4 ms·

> it wants to do everything and does none well On that topic, it’s amusing to see when the “are we a product or a platform?” confusion jumps from its native ho

by klabb3 2y ago

> it wants to do everything and does none well On that topic, it’s amusing to see when the “are we a product or a platform?” confusion jumps from its native host (publicly listed tech corps) to FOSS projects – different species altogether. The idea of owning your own server just like any other device like laptops, smartphones and tablets, is just wonderful. But that means Linux! And Linux is absolutely infamous for poor application distribution (well technically the Linux distros). So now people make their own half-assed “app stores”, which is infinitely worse. We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That would be such a major step away from the surveillance economy and towards data sovereignty.

bzzzt 2y ago
> We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That's been tried with Linux Standard base, but it seems 'standardise on glibc 2.31 and Qt 3' is not a viable way to describe system dependencies. Such a spec also doesn't exist for Windows or macOS systems. If you target 'living' operating systems you need living applications that are updated to keep working. We're well past the point you can assume some 20 year old binary will work unless you're running it in an emulator.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Microsoft is so committed to backwards compatibility for Windows that you are very likely to be able to run 20 year old binaries without any heroics. They don't need any kind of platform spec, because they put in serious work to maintaining that kind of compatibility.
wvh 2y ago
Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but aren't containers pretty much that application platform? Or stuff like Helm, when you're talking about larger, more complex deployments? I imagine Nextcloud needs at least a database, web server and the ability to send emails, and possibly some form of backup and high availability if you really want to rely on it. There are a lot of non-trivial ways to skin that cat.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but aren't containers pretty much that application platform? That’s right. And for UI, web is the obvious choice. But it’s not an application platform alone. You need at the very least file systems and networking/routing over https and maybe lower level protocol support too, that apps can use/discover without having to have a phd in Linux configuration. But to be truly useful, you need a lot more stuff wrt identity & auth, server-to-server networking, service discovery, cross-app communication, etc. Something more like Dokku probably. > Or stuff like Helm, when you're talking about larger, more complex deployments? Well fortunately you don’t need to open the Pandora’s box of consensus problems for a personal node (again like any other device). Also too much Yaml to make it sane probably?

by klabb3 2y ago

bzzzt 2y ago

> We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That's been tried with Linux Standard base, but it seems 'standardise on glibc 2.31 and Qt 3' is not a viable way to describe system dependencies. Such a spec also doesn't exist for Windows or macOS systems. If you target 'living' operating systems you need living applications that are updated to keep working. We're well past the point you can assume some 20 year old binary will work unless you're running it in an emulator.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
Microsoft is so committed to backwards compatibility for Windows that you are very likely to be able to run 20 year old binaries without any heroics. They don't need any kind of platform spec, because they put in serious work to maintaining that kind of compatibility.

wvh 2y ago

Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but aren't containers pretty much that application platform? Or stuff like Helm, when you're talking about larger, more complex deployments? I imagine Nextcloud needs at least a database, web server and the ability to send emails, and possibly some form of backup and high availability if you really want to rely on it. There are a lot of non-trivial ways to skin that cat.

klabb3 2y ago
> Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but aren't containers pretty much that application platform? That’s right. And for UI, web is the obvious choice. But it’s not an application platform alone. You need at the very least file systems and networking/routing over https and maybe lower level protocol support too, that apps can use/discover without having to have a phd in Linux configuration. But to be truly useful, you need a lot more stuff wrt identity & auth, server-to-server networking, service discovery, cross-app communication, etc. Something more like Dokku probably. > Or stuff like Helm, when you're talking about larger, more complex deployments? Well fortunately you don’t need to open the Pandora’s box of consensus problems for a personal node (again like any other device). Also too much Yaml to make it sane probably?