Oh, it can get worse. If Windows market share should really plummet, it won’t be replaced by a heterogenous distro utopia but some company like Canonical or Red Hat or a new one will get their distribution to fill the gap. And call me a cynic but I doubt this will be immune to enshittification.
But even that scenario is better than what we have with Microsoft and Apple. The FOSS world would still benefit like it does from the Steam Deck developments.
Well, no offense intended, but that is cynical. The only way for enshittification to hit Linux would be if only one group controlled it. When IBM/Red Hat discontinued CentOS, the community immediately moved to fill the gap with AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.
That said, yes, things can always get worse. I don’t think Linux is immune to having problems, but not on the scale of what’s happening with Windows with their Copilot garbage.
My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.
(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)
it’s great for applications that are notorious for requiring specific versions of libraries and can cause dependency hell. moves unnecessary system dependencies into a sandbox. for me this means i don’t have to enable multilib to install Steam and pull in 32 bit libraries on my root.
while it does take a lot of disc space it doesn’t duplicate dependencies in most cases. i would say you receive some good benefits at the cost of a bit more disc space, such as increased security, easy installs, explicit app permissions. it’s great for when you have to install a proprietary tool in that you gain control of what it’s allowed to access.
Oh, it can get worse. If Windows market share should really plummet, it won’t be replaced by a heterogenous distro utopia but some company like Canonical or Red Hat or a new one will get their distribution to fill the gap. And call me a cynic but I doubt this will be immune to enshittification.
But even that scenario is better than what we have with Microsoft and Apple. The FOSS world would still benefit like it does from the Steam Deck developments.
Well, no offense intended, but that is cynical. The only way for enshittification to hit Linux would be if only one group controlled it. When IBM/Red Hat discontinued CentOS, the community immediately moved to fill the gap with AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.
That said, yes, things can always get worse. I don’t think Linux is immune to having problems, but not on the scale of what’s happening with Windows with their Copilot garbage.
My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.
(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)
it’s great for applications that are notorious for requiring specific versions of libraries and can cause dependency hell. moves unnecessary system dependencies into a sandbox. for me this means i don’t have to enable multilib to install Steam and pull in 32 bit libraries on my root.
while it does take a lot of disc space it doesn’t duplicate dependencies in most cases. i would say you receive some good benefits at the cost of a bit more disc space, such as increased security, easy installs, explicit app permissions. it’s great for when you have to install a proprietary tool in that you gain control of what it’s allowed to access.