I like your comment a lot because you can substitute a lot of different things for “snap” and it still ends up sounding like a very reasonable opinion

I feel like I would be more okay with leaded gasoline if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with anarcho-capitalism if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with PFAS-coated cookware if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with single-use plastic bags if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with cryptocurrencies if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with generative AI if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with eating highly processed meat if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase ‘Yes, do as I say!’

But speaking seriously, I think he tried it for a while and didn’t like it either… not sure why specifically tho, I’ll ask him

It’s not a miniscule gripe tho. Snap is still broken for many users, and relying on it for something as critical as a web browser is asking for trouble. Experimental technologies like snap should be opt-in for users who are willing to deal with the issues they create. Do they really expect a novice to see firefox’s filepicker not behaving correctly, and think “Aha, an XDG desktop portal issue! Let me drop everything I’m doing and go troubleshoot that” ? Ubuntu is meant to be linux for normies, they don’t have the time or the knowledge to deal with snap.

Next step is probably a VM…

Boy, you’re gonna love QubesOS

One of my friends spent like a month distrohopping just to find a debian-based distro that fits these two criteria:

• First-class support for KDE

• Isn’t broken all the time

Ubuntu fails both. KDE Neon excels on the first one, but fails harder than ubuntu on the second one. Kubuntu as well. Debian has horridly outdated packages, and he refuses to use nix/flatpak. Tuxedo OS is obscure and broken. Mint is great, but installing KDE takes some effort.

He finally settled on Ubuntu Server with the native KDE package. Still has to do some weird incantations to banish snap tho.

How did things get this bad?

Do these things correlate that much tho? Not to toot my own horn, but I am fairly tech-proficient and have terrible typing skills. My technique is somewhere in between hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, despite regular typing lessons in elementary school. I imagine a lot of other people are like this, and vice-versa as well.

The trick is to give up and just shuttle files from computer to printer via usb stick

Clean and simple

In your browser

What?

I think it has to do with the age of the target audience? I remember being absolutely terrified and morbidly fascinated by sonic.exe and similar when I was in middle school. What might seem weak/shallow/uncreative to an adult might actually be extremely interesting to someone younger.

I agree. I also think part of the blame can be placed on the system administrators who failed to make a recovery plan for circumstances like these – it’s not good to blindly place your trust in software that can be remotely updated.

In Linux, this type of scenario could be prevented by configuring servers to make copy-on-write snapshots before every software upgrade (e.g. with BTRFS or LVM), and automatically switching back to the last good snapshot if a kernel panic or other error is detected. Do you know if something similar can be achieved under Windows?

Those template errors feel almost passive-aggressive to me. Almost as if the compiler is telling you “Here are all the ways in which I tried to make your shitty code make sense, and yet it still doesn’t work” lol

For vim users, there’s also vimtex, which, on top of doing what entr does, has a “quick fixes” feature that basically creates a split with a concise list of errors that’s much more readable than pdflatex (or similar) output

Yes? Experience and skill are good things and should be encouraged!

Thank you for this writeup, very informative. I get a lot of these “badness 10000” messages when working with things that have “complex” layouts, for example a resume/CV template. Given that TeX was originally made for research papers/articles, it makes sense that weirdness would arise when it’s used for more layout-heavy stuff!

Whether or not typst is “superior” is largely debatable, but here are some reasons why I personally prefer Typst to LaTeX:

• leaner syntax
• less boilerplate
• (arguably) more intuitive syntax for math and formatting
• real-time preview thanks to incremental compilation
• automatic package management
• Ability to perform calculations/data processing inline inside your document (I know you can do this in LaTeX as well, but typst makes it easier)

However, as Andrew said, it is very much still in beta, so I don’t think it can be a complete replacement for LaTeX. Basically, think of it as something in between LaTeX and Markdown. Less features, but easier to write.

This is what I though as well when I first looked at their website. But nope, the compiler and LSP are available as fully offline programs under the apache license. But I understand how you’d get confused, their website is strikingly polished for an open-source non-commercial project!

The only thing you’re missing out on if you use the offline version is having the rendered preview update in real time as you type, but you can sort of emulate that feature using their neovim plugin and a really fast PDF viewer like zathura.

honestly LaTeX isn’t too bad once you have it all set up. An environment with the correct packages, a collection of templates for common document types, a set of macros for often-used constructions, and and editor with good snippets and syntax highlighting. Once you have all of that, LaTeX becomes a breeze. At one point, I was even taking notes with LaTeX in real-time during lectures.

But that’s the beauty of typst – it’s like a fully beefed out LaTeX setup, but straight out of the box. No need for snippets, because the syntax is lean enough as it is. No need for templates, because there is no boilerplate needed for a document. No need to waste half an hour setting up an environment and looking for dependencies – all of typst is just two executables (compiler and LSP), and package management is automatic.

Compiler: Could not find "tikz.sty"

Me: So you want me to install the package called “tikz”?

Compiler: no, there's no package called tikz. I need the file called "tikz.sty"

Me: Okay then, so which package provides the “tikz.sty” file?

Compiler: fuck if I know, go google it or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Switched to typst a few months ago, enjoying it much more than LaTeX so far. Really excited to see how it will grow in the future

Perplexity.ai is also pretty nice. As far as I understand, it’s just some version of chatgpt but with the ability to search the web.

Its only worse than not having it at all in the sense of giving users a false sense of security.

Flathub’s website has a bigass banner telling you if an app requires permissions that they consider dangerous. And flatpak’s CLI tells you what permissions are needed when installing an app. It’s pretty hard to miss, no?