MacOS has more than sandboxed… they are basically removing the ability of a user to do anything to their computers. I can’t fix my dad’s imac (I used to fix my own macs), they are impenetrable… They’ve more than “sandboxed” apps, they’re forcing all but previously established powerusers to take their dying overpriced lumps to the Apple store. This, they say, is “good for you.” I loved Apple for 8 or so years. Hate them to death now.

My 9-year-old quad-core running Mint MATE 22 boots up faster than both my dad’s 2-year old iMac and my 6-core PC running Win11. And I can tell you what every process running is doing… bonus.

One thing you might notice is that flatpak defaults to “system” installs. Is your root system directory filling up? You probably want to start installing onto --user, as this will put things in /home where they belong and, by default, sandbox permissions away from root (that, too, can be easily changed).

Also, don’t fear mixing different ways of installing. I use AppImage, Flatpak, the default app-get install method, and .deb. FlatPak at this point is the best, because it offers the ease of use of AppImage, but the flexibility and auto-maintenance of apt-get/Software Update. The only problems I’ve encountered were due to me not understanding that it was filling up my root partition by default…

I’ve been running Mint MATE for about 9 years. Love it to death.

A sidestory to this is that Flatpak and AppImage have been miraculous boosts to Linux OS machines. After I figured out that ya gotta throw the --user flag into your flatpak installs so they don’t jam up your / tree, and also throwing flatpak override --user xyz.app onto a few apps that benefit from universal access, things have been fine and dandy.

I continue to be happy with how awesome Linux has gotten just over the past 5 years.

I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.

I don’t think the answer to any of society’s ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.

It doesn’t say how they got this number in the piece (unless I missed it), but it’s likely more than 5% if they are, say, counting the OS by user agent strings hitting a particular tracker. Linux distros use different browsers and they don’t report the OS in an accurate way all the time.

For a long time my UAS just said “Firefox, the version #, NT-based” or something like that, but now it reports Linux properly… I haven’t been paranoid enough to use a agent switcher lately.