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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all.

    It’s the sense I got. It made everything harder for me.

    Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.

    I like the idea of distrobox but it’s simply broken. Things just don’t “work”. I’ve hit weird problems each time I try to use it for anything meaningful (don’t ask what - I don’t remember and I was always jumping down rabbit holes to figure out how to just get things that should work working). And the shared home directory model is simply broken by design since you now get competing containers fighting over the same files. You can use per-container home directories and now you get to setup a linux environment from scratch for each distrobox. So much duplication of effort… What a terrible implementation of what is potentially useful idea.

    I thought it would be kinda like using Docker but it’s so much worse. Docker works well because the containers are often pretty simple with few requirements. Desktop environments are messy.

    And frankly it’s not really worth it in the end. pyenv, sdkman and others have basically solved that problem without adding weird things to debug. They genuinely “just work” and let you easily switch versions of java, python, groovy, etc.









  • This is one of the old-time original arguments in the OSS community.

    The crux of the matter is that the GNU licenses require that modifications be released back to the community. Other “more permissible” licenses like MIT do not.

    So if you want to make a commercial version of X, and X is under a GPL, then any changes you make need to be released under the GPL. The idea being “I shared this code with the community with the intent that you can use it for free and modify it as you like, but you need to share back what you do.” Also called “Share and share alike”.

    This defends against “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics that companies like Microsoft has loved to do. They can’t take your code, modify it for their own purposes and re-sell it possibly making a more popular version that is now proprietary.