143 karma · joined February 28, 2024
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
I’m all for higher Linux adoption on desktop, but there’s still a lot of resistance to making less-skilled users the primary target instead of power users.
Teaching can help, but if it takes 50 hours to learn the basics of Linux versus 5 hours for Windows, it’s a losing battle.
IMO a lot of the blame falls onto the package manager ecosystem refusing to take into account very valid needs and claiming they aren't real / desirable.
I'll stop there. I'm not interested in continuing this discussion when it's being conducted in bad faith.
Users need to figure out which of the 10+ package managers they should be using, then run several commands. If something fails, the error messages are often cryptic and not easily configurable by the distributor.
And that’s before getting into the many rough edges of package managers. Most of them flat-out refuse to handle configuration and leave that part to the end user. Now you also need to document how to edit YAML and restart a systemd service. With an install script this is also solved.
For power users, this always looks trivial. In practice it raises the barrier to entry and can meaningfully affect adoption if your product is often used by less technical people.
/s
Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.
Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.
If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.
If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today
Competitive games will likely add AI-based flagging into the mix, but it still doesn’t make sense to make cheating as trivial as adding a few uprobes/kprobes on a Linux box.
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.