6 ms·

grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu"

by jarcane 11y ago

dozzie 11y ago
The same here. I've seen web applications that could be run on Ubuntu only.
scrollaway 11y ago
What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out there? They pick a mainstream one and run with it - I get it. It's normal. It's sad, but you can't blame them; you gotta blame the ecosystem we're in. I'm an Arch Linux guy. I strongly dislike both Ubuntu and Canonical, on technical, political and ethical grounds. But I get it. And you know, a huge part of the problem is that "we", as the Linux community, have no direct interest in pushing compatibility between distributions. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of political reach, and the distros will just run with their own thing a few months later anyway, nullifying the efforts. Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game? Anyway, not to detract from the topic - it's fantastic news. Unity3d is huge in the game development world and this is a big win.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out there? No, say that Unity comes to Ubuntu.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    It's supported on Ubuntu, but if it's available there, it's essentially compatible with Linux. You can't realistically not be compatible with Linux if you're available on Ubuntu.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Ubuntu is Linux, I don't use Ubuntu. I use mostly OpenSUSE/SUSE and sometimes Arch or a Redhat version and if I must Ubuntu or Debian. It will work in Linux just wish we had a solid second tier desktop Distro. Gone are the days when distros decided if something worked or didn't. Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). Also hoping we finally do package management in a elegant modern way soon and not like we are right now.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). How? systemd touches a completely different layer. The main thing that might prevent ELF interoperability across distributions is if the distro has some esoterically configured binutils/glibc toolchain and the provided application is a dynamically linked binary blob.
      - baldfat 11y ago
        SystemD pretty much takes over the core of the OS. This has helped the trend of Distros being interoperational with each other. This is why some people HATE SystemD. Before SystemD we had init scripts in our thousands of packages. Each package system would have different init systems and procedures. This is one of the big reasons why things were not inter-operational between distros. This is why Arch and Debian among others distros jumped off their old init systems and adopted SystemD.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        The package systems never had init system integration. What some PMs did was they ran procedures in the postinstall scripts to do things like update SysV symlink farms. In Debian, this was done by sysv-rc and in RPM-based distros, chkconfig or something similar. They're completely orthogonal tools. And no, it was hardly a "big reason" why distros weren't interoperable. Initscripts were rarely supplied by upstream vendors and frequently written downstream. Then many other people didn't use them at all, but wrote runscripts for some flavor of daemontools in about 4 lines or something. The main reason has always boiled down to the toolchain. One proposed way to get around it was fat ELF binaries, but that effort got metaphorically curbstomped by the Linux community. Universal package managers aren't supported for political/branding reasons. In any event, systemd doesn't help with this.
- fortytw2 11y ago
  I'd argue that compatibility between distributions isn't a strictly good thing - but rather serves to hamper innovation and new developments in userland from distros in all but a few cases.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game? Let's not bait with systemd, that's a different issue. Package manager interoperability is certainly a political issue. A lot of distributions are identified by their PM infrastructure, so adopting a universal one like Nix or Guix would mean losing their identity. Conflict of interest, quite clearly. We might end up with, GNOME-based distros at least, running a NIH version of Nix called xdg-app, however.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Package management is the least of our worries when it comes to cross-distro compatibility. What truly affects companies wanting to release and support their software on multiple distributions is the lack of universal fat-apps. And yes, xdg-app is the way to go - sadly, only GNOME has been leading that front and cross-desktop talks have stopped. The XDG mailing list is dead. Sending an email there is equivalent to pissing in a violin. Meh, I'm pretty jaded. But I totally do think systemd is a clear example of what happens when a group tries to push for less NIH and more standardization. Tools get replaced and people get upset.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      xdg-app is a prime example of NIH. It poorly reinvents reproducible, deterministic and isolated builds when battle-tested and academically sound solutions like Nix are available off the shelf. People refusing to adopt it is a good thing in my book, it'll only be harmful in the long term. The Linux community has rejected fat apps (primarily fat ELF binaries) many times, so that's not out of the ordinary. I find the idea of systemd being less NIH to be quite baffling, though. Just look at its ad-hoc LISTEN_FDs protocol rather than adopting something well designed like UCSPI.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      "fat-apps"? What is the difference between that and a tar.gz with all dependencies included? Mozilla offer Firefox that way, Opera used to offer, well, Opera that way (until they wen't full retard and cloned Chrome). Heck, a RPM is pretty much a fancy tar.gz at first glance (and a DEB a bit more elaborate). I swear i wonder of far up the devops exhaust channel the Linux userspace thinking has gone these days...
onion2k 11y ago
