Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we’ve proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don’t cut it, so I’m in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I’m essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

• Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
• Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
• The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
• The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

Annecdotaly, a recent patch had notes that implied it fixes this issue. I got so tired of the dock being unreliable that I haven’t confirmed it, though.

Spot on. And I’ve found it’s even that bad at small companies too, if the company is more than five years old.

Maybe because I tried to follow MS’s “use your own distro” instructions instead of using something prepackaged?

Not op, and I don’t care about systemd, but…

When I’ve used anything I wanted to substantially modify, I’ve followed the “use your own distro” instructions. In the past I’ve done this because WSL had a strong assumption of exactly one copy of each distro, and I like to abuse it for more.

Overall, I’ve had a better time with the the “bring your own distro” instructions. But some of my experiences with WSL were before they even got the Windows Store installer working correctly.

More recently, I recall Windows Store being fine for stock Ubuntu and for stock Debian. But I didn’t find the “bring your own distro” instructions to be much trouble, either. My perhaps faulty memory is that it took maybe ten minutes, last time I used them.

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.

I mean, I didn’t read terribly closely, because I already made my choice.

My reason is that the benefits of Ubuntu over Debian are most noticeable in the GUI, which WSL doesn’t contain.

In contrast, I find the benefits of Debian over Ubuntu to be most noticeable on the command line, which is all we get in WSL anyway.

To me this is some solid advice that I already knew.

I think there’s also a fair assumption by the author that anyone running WSL isn’t a total Linux newbie. I personally, think of WSL as an intermediate skill level way to run Linux, because WSL is still - frankly - a huge pain in the ass, when contrasted with trying out a bootable USB drive, and then only gives the command line, which is also a very limited way to experience Linux. (I think it will get better, but today WSL is not a way that I recommend to newbies to try out Linux.)

That’s a fair enough reason. I personally never noticed because the “this isn’t running” message is pretty clear to me. But I can see how that’s a potential blocker for newer Linux users.

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 would do better asking elsewhere. I am famously old and irritable.)

“if you’re a Linux expert, this article isn’t for you. You’re probably already using Debian if you use WSL”

As a Linux expert - yep! My distro choice under WSL is Debian, for the same reasons shared in the article.

there’s a whole load of artists historically, who have virtually no information about them. If they weren’t famous whilst alive, who would bother to write down a biography at the time? Afterwards, you’re left with researching records from census, school, sales, newspapers, possible living relatives etc.

That makes sense. Today I learned. Thanks!

Huh. Maybe that Robert guy from before just never did anything notable.

Jean has a pretty detailed Wikipedia page that comes right up in search.

So maybe the Internet isn’t broken, but Robert Engel did something to really piss off every wikipedia editor. Heh.

// portability

Gave me the giggles. I’ve helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

I am unable to speak using contractions.

Same. I am anxious that the alien dopplegangers will figure this out, though.

The guarantee they enjoyed is no longer expressed in the constitution. Or am I missing something?

Yeah. I’m not saying it was wise, by any means!

Thanks. That’s a little helpful. But it’s nothing like the page I used to find, with some independent academic’s rambling thoughts about the life and times (marriages, affairs, day job and scandalous might life) of Robert Engels. Maybe 'ol Robert is just completely forgettable. But I suspect it’s more just that Internet search sucks now.

I’ve run almost every OS.

My daily driver is Debian. It’s practical, efficient, stable, and with just a few commands clipped out of blog articles, it morphs into whatever weird silly thing I happen to need it to be, this year.

A lot of people died who didn’t need to, in the United States, during the pandemic of 2020, due to a certain orange jackass making basic mask wearing into a political statement, instead of a matter of human decency to each other.

We’re here to post about. Others are not.

Voting in the United States has always been primarily a way to protect the power of already powerful people, and secondarily a way to ensure incremental social progress continues at a pace that doesn’t make powerful people too uncomfortable.

A lot of things about the way things are structured in US democracy make more sense with that context, including this, I think.

Specifically, 70% of people both eligible and motivated to vote, voted to ensure eligibility to vote is not extended. This has happened many times throughout history, and only seems odd if we accept the fib that everyone is represented.

In the context of gerrandering, first-past-the-poll “representation”, and various other forms of disenfranchisement; it makes sense that 70% of the people allowed to actually vote, votes in favor of continuing to restrict the vote (to themselves).