GoboLinux lives again
GoboLinux lives again
I discovered GoboLinux not long ago and was disappointed to see it was no longer being maintained. It's exciting to see some folks are picking it back up again.
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Not to offend, but the entire premise of this distro is about directory names, which seems a bit...dated. What are the other selling points?
I think the main premise is that every version of every software has its own installation prefix. This allows you to mix&match different versions, perform atomic upgrades, etc. You can think of it as a proto-Nix. TBH I don't see much point in it now that Nix(OS) and Guix exist, or, if you don't like their purity, stal/IX.
Well Nix and other immutable distros are about versioning with binary compatible layers that will be repeatable. Directory structure is already baked-in, so that's sort of my point.
This project, from the docs at least, seemed like a week intentioned thing that has been handled and passed over in a different way.
Not sure I follow you entirely, but I think we agree.
so a bunch of versions of stuff to be compatible.. like what flatpak does?
No, not quite. Flatpak is containers - it just stuffs every dependency that an application needs in a directory with no way to deduplicate or update independently. Gobo is a bit more nuanced, since dependencies are shared between applications when the versions match.
flatpak does indeed deduplicate. The stuff is updated to whatever is required as a dependency to whatever programs are installed. And versions are shared between applications when versions match as well..
So I am guessing it is just like flatpak
They only dedup runtimes, not individual dependencies.
I haven't tried it yet but the concept just seems a lot more intuitive in a way that systems like NixOS and Guix SD arent. I haven't tried those either though so maybe I'm just ignorant 🤷
All of these distros strive to solve the problem with having multiple versions of libraries and programs coexisting without conflicts, but Gobo took a different approach. What Gobo doesn't do is the declarative system configuration. In Nix you don't need to worry about breaking your system because you can easily restore the previous version of your config. In traditional distros you would need to set up package manager hooks to make snapshots and create snapshots manually every time before changing something in /etc
When switching from Windows, it was very confusing to me, that program files where all over the place. It was before (almost) every distro switched to the /usr directory, so it was even worse than it is now. Even now, when I understand more about Linux than before, I still prefer the Windows way.
I think that this hierarchy is nice for people moving from Windows, but experienced enough that they could understand the docs and tweak the OS.
I was actually surprised that this distro was designed with more experienced people in mind, I thought it was for beginners.
Doesn't Windows leave program files and data all over the place too?
Two "program files" folders, user and generic "appdata", wherever the user unpacks things, yeah
Well, the configuration and state in both cases is all over the place. I admit that since the move to push program directories to /usr and the XDG share/config directories the problem has been largely solved. I only shared my perception when I was learning Linux, which was right after Mandriva came out
Yes, most people aren't aware of it as they've seen inside Program Files and assumed that was all the program's data.