produce legally redistributable test archives.
The open-source asset extractors for things like Unity lag way behind the Windows freeware tools in supporting modern versions of Unity whenever I find myself needing that to format-shift soundtracks I've already paid for once.
...and that's not including hardware-specific stuff where the protocols have never been reverse-engineered like the Musicsoft Downloader for loading MIDI files onto Yamaha keyboards via SysEx messages.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 11:58 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (7 responses)
It's funny that you have quoted the sentence without reading it. Not that I haven't said that for every awesome Linux-only app there are dozen of awesome Windows-only or iOS-only apps. Most of the apps are not, really, all that awesome. They are just available for Windows and/or Android/iOS only… and you need them. Want to backup documents your children created on their calculator in college? Here's your app, pick whether you need EXE, MSI or DMG. Need to deal with bank? Here's your Windows-only app. Need to check in on your plane? Oh, sorry, web site is broken for last month, but here's you Android/iOS app. Taxes? You know what to do, right? It's not that there are too many amazing programs for Windows or iOS. It's that lots of apps which you need to be member of the society are not available under Linux. Sure, you can deal with it. You can ask your friends to help install Linux on your TI Nspire CX II CAS… but, frankly, that phrase even sounds silly. If you are hermit and actively try to avoid everything not available on Linux it may work… till you would try to find a job and would get instructions in mail which would include link to Windows-only special “safe” browser… Windows-only, of course. This all comes down to the fact that for decades it was possible to develop and deliver app for Windows and macOS, but before flatpack and snap it wasn't possible to do for Linux. Today… it's possible, sure, but… development process for these apps is entirely separated from development of apps and libraries for the linux distros, why would you need to bother about that one at all? It would be as silly as if Android guys would have demanded that Rust developers would have abandoned Why can not Linux distros do that?
Posted Oct 30, 2022 17:35 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (5 responses)
> It's not that there are too many amazing programs for Windows or iOS. It's that lots of apps which you need to be member of the society are not available under Linux.
This is ... quite depressing.
It also really drives home the points that the FSF has been trying to make about the problems that arise from depending upon proprietary software and, more recently, proprietary services.
I consider myself fortunate that I've still been able to opt out of all of the dreck. I don't know how much longer that will be the case, but I try hard to put my money where my mouth is, and do what I can to ensure a couple of niche corners still can be met with software that respects its users' freedom.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 21:46 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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But many services were always proproetary! Your bank always belonged to someone and water comes into your house by pipes owned by someone. That's the thing: world have changed and very often software is used as part of something bigger. Think about that damn TI Nspire CX II CAS: I only need to have program which can talk to it while I use it. Maybe 4 or 5 years while it's needed for college. After that I have no need neither for it nor for the program which can talk to it. And I'm pretty sure in 2 or 3 years community would crack it's protocol (like it did with previous models) and would support it. When I would no longer need it. And the same with everything. Most programs which have no analogues under Linux don't have analogues because they are only usable for a limited time. They are part of some offer which was always proprietary — only in XX century that some offer included the need to go somewhere and today you can use program to do the same thing from home. Why would they support more than bare minimum? And bare minimum naturally leads to proprietary programs and then only for popular platforms where ongoing support is not too onerous.
Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:15 UTC (Mon)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link] (3 responses)
It's also not true. The specific calculator model he's complaining about has a Linux file manager that works with it. Every bank I've ever encountered has a website that works in a Linux web browser. No bank I've ever encountered has ever tried to push a Windows-only app on me. Airline web sites don't go down for months at a time, because that would be very expensive for the airline as it would lead to fewer ticket sales. From every airline website I've ever used, you can print your boarding pass from the website and take the printed page with you to board, meaning all you need to buy the ticket and get on the plane is a web browser, and it can be a Linux web browser if you want. Regarding taxes, the IRS has an official online filing portal called "Free Fillable Forms" which I can attest works just fine from a Linux browser.
Now, that website is actually run not by the IRS but by some proprietary shitware company, I think Intuit, for stupid political reasons, and it's not the most user friendly tax filing option out there. I do believe there is an unfilled need for open source tax filing software, and I am actually working on filling that need. While I don't have anything remotely usable yet, but this team does: https://ustaxes.org And you don't need either of our products because Free Fillable Forms does work just fine, even if it is clunky.
The Linux desktop world is not perfect -- nothing ever is -- but, contrary to what khim claims, it's in very good condition.
Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:54 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
We can quibble over the specifics of what he said, but it's clearly been trending in that direction for some time, with mobile-optional becoming mobile-first and trending towards mobile-only, and locked-down-mobile-only at that. Even before smartphones became common, there were examples of banking sites in some countries (South Korea?) and plenty of governmental sites elsewhere requiring specific ActiveX plugins, which effectively locked everyone into IE on Windows.
> The Linux desktop world is not perfect -- nothing ever is -- but, contrary to what khim claims, it's in very good condition.
Oh, I completely agree -- I've been using Linux as my only desktop environment since at least 1998 -- but I still have a Windows VM I need to fire up once in a while to deal with some stuff that WINE probably won't ever handle [1].
[1] Anything involving device drivers or badly-written [2] vendor firmware updating tools, for example
Posted Oct 31, 2022 13:31 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Where is it and how can I find it? I only know that tilp still doesn't support it, but I admit, it was easier for me to just use Windows that to look around on unofficial forums for the version which may or may not work. Except you are a small business, then they would give you Windows-only bank client and if you are lucky key for that bank client would be on USB and not on floppy. I remember how even LWN itself struggled with that and while maybe, just maybe they solved that problem, it took years.
Posted Sep 14, 2023 2:12 UTC (Thu)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
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Posted Oct 31, 2022 6:52 UTC (Mon)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link]
Calculator: https://www.reddit.com/r/nspire/comments/k5v7vy/cxcx2linu...
Taxes: It's not tax season but previous tax season you had a multitude of online options for filing taxes, some free.
Online Free: Credit Karma Tax, Free Fillable Forms
I am actually working on a libre tax software solution, but haven't had much time for it recently due to my day job: https://github.com/linuxrocks123/taxfloss
If you are at all interested, I'll push my 2021 forms to GitHub. They're not right now. The program has no user interface, but the domain-specific language works so if you declare variables with your input you can actually use it. (I did.) You still have to fill in the forms by hand by copying the output, though.
These people are taking a different approach and have a UI and something more usable currently: https://ustaxes.org/start
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
rustup and cargo and switched to blueprints. They, as developers of platform, do their own thing, Rust developers offer tools for app developers)… and nobody tries to swallow the whole world.Packaging Rust for Fedora
> It also really drives home the points that the FSF has been trying to make about the problems that arise from depending upon proprietary software and, more recently, proprietary services.
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
[2] That's probably redundant
> The specific calculator model he's complaining about has a Linux file manager that works with it.
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Online Pay: TurboTax, H&R Block