IHeartBadCode

I think what’s wild is that particular group’s incredible thought process of “oh yeah, the current guy is just doing a hit job on this other guy because he’s running for President. He’s sending all these various agencies after him. blah blah blah…”

And I’m just like. Or you know, simple answer is that guy is doing crime stuff and ought not to be doing crime stuff. To really over simplify the most recent crime stuff. The crime was he wrote the wrong thing on the sheet of paper. You look at the paper, it says it’s for lawyer stuff. You look at the receipts shows the money went to hide sex stuff. Lawyer stuff ≠ hide sex stuff. Ta-da!

And a bit more detail. The whole argument that hiding sex stuff wasn’t political money. Literally a letter between crime guy and other person handling political stuff was, we need to hide this sex stuff otherwise that could hurt us in election stuff. Like I get it that there’s some folks wanting to believe that President guy is just mad at crime guy and wants to whatever him so that President guy can stay in office. But crime guy literally admitted crime stuff in letters he thought no one else would ever read. Crime guy is not a very smart crime guy.

I don’t like current guy, don’t get me wrong. But crime guy is an idiot. I just don’t want an idiot back as President. There’s just way too many people hitched to an idiot here and willing to go down with the ship. Crime guy is an idiot and he’s getting smacked with a lot of the crime shit he’s done because he’s an idiot. There’s not any other way to slice this. Crime guy is just not good at anything and is coasting on mom and dad money still. If anything, that Crime guy is still floating on some money is a testament to Crime guy’s book keeper.

Do you use autocomplete? AI in some of the various ways that’s being posited is just spicy autocomplete. You can run a pretty decent local AI on SSE2 instructions alone.

Now you don’t have to accept spicy-autocomplete just like you don’t have to accept plain jane-autocomplete. The choice is yours, Mozilla isn’t planning on spinning extra cycles in your CPU or GPU if you don’t want them spun.

But I distinctly remember the grumbles when Firefox brought local db ops into the browser to give it memory for forms. Lots of people didn’t like the notion of filling out a bank form or something and then that popping into a sqlite db.

So, your opinion, I don’t blame you. I don’t agree with your opinion, but I don’t blame you. Completely normal reaction. Don’t let folks tell you different. Just like we need the gas pedal for new things, we need the brake as well. I would hate to see you go and leave Firefox, BUT I would really hate you having to feel like something was forced upon you and you just had to grin and bear it.

I am so sorry this got so long. I’m absolutely horrible at brevity.

Applications use things called libraries to provide particular functions rather than implement those functions themselves. So like “handle HTTP request” as an example, you can just use a HTTP library to handle it for you so you can focus on developing your application.

As time progresses, libraries change and release new versions. Most of the time one version is compatible with the other. Sometimes, especially when there is a major version change, the two version are incompatible. If an application relied on that library and a major incompatible change was made, the application also needs to be changed for the new version of the library.

A Linux distro usually selects the version of each library that they are going to ship with their release and maintain it via updates. However, your distro provider and some neat program you might use are usually two different people. So the neat program you use might have change their application to be compatible with a library that might not make it into your distro until next release.

At that point you have one of two options. Wait until your distro provides the updated library or the go it alone route of you updating your own library (which libraries can depend on other libraries, which means you could be opening a whole Pandora’s box here). The go it alone route also means that you have to turn off your distro’s updates because they’ll just overwrite everything you’ve done library wise.

This is where snaps, flatpaks, and appimages come into play. In a very basic sense, they provide a means for a program to include all the libraries it’ll need to run, without those libraries conflicting with your current setup from the distro. You might hear them as “containerized programs”, however, they’re not exactly the Docker style “container”, but from an isolating perspective, that’s mostly correct. So your neat application that relies on the newest libraries, they can be put into a snap, flatpak, or appimage and you can run that program with those new libraries no need for your distro to provide them or for you to go it alone.

I won’t bore you on the technical difference between the formats, but just mostly focus on what I usually hear is the objectionable issue with snaps. Snaps is a format that is developed by Canonical. All of these formats have a means of distribution, that is how do you get the program to install and how it is updated. Because you know, getting regular updates of your program is still really important. With snaps, Canonical uses a cryptographic signature to indicate that the distribution of the program has come from their “Snaps Store”. And that’s the main issue folks have taken with snaps.

So unlike the other kinds of formats, snaps are only really useful when they are acquired from the Canonical Snaps Store. You can bypass the checking of the cryptographic signature via the command line, but Ubuntu will not automatically check for updates on software installed via that method, you must check for updates manually. In contrast, anyone can build and maintain their own flatpak “store” or central repository. Only Canonical can distribute snaps and provide all of the nice features of distribution like automatic updates.

So that’s the main gripe, there’s technical issues as well between the formats which I won’t get into. But the main high level argument is the conflicting ideas of “open and free to all” that is usually associated with the Linux group (and FOSS [Free and open-source software] in general) and the “only Canonical can distribute” that comes with snaps. So as @sederx indicated, if that’s not an argument that resonates with you, the debate is pretty moot.

There’s some user level difference like some snaps can run a bit slower than a native program, but Canonical has updated things with snaps to address some of that. Flatpak sandboxing can make it difficult to access files on your system, but flatpak permissions can be edited with things like Flatseal. Etc. It’s what I would file into the “papercut” box of problems. But for some, those papercuts matter and ultimately turn people off from the whole Linux thing. So there’s arguments that come from that as well, but that’s so universal “just different in how the papercut happens” that I just file that as a debate between container and native applications, rather a debate about formats.