this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR
, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
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- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
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Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
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I see where this is coming from, Valve only supports Ubuntu LTS officially so it would make sense that a native package on those operating systems would work ootb. I've just been using Fedora for so long that me installing flatpak Steam is second nature (instead of jumping through the hoops of installing RPMFusion Nonfree).
Software Manager on Linux Mint is really robust since I've last used it a couple of months ago. I think the impression people have of bad software store guis comes from GNOME software because of how slow Packagekit (the backend) is.
For a while now, Steam on Linux has shipped with the "Steam Runtime," which is a collection of all the dependencies which would be present on Ubuntu. Games targeting Linux for distribution on Steam are compiled against this specific slate of libraries, and this is intended to make them work "everywhere" regardless of which versions are packaged by the distribution. On other distributions (in my experience, ArchLinux and Gentoo) this has worked pretty well. No segmentation faults, ABI problems, or dynamic link errors to report. It can, however, cause weird incompatibilities where something shipped by your distribution works, but doesn't on Steam, or vice versa due to different library versions. The versions shipped by Steam tend to lag behind, but they are also configured specifically for the purpose of gaming.
As far as PackageKit goes, I'd say they hold a very un-enviable position. There are dozens of package managers out there, each with their own APIs, quirks, and functional differences. Trying to apply a one-size-fits-all layer on top of those is a never-ending struggle. Support for Apt and RPM is probably good, but as you start branching out into other systems it going to get rough.