From the article; the editor will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions The fact that it's only supported on one distro doesn't mean it hasn't come to the others. It has, but in an unsupported way. Anyone who uses a Linux desktop running anything besides Ubuntu should be quite used to that.
- andresmanz 11y ago
  Yes, and with a little bit of work you can install these packages on pretty much every distro anyway. I've got a few packages on Arch which are only officially supported on Ubuntu, and I never had any problems with them.
  - timboslice 11y ago
    They even include a shell script to install on non-supported distros: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-editor-installer-5.1.0f3+2015082501.sh http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-editor-inst...
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Its likely a tarball masking as a shell script (or at 800MB it is the most massive shell script i have ever seen).
      - yellowapple 11y ago
        I'm pretty sure 800MB of actual shell script would be capable of sentience and self-awareness :)
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    On any distro with a compatible set of GNU tools. Unfortunately, GNU breaks its binary compatibility all the time.
wjoe 11y ago
I'm an Arch and Gentoo user, and I've yet to come across anything that only runs on Ubuntu, despite plenty of things only "supporting" Ubuntu. Something might only be distributed as a deb, or rely on specific package versions which are included in the latest Ubuntu release, but someone always packages them up in the relevant format/repository for every distro. And users of such distros are usually ok with fiddling around a bit too get it working anyway. They even provide a distro agnostic installer. Sure, it would be better if they provided RPMs and a bit more "official support", but it's not practical to promise and support it working on every distro.
- baldfat 11y ago
  I do feel that if you say you support Linux you do three files. 1) Deb 2) RPM 3) Tarball
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Exactly this. If you provide your Linux oriented project in those three formats, you cover approximately 100% of the meaningful use-cases. Provide source as well, and you definitely cover just about every conceivable scenario.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    In a pinch you could extract a RPM into a sub-dir and attempt to run it from there.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      Alien Deb to RPM works most of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software) Though OpenSUSE Build Service is the most under used Linux technology period. Build on it and send out packages to whatever distro you want. https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/
      - baldfat 11y ago
tagrun 11y ago
Indeed. And if they're able to support only a single distro, I wish it was Debian rather than a Canonical product. On a related note, it's currently not working on Arch/Manjaro/Void Linux http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/service-not-available.350332/ http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/service-not-available.35033...
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  That. I'd be glad if they supported any distro that is not user hostile. But anyway, they are probably doing this because Valve supports Ubuntu, and Valve is doing it because Ubuntu comes with GPU drivers out of the box (contrary to Debian, where you must apt-get them). A Debian installer with support for non-free software would go a long way towards changing all that. (Or even better, a deb-multimedia installer.)
  - tagrun 11y ago
    > Valve supports Ubuntu Actually they're advertising Linux as SteamOS these days which is essentially Debian.
melling 11y ago
grumbles something about Linux nerds not getting why Linux still only has 1% of the desktop 23 years after he first downloaded it Go fork another distro and shut up. Perhaps a new window manager? Steve Jobs took a bankrupt company and turned it into the world's most profitable company in less time.
lawl 11y ago
Eh, there will be community supported LD_LIBRARY_PATH wrappers, effectively making it run on "linux" even of they only support ubuntu. I'll take that over zero linux support anyday. Usually it's pretty easy to make these things run by yourself too. ldd the binary, fetch the missing libraries and/or grab the ubuntu packages set the library path and you're done.
outworlder 11y ago
It is about time one distribution takes over. At least it will be easier to target and we can all pool efforts. Let Linux take the desktop and THEN we can start forking over minute details.
listic 11y ago
Well, they say it 'will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions, but official support is only provided for 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or newer'; that looks reasonable to me. It's unreasonable to ask them to support all kinds of Linux distributions; it all depends on how well it actually 'will work'. E.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone does not officially support Linux (despite using Unity, btw.); also it doesn't support graphics chipsets as old as Intel GM45 (Intel's integrated graphics circa 2008; gen.4; last Core2). Yet I've been able to run this game on Ubuntu on my ThinkPad X200 reasonably well since beta and it's only getting better with time. Part of it are improvements from Wine and Mesa 3D (I didn't believe I will get performance improvements for the 5+ year-old hardware, but it happened last year: mesa 9.3(?) brought a solid improvement to 3D including Ubuntu desktop experience[sic!]) but also I believe Blizzard is actually fixing Linux-related glitches, even though the game is not officially supported. This could be better than some companies 'supporting' Linux by doing a half-assed port and forgetting about it.
digi_owl 11y ago
> grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu" Because MS has basically cockblocked all attempts at getting something other than Windows preinstalled on store shelf hardware.
yellowapple 11y ago
In practice, this isn't that big of a deal. Steam is technically only supported on Ubuntu, for example, yet I have little if any issue using it and playing games on my Slackware-running gaming rig.

grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu"

by jarcane 11y ago

grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu"

dozzie 11y ago

The same here. I've seen web applications that could be run on Ubuntu only.

scrollaway 11y ago

What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out there? They pick a mainstream one and run with it - I get it. It's normal. It's sad, but you can't blame them; you gotta blame the ecosystem we're in. I'm an Arch Linux guy. I strongly dislike both Ubuntu and Canonical, on technical, political and ethical grounds. But I get it. And you know, a huge part of the problem is that "we", as the Linux community, have no direct interest in pushing compatibility between distributions. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of political reach, and the distros will just run with their own thing a few months later anyway, nullifying the efforts. Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game? Anyway, not to detract from the topic - it's fantastic news. Unity3d is huge in the game development world and this is a big win.

masklinn 11y ago
> What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out there? No, say that Unity comes to Ubuntu.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- scrollaway 11y ago
  It's supported on Ubuntu, but if it's available there, it's essentially compatible with Linux. You can't realistically not be compatible with Linux if you're available on Ubuntu.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Ubuntu is Linux, I don't use Ubuntu. I use mostly OpenSUSE/SUSE and sometimes Arch or a Redhat version and if I must Ubuntu or Debian. It will work in Linux just wish we had a solid second tier desktop Distro. Gone are the days when distros decided if something worked or didn't. Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). Also hoping we finally do package management in a elegant modern way soon and not like we are right now.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). How? systemd touches a completely different layer. The main thing that might prevent ELF interoperability across distributions is if the distro has some esoterically configured binutils/glibc toolchain and the provided application is a dynamically linked binary blob.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      SystemD pretty much takes over the core of the OS. This has helped the trend of Distros being interoperational with each other. This is why some people HATE SystemD. Before SystemD we had init scripts in our thousands of packages. Each package system would have different init systems and procedures. This is one of the big reasons why things were not inter-operational between distros. This is why Arch and Debian among others distros jumped off their old init systems and adopted SystemD.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        The package systems never had init system integration. What some PMs did was they ran procedures in the postinstall scripts to do things like update SysV symlink farms. In Debian, this was done by sysv-rc and in RPM-based distros, chkconfig or something similar. They're completely orthogonal tools. And no, it was hardly a "big reason" why distros weren't interoperable. Initscripts were rarely supplied by upstream vendors and frequently written downstream. Then many other people didn't use them at all, but wrote runscripts for some flavor of daemontools in about 4 lines or something. The main reason has always boiled down to the toolchain. One proposed way to get around it was fat ELF binaries, but that effort got metaphorically curbstomped by the Linux community. Universal package managers aren't supported for political/branding reasons. In any event, systemd doesn't help with this.
fortytw2 11y ago
I'd argue that compatibility between distributions isn't a strictly good thing - but rather serves to hamper innovation and new developments in userland from distros in all but a few cases.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game? Let's not bait with systemd, that's a different issue. Package manager interoperability is certainly a political issue. A lot of distributions are identified by their PM infrastructure, so adopting a universal one like Nix or Guix would mean losing their identity. Conflict of interest, quite clearly. We might end up with, GNOME-based distros at least, running a NIH version of Nix called xdg-app, however.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Package management is the least of our worries when it comes to cross-distro compatibility. What truly affects companies wanting to release and support their software on multiple distributions is the lack of universal fat-apps. And yes, xdg-app is the way to go - sadly, only GNOME has been leading that front and cross-desktop talks have stopped. The XDG mailing list is dead. Sending an email there is equivalent to pissing in a violin. Meh, I'm pretty jaded. But I totally do think systemd is a clear example of what happens when a group tries to push for less NIH and more standardization. Tools get replaced and people get upset.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    xdg-app is a prime example of NIH. It poorly reinvents reproducible, deterministic and isolated builds when battle-tested and academically sound solutions like Nix are available off the shelf. People refusing to adopt it is a good thing in my book, it'll only be harmful in the long term. The Linux community has rejected fat apps (primarily fat ELF binaries) many times, so that's not out of the ordinary. I find the idea of systemd being less NIH to be quite baffling, though. Just look at its ad-hoc LISTEN_FDs protocol rather than adopting something well designed like UCSPI.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    "fat-apps"? What is the difference between that and a tar.gz with all dependencies included? Mozilla offer Firefox that way, Opera used to offer, well, Opera that way (until they wen't full retard and cloned Chrome). Heck, a RPM is pretty much a fancy tar.gz at first glance (and a DEB a bit more elaborate). I swear i wonder of far up the devops exhaust channel the Linux userspace thinking has gone these days...

