Have you ever decided to do something truly devious with your Linux computer? I’m talking the elite hacker shit. I’m talking the stuff they don’t dare talk about at Defcon. I’m talking crossing a line you can’t uncross, the things that get your civil rights revoked and summon the black helicopters. Things like watching a DVD or inkjet printing a photograph you took with a digital camera.

Normal people can’t just do heavy shit like that, man. A lot of them won’t even make it through installing VLC, watch them try to grok the difference between Fedora repos, Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub. Then, how many of them do you think will figure out how to go to File > Open Disc. Your uncle that hunts and pecks at 2 words a minute can’t fit that idea in his head because “Play DVD” is taking up too much room for “Open Disc” to fit.

Then it bombs out with a cryptic error message that doesn’t even display in white text in dark mode, because your Linux computer doesn’t have the DRM shit required to play a DVD. That is going to require one of these:

sudo dnf install libvcss libvcss-data libvcss-common libvcss2 ffmpeg ffmpeg-common ffmpeg-dvdcss

and if that was an APT command, that’d be the end of it because it would work. NOT ON FEDORA. I’ve never seen one of those “install seven packages” commands work on Fedora. Ever. Because DNF is more pedantic, it’s libvcss-common4.2.2beta now, stop deadnaming the penguin flavored DLL.

Oh and your inkjet printer? No we don’t do that anymore. We do driverless basic bitch document printing now, we removed the drivers from any repos out there and made it so that DNF won’t install the ones offered by Epson themselves, because this shall not be done. You want to put a glossy photo of your house cat, in a frame, IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME?! I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional Epson XP-830 is extremely not on it because we saw what you did that one time and we won’t forgive you.

Seriously, software management on Fedora is goddamn unlivable.

  • lambaliciousEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    The fun thing about having a built-in package manager provided by the OS is that the line gets blurry there. Is it the application developer’s responsibility to make sure they have a package for each distribution?

    No, and no.

    Packagers take things from upstream and package them for their distro. It’s not the responsibility of the upstream devs to know exactly the millisecond when someone launches a new Arch-derived distro or whatever so they have to ready packages for it. Like, who ever packages for Hannah Montana Linux?

    Is it the OS’s responsibility to make sure they have a working package for each application a user may want?

    No, either. But that’s at taking the question literally.

    Honestly, those two cases are not blurry like, at all, and I have no impression of where such blurriness could even come from if it existed.

    Because in the end, the end user doesn’t know who is actually responsible, and they shouldn’t have to know.

    It’s 2025. If your users are expecting a tiktok-like experience, Get Better Users.

    Unlike the download-and-run-installer of Windows, the only user-facing interface IS the OS’s package manager,

    False, but to truly appreciate it why this is not the case you have to look into stuff that includes their own package management. Luanti, Python, Retroarch, [insert programming language of the month], etc. They all have their own package management. Precisely because that’s the direct and small scope where the upstream should have responsibility and avoiding the extra costs of middlemen bureaucracy is important.

    Everything else is on-point, in particular the point that distros do and should fine test and fine tune the software that they do package. But that’s only on the social contract of what makes a distro – little more than a selection of software packages carefully stitched and tuned to work together, plus a system of honour to continue to do so; and that capacity for tuning and testing is finite over a finite set. Most of everything else is luck down on having a decent enough API.