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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, is this an AI response? How could Apple break linux sw?

I use four personal machines pretty frequently (a few hours, a few time a week), one Mac Mini, a recent all-AMD Asus laptop running Ubuntu 22.10, an old Dell laptop (with a discreet nVidia card) running Ubuntu 22.10, and a really old Toshiba ultrabook running Pop_OS! None of them break regularly, though the Asus (probably from being the newest) has a fingerprint sensor that has never quite worked right under Ubuntu. Other than the slowness and clunkiness of snaps, Ubuntu seems fine to me? Going forward I will probably stick to Pop, it seems a little better thought out than plain ol' Ubuntu, but the differences aren't night and day.

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Dont know if it is a AI response, but one of my friends had a M1 and we couldn't watch a movie because VLC wasn't ported yet.

Just some weird things with Snaps that made me "snap" :P Like, Installing Chromium with snap, and then it doesn't have access to file drop which is something I use like 20 times a day. This easily adds 30 minutes to my work. Or sharing my screen I have to click 4 buttons in a slow and clunky manner.

Snap, flatpack and the like are not really sorted out yet and possibly never will be. Best to avoid them and if you cant install from your distro's repo than compile it yourself.

The issue with your friend and their M1 was probably because he was running linux on it and not OSX? he surely could have watched a movie with the native OSX apps if that was not the case.

>How could Apple break linux sw?

Software must communicate with the OS to work and Apple does not seem to care much about doing things which will break software from the linux/OSS community. This is actually one the primary reasons I gave up OSX/Apple, the other being they dropped support for classic apps, in one update they rendered 75% of the software I used unusable.

Sorry I called you an AI, but I think the problem is that you're using "linux/OSS" to refer to things like FF or VLC that happen to be OSS, and run on both Linux and macOS. Apple for sure has been getting increasingly hostile to developers, these days getting basic tools set up via homebrew etc. on newer releases of macOS is getting ridiculous. But that doesn't have any bearing on the stability of Linux releases of those apps, which is why it seemed like an impossible non-sequitur.

I was using "linux/OSS" to refer to software which originates from the the linux ecosystem and implying the cross platform aspect. I did not use the phrase "cross platform" because I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that cross platform software which originates from the OSX ecosystem is less vulnerable since they tend to know OSX better and keep up to date on changes in OSX. I probably should have just said "software from the linux ecosystem" but my language skills have been lacking today.

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