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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • Can you be more specific?

    Sure.

    I’ve had discussions about my impression that Rust’s build chain can be a bit surly compared to other popular languages.

    I don’t particularly mean it as a criticism - of course Rust’s security enforcement comes with more warnings and errors.

    But the novel part of the interactions, for me, was Rust community members coming at me with ‘well get gud, newbie’.

    These interactions are particularly ironic, given my experiences and specialties. I’m an old school veteran software developer. I have spent over half of my career in dedicated Cybersecurity roles.

    These conversations converted me from a mildly interested Rust proponent into a casual Rust critic.



  • So why are you advising to change the default install of Debian to include it?

    I didn’t advice any such thing. My edit is just to acknowledge someone else who makes it part of their process.

    Citation needed.

    I shared my personal experience and you turned it into a distro war. Go look up your own damn sources.

    Pretty sure this is either personal opinion or anti-canonical, anti-snap ideology.

    Fuck yes. It’s both! Snap is a slap in the face to the contributors who brought Canonical this far. I appreciate their partnership so far, and now, speaking as a package maintainer, Canonical can fuck right off.

    Targeting WSL users with this rhetoric is ridiculous.

    Helping people make an informed decision about their tool chain is rhetoric? Give me a fucking break.

    I don’t like Ubuntu. That’s not a secret. Ubuntu is a fine option for total newbies. People using WSL tend not to be total newbies and may well run into real issues (such as the ones that prompted me to switch), thanks to snap.



  • All the answers are going to assume WSL is using Ubuntu.

    Every recipe that I have ever encountered for Ubuntu worked on Debian, except the recipes involving Snaps, which were inevitably much simpler on Debian. And I haven’t seen anything useful under WSL (cli tools) packaged better as a snap anyway.

    Why do Linux advocates try so desperately to overcomplicate things?

    Computers are complicated. Linux advocates just aren’t being paid to lie about it.

    In this case, this is a simple 7 character (edit: plus a (optional) one line command to enable systemd) change that can save a newbie a lot of trouble, and comes with no downside. the downside that systemd isn’t enabled by default. (Edit: a good point made below.)

    There’s very few cases where Debian and Ubuntu are different at on the command line (which WSL is). In those very few cases, anyone using WSL is going to have a much better time on Debian, because they’re more likely to find a working recipe.

    The exact reasons for this are nuanced, but come down - folks liked me publishing recipes don’t target Ubuntu anymore, because I wasn’t (as a package maintainer) invited to the Snap party. Which is fine. Flatpak does the same job, in an open way.

    So for the 98% of recipes that predate Snap, there’s no difference to be had as a user. For the cutting edge 2% of new stuff, newbies are increasingly better off on Debian.

    (Edit: In case anyone was wondering, I really, personally, don’t like Ubuntu, because it has Snaps. I’m aware that makes me a meme.

    Snaps are bad for the community, and bad for the user.

    Some of us understand why, and do our best to mention it politely, every so often, to save our peers a headache or two.

    That said, folks who need hand-held through the specifics of why Snap sucks would do better asking elsewhere. I am famously old and irritable.)