IRC: #techbytes @ Techrights IRC Network: Sunday, December 31, 2023

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"My reply to Brodie's video about Stallmans take on Flatpaks

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In his video "In reply to "Stallman's Bizarre Take On Flatpaks & Snaps" Brodie talks about an interview Stallman gave to Wikinews and more specifically about some things he said about Flatpak, Snap, etc.

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Stallman made a "bad" argument. As you said yourself, not everyone is correct all of the time.

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But if you go into it, it's not that bad or wrong. Because Snaps and Flatpaks (and I want to include Docker as well) can be used to easily include non-free software, while packages, that are disributed via the distributions package managers have to have certain standards and all the used dependencies must be clear. With Debian (and Fedora) they even have to be Free Software. So for the user it's much more clear from the beginning, what

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he was getting into, if he uses a "traditional" package manager.

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You know and instead of (for lack of a better word) "making fun" of Stallman for his "bizarre" take, why not invite him and him to see how much he actually knows and maybe use the chance to educate him and your viewers more about the issue. Because Flatpaks, Snaps and Dockers (FSDs) come wit a lot of problems – more social than technial – which is why it's even more important to discuss them.

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Free Software (not) included

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You were saying, that you don't (currently) want to use 100% Freedom-Giving (Free) Software, which is your good right. The point is, that the user always should have the choice, whether he wants to install and use freedom-denying (non-free) software. And that's Stallmans point, when he says: "So a free operating system always permits you to install non-free programs." It's not so much about, whether the distribution (in the case of GNU+

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Linux) includes proprietary drivers from the beginning. If someone doesn't want to have those drivers preinstalled, that's his good right and if someone does, that's fine as well. The big difference to, let's say Windows users, is, that we have the choice, how much non-free software we want or need (or if we have to have it at all). This is one of those points where Stallman and the FSF actually have changed their stance over the last y

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ears. If you go back to talks of Stallman from, let's say 10, 15 years ago Stallman was often refering to the free-distro page you showed.

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And even though, they've accepted, that not everyone can run Free Software to the same degree they do, I think it's good and necessery, that the FSF always kept their position, that Free Software is prerequisite for a "free society". I mean, how else should we know, what the goal is? How should we get a glimpse at a possible utopia, if no one talks about it and doesn't show us, what's possible?

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Flatpak, Snap and Docker

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The security issues

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While, I agree with you, that a lot of packaging work is wasted time, FSD are not the solution. Consider this, if there is a security-related bug in OpenSSL or cURL. With FSD every maintainer, that uses the affected library has to update his individual package. Then every user would have to update every single container in the hopes, that the issue got fixed. With the distributions "traditional" package management only the one depencenc

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y, that needs to be updated gets updated. All the other maintainers don't need to do a thing. The latest real world example was "libwebp", where some Debian(?) maintainer was writing on the Fediverse, how the whole communtiy beneftied, because only the dependency (libwebp) needed to be udpated. Which also probably saved a lot of redudant work. ;-)

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The big social issues

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The point Stallman is trying to make, when he says "Nobody's building it" is again not so much a technical, but a social one. Because, of course, most people also don't build the packages, they get from their distros, but there is a community of maintainers, that does. And that is in contrast to all the individual developers and projects, that build and distribute their software by themselfs. This distributions have communities of maint

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ainers, devs and users, that meet and have discussions, how they want software packaged, what should be in them and how it can benefit everybody. Flatpak, Snap and Co. are attacking those communities by indiviualising the developers and the users. FSD are probably not even that with bad intention, but they are not healthy for a Free Software (and even "Open Source") community.

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Finishing words

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In my opinion Flatpak, Snap and Co. are nice tools for developers to quickly setup and test their software, but in the end projects, if they want to be part of a community, should get their projects published via the different package managers.

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I also want to recommend you this blog post "Flatpak Is Not The Future", which goes into more technical details."

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<li>

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<h5><a href="https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-wireguard-vpn-gateway/"> Creating an OpenBSD Wireguard VPN Gateway </a></h5>

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<p> A couple of years ago I published a blog post about creating an OpenBSD VPN gateway using OpenVPN. </p>

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<p> I've recently switched from an OpenVPN-based VPN provider to one that uses Wireguard. As a result I've had to redo my VPN gateway. </p>

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<p> I'll only be highlighting the things I've changed since the last setup in this post, so please refer to the previous post for more details. </p>

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</blockquote>

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-blog.lambda.cx | Creating an OpenBSD Wireguard VPN Gateway - lambda.cx blog

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<h5><a href="https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html"> Gentoo goes Binary! </a></h5>

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<p>You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed? </p>

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<p> To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo s

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table, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details! </p>

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</blockquote>

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-www.gentoo.org | Gentoo goes Binary! – Gentoo Linux

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<h5><a href="https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/12/30/make-your-own-mesmerizing-sand-art-coffee-table/">Transform your coffee table into a piece of kinetic sand art</a></h5>

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<p>An Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls those stepper motors through a CNC Shield V3 with two TMC2209 drivers. The sketch is very simple and doesn’t run G-code directly. Instead, the user must extract a series of coordinates from a G-code file and copy them into the sketch. But because this is a coffee table, most users will only need to do that one time to program a series of patterns to cycle th

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rough. </p>

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</blockquote>

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-blog.arduino.cc | Transform your coffee table into a piece of kinetic sand art | Arduino Blog

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<h5><a href="https://rubenerd.com/ordering-my-first-3d-printed-part/">Ordering my first nylon 3D printed part</a></h5>

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<p>NOTE: Posting about 3D printing is an exercise fraught with peril; you’ll always be told you used the wrong materials or hardware, that you bought it from the wrong place, that you should have done something else, and/or you’ll be lectured by an armchair chemist about formulations they read on Wikipedia. This post shows something that worked amazingly well for me in this specific use case,

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but it’s up to you to do research if you attempt one of these yourself.</p>

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</blockquote>

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-Rubenerd: Ordering my first nylon 3D printed part

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<h5><a href="https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/continuous-integration-and-workflow-improvement/">Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement</a></h5>

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<p> As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, we have a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and the test infrastructure. In 2023, we added more testing jobs for ARM64 architectures like testing with Kernel Address Sanitizer and building test for non-standard compilers like GCC 12 and 13. </p>

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<p> We have also made great progress running the workflow working group, designing and implementing systems to support the pull-request based workflow. Pre-commit CI is on the horizon as well.</p>

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</blockquote>

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-freebsdfoundation.org | Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement – FreeBSD Foundation

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> There are some further significant changes I'll have to make.

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> I'm also thinking of making a series of posts out of it, because it got

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> so long.

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Definitely.

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Beat me to it.