onion2k 11y ago

From the article; the editor will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions The fact that it's only supported on one distro doesn't mean it hasn't come to the others. It has, but in an unsupported way. Anyone who uses a Linux desktop running anything besides Ubuntu should be quite used to that.

andresmanz 11y ago
Yes, and with a little bit of work you can install these packages on pretty much every distro anyway. I've got a few packages on Arch which are only officially supported on Ubuntu, and I never had any problems with them.
- timboslice 11y ago
  They even include a shell script to install on non-supported distros: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-editor-installer-5.1.0f3+2015082501.sh http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-editor-inst...
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Its likely a tarball masking as a shell script (or at 800MB it is the most massive shell script i have ever seen).
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure 800MB of actual shell script would be capable of sentience and self-awareness :)
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  On any distro with a compatible set of GNU tools. Unfortunately, GNU breaks its binary compatibility all the time.

wjoe 11y ago

I'm an Arch and Gentoo user, and I've yet to come across anything that only runs on Ubuntu, despite plenty of things only "supporting" Ubuntu. Something might only be distributed as a deb, or rely on specific package versions which are included in the latest Ubuntu release, but someone always packages them up in the relevant format/repository for every distro. And users of such distros are usually ok with fiddling around a bit too get it working anyway. They even provide a distro agnostic installer. Sure, it would be better if they provided RPMs and a bit more "official support", but it's not practical to promise and support it working on every distro.

baldfat 11y ago
I do feel that if you say you support Linux you do three files. 1) Deb 2) RPM 3) Tarball
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Exactly this. If you provide your Linux oriented project in those three formats, you cover approximately 100% of the meaningful use-cases. Provide source as well, and you definitely cover just about every conceivable scenario.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  In a pinch you could extract a RPM into a sub-dir and attempt to run it from there.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Alien Deb to RPM works most of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software) Though OpenSUSE Build Service is the most under used Linux technology period. Build on it and send out packages to whatever distro you want. https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/
    - baldfat 11y ago

tagrun 11y ago

Indeed. And if they're able to support only a single distro, I wish it was Debian rather than a Canonical product. On a related note, it's currently not working on Arch/Manjaro/Void Linux http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/service-not-available.350332/ http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/service-not-available.35033...

marcosdumay 11y ago
That. I'd be glad if they supported any distro that is not user hostile. But anyway, they are probably doing this because Valve supports Ubuntu, and Valve is doing it because Ubuntu comes with GPU drivers out of the box (contrary to Debian, where you must apt-get them). A Debian installer with support for non-free software would go a long way towards changing all that. (Or even better, a deb-multimedia installer.)
- tagrun 11y ago
  > Valve supports Ubuntu Actually they're advertising Linux as SteamOS these days which is essentially Debian.

melling 11y ago

grumbles something about Linux nerds not getting why Linux still only has 1% of the desktop 23 years after he first downloaded it Go fork another distro and shut up. Perhaps a new window manager? Steve Jobs took a bankrupt company and turned it into the world's most profitable company in less time.

lawl 11y ago

Eh, there will be community supported LD_LIBRARY_PATH wrappers, effectively making it run on "linux" even of they only support ubuntu. I'll take that over zero linux support anyday. Usually it's pretty easy to make these things run by yourself too. ldd the binary, fetch the missing libraries and/or grab the ubuntu packages set the library path and you're done.

outworlder 11y ago

It is about time one distribution takes over. At least it will be easier to target and we can all pool efforts. Let Linux take the desktop and THEN we can start forking over minute details.

listic 11y ago

Well, they say it 'will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions, but official support is only provided for 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or newer'; that looks reasonable to me. It's unreasonable to ask them to support all kinds of Linux distributions; it all depends on how well it actually 'will work'. E.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone does not officially support Linux (despite using Unity, btw.); also it doesn't support graphics chipsets as old as Intel GM45 (Intel's integrated graphics circa 2008; gen.4; last Core2). Yet I've been able to run this game on Ubuntu on my ThinkPad X200 reasonably well since beta and it's only getting better with time. Part of it are improvements from Wine and Mesa 3D (I didn't believe I will get performance improvements for the 5+ year-old hardware, but it happened last year: mesa 9.3(?) brought a solid improvement to 3D including Ubuntu desktop experience[sic!]) but also I believe Blizzard is actually fixing Linux-related glitches, even though the game is not officially supported. This could be better than some companies 'supporting' Linux by doing a half-assed port and forgetting about it.

digi_owl 11y ago

> grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu" Because MS has basically cockblocked all attempts at getting something other than Windows preinstalled on store shelf hardware.

yellowapple 11y ago

In practice, this isn't that big of a deal. Steam is technically only supported on Ubuntu, for example, yet I have little if any issue using it and playing games on my Slackware-running gaming rig.