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Cake day: July 31st, 2021

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  • I did an experiment where I used Distrobox for many apps not available on Debian. I installed an Arch distrobox and exported the packages. I found that it works great with simple programs, but I run into a few issues when using more complex programs. Jellyfin Media Player for example tended to have a memory leak and have a core dump on the desktop whenever it is closed. It uses twice as memory as the Flatpak for some reason. I had the same issue with Stremio which is also a video streaming app. For command line things it’s mostly fine. But this too can get tricky. I tried to use Neovim (Debian’s is a bit old) in the Arch distorbox. The issue is that if you need plugins that require some dependency with a given version then you have to also install those and export them which makes things messy. For example you may have a version of Nodejs on your Debian install but you’ll need to install Nodejs on the distorbox too and export it. It’s the same with many packages like that. You’ll run into some issues and waste time trying to figure out where is it coming from. Is it your machine or the distorbox? I ended up just building from source. Overall it’s a great project and might work for some software that you need. But it’s not something you can always rely on for everything. The app devs are not testing for that specific use case. It’s so great for testing and installing stuff and then destroying when you don’t need it anymore.

















  • nobloat@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMarx's rule
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    11 months ago

    If I could, I would. Sadly being from North Africa makes it hard for me to donate to my favorite FOSS projects. There are many restrictions and even getting a credit card that’s usable internationally is a pain, and it only gives you an amount each year you can use online. Not to mention having a really low currency and bad economy would make even a trivial donation feel like a sizable portion of your income. My comment wasn’t a dig at Firefox but a lament. It shows how complex things are. The FOSS and privacy oriented option has to rely here on Google having enough money to give to it. Google having enough money relies on data mining. So the monetization of privacy-respecting option relies on other users letting go of their privacy to Google. While Firefox is a superior option, it is worth seeing how ultimately we are still fucked. Even the FOSS option survives through ad revenue of another company. This highlights the problem of FOSS monetization that needs to be solved. Firefox should learn from Thunderbird.