Endless Operating System (opens in new tab)

This seems like a very simple question and I am inclined to treat it as a trick one, but I will be trusting and try to answer it.

The difference is huge.

A package manager installs, removes, updates etc. components of the OS. It manipulates files in /bin, /sbin, /lib, /usr and so on.

In Endless, the root filesystem is read-only and immutable. It is not possible to modify any of the files provided with the OS in any way, including all of those paths above and others.

Flatpak apps are containerised and all of their components are within the app bundle, typically in `/var/lib/flatpak` I believe. (I am not a GNOME user and don't use Flatpak much, but I have a couple of Snap apps installed.)

Nothing goes anywhere else or is allowed to install dependencies etc.

Think of it like a Smartphone. Android and iOS are both *nix OSes. The entire OS is essentially a single image, kept in Flash, and booted into RAM each time you turn on. The user can't change it in any way. Apps are kept in a separate chunk of flash memory and they can't change the OS. OS updates are a single big file that updates the entire OS partition in one operation.

It's a little bit like booting a Live USB with a persistent storage file: nothing can change the SquashFS, but you can add your own files and have them survive a reboot.

Endless works the same way. It is comparable to Red Hat Atomic Workstation, Core OS, Chrome OS, and SUSE MicroOS.

Saw an interesting post on this topic, on HN, today:

https://infrequently.org/2020/09/the-pursuit-of-appiness/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26578458

I did see that too- but if that's the case, why not just explicitly say so instead of all the vaguespeak.

Normal computer users don't understand:

- What a filesystem is.

- How directories, files, and filesystems relate to one another.

- What a server is/does.

- How any kind of raw text whatsoever relates to what the computer "actually is" (the GUI)

- When or how or under what circumstances a program might read a file (say, re-reading a config file)

- What all that prompt noise means.

- Why some things they type on the command line work and why others don't—they don't understand that the things they're running are discrete programs and not somehow built in to the terminal or the OS, and they certainly don't understand the concept of a PATH.

- All kinds of magical bullshit you need to just know (or spend time finding out then internalizing) to use a command line (what the fuck is ".."? Why do I need to put "-" before things seemingly at random, but other times that breaks stuff? Et c., et c.)

- What they can even expect to be able to do on the command line (change permissions on files? Is that a thing you can do? Oh now you're going to need to learn how your OS permissions system works on a lower level than you've ever needed to know before, or else just blindly copy-paste from the Web and hope for the best)

And that list is far from comprehensive.

There's a ton of reasons people are afraid of CLIs, here's a few:

1. Graphical UIs are inherently more discoverable. There's no way around this and "googling it" isn't a good enough answer.

2. Graphical UIs, for better and worse, hide or limit you from doing things that will break. Those guardrails reduce the fear associated with exploration. There are guardrails on CLIs as well (sudo), but we take for granted what those are and how they work.

3. You overestimate the level of skills required to function in modern society.

>I've never really understood why command lines are so intimidating for people.

Really? The most popular computing device of our time is the smartphone, and you don't understand why people find command lines intimidating?

Command lines are unforgiving, frequently obscure, and will let you delete files and break things without blinking. There's plenty to be intimidated by for people who have no need to learn the skills.

I was telling some college students how to do something and I said, "then hit return" and I had to explain that I meant the enter key. So it might take a while to be ready for the command line.

In the early 1990s a friend used to help run the computer my parents bought me. When he wasn't around it was like a paperweight. Command lines old and new are intimidating because you begin with a cryptic prompt image. Microsoft Windows and MacOS classic were much more accessible. Their help hovers, tooltips, and systems were a breath of fresh air compared to DOS.

Most forms of utility, including forms that come from using a CLI, have an acquisition cost. Rationally it makes sense to invest in things whose acquisition cost is lower than their utility. When a time horizon is introduced, for example, five minutes, the rational response changes. The acquisition cost becomes higher than the value generated. Once you've learned something there is no acquisition cost. So generalizing from that position produces the prediction that others are behaving irrationally. Which they would be, if their bandwidth was unlimited, but in practice they have to spend more time doing real time work because they live in a time context and only have a limited budget on which they can spend non-realtime thinking. Since there are a whole host of different things which have lower acquisition costs than expected utilities, some people end up exploring, say, genetics or rocket science, instead of computer interface usage optimizations. They weren't being irrational. They were constrained and they made the cooperative choice to let you explore one thing while they explored another. As a result, you can learn from them and they learn from you and the overall acquisitions costs for everyone are lowered.

Another way to say this is that the people who were too intimidated to use CLIs know things that you don't that are of the same character as your own knowledge of CLIs and it shouldn't have been overly complicated for you to know those in a modern society seeing as you are literate.

If you think people should really do what you are advocating: pave the roads. Lower the acquisition cost. Make it easier for people who are time constrained to do the thing you think they should be doing.

And so people did... and now we arrive at why things are the way they are.

It turns out that in the case of CLIs there is a usability problem. CLIs are constrained to text. Other mediums are a superset. They have more options for lowering the barrier. The people who are doing the paving in those cases are able to make better progress and faster! The masses flow to the GUI, not the CLI, because the GUI does a better job lowering the acquisition cost! It is a fight. On one hand we have the CLI, a hand tied behind its back. It is not allowed to go beyond text. In the other we have the other mediums. They have text, but are not limited to it. Should the CLI overcome them, they shall just put a little window wherein the CLI is present. They might do a nasty trick when they do this, stealing the fame of the CLI, by calling this a TextArea or a TextInput or even a TextBox.

Woe to the CLI, we type into the textboxes, supposing that the GUI has won.

And plus apt get install or whatever your distro is equivalent is is infinitely easier than searching the internet to try and find what you want. I reckon a kid who can install apps on Ubuntu and troubleshoot basic issues can probably get a tech support job right out of high school if they put a good effort in.

But why not. The worst thing that happens is maybe a teacher needs to reflash the OS, if you tell kids that no we're not going to play Minecraft today, we're going to make Minecraft you can inspire a lifelong love of programming.

Sometimes you just got to strap yourself in and embrace the the terminal. If you're too afraid to try you'll never learn. Once around the same time I actually fried a motherboard by not mounting it properly, a nice computer repair shop owner gave me a bunch of motherboard spacers for free and told me to never Mount the motherboard directly to the case again.

I actually love programming in that it's one of the last Fields where you can teach yourself how to do amazing things for free. Sure if you need to deploy things you might need to spend two or three bucks a month on AWS, but even then you can get so much done locally.

It's a gateway drug, I successfully installed with apt, then with make, then moved to live in the CLI.

That may be regional. Over here I see ~5 Deb/Ubuntu installations for every RedHat-derivative.

Yep, Endless OS is built on Debian, although it has an immutable root filesystem with ostree. Users don't really touch Debian packages. System updates (and rollbacks) all happen atomically, with a reboot. This is a bit more ordinary now, but Endless has been a pioneer in that space. For desktop apps, it is focused on Flatpak, including a large library of Endless-specific offline content and learning apps in its own flatpak repository. Many of these have moved to Flathub, such as https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/com.hack_computer.Clubh....

There is a lot of stuff in Endless OS to improve the experience for users with limited connectivity. That's why there are so many simple apps with big content libraries, why ostree is very useful, among other things. We do a lot of stuff upstream, but you can get a pretty good idea what we're all doing over at https://github.com/endlessm/.