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Something funny just happened. My constant desire to procrastinate got the better of me again and I decided to download xscreensaver for ubuntu. Naturally, I decided to check out the screensavers that come prepackaged with it. One of them is called zoom and guess what happens when I decide to preview it?

Yeah exactly you have guessed it, #xscreensaver starts the program zoom. like, like, the video conferencing software. I was utterly baffled but it seems like I am not the first person to encounter this hilarious problem (see screenshot)

@booters
tl;dr your distro sucks.

I'v been PLEADING with the various packagers to stop making this unforced error in their distros for decades. They all refuse.

I distribute XScreenSaver as a single package, tested as a unit.

Then those bozos divide it into dozens of "extras-data-extras-gl-extras" sub-packages so that most people accidentally install part of it, yet with config files that reference the whole thing. Hilarity ensues.

"Here's your car. Make sure you install brakes. Good luck!"

@jwz @booters This explains a whole lot about a whole lot, not just the screensaver issue. What in the world motivated their decision to do this?

@ironchamber @booters
You'd have to ask them that.

Back in, say, 1996, it might have been reasonable for someone to say, "I would like to install XScreenSaver without requiring OpenGL, because my video card can't do that." But we have made some advances since then.

For example, in 2002, HDMI was invented.

Petr Tesarik

@jwz @ironchamber @booters This all sounds hilarious, until you realize that some people try extremely hard to reduce their installed image size to an absolute minimum (like dozens of megs), because hundreds of instances should run on a single machine.

Maybe the real mistake was containers?

@ptesarik @jwz @booters I’m not sure that screensavers are getting deliberately put into containers much by that crowd, are they?

@ironchamber @jwz @booters They might be. Before I left SUSE, they containerized the desktop environment.

But it's more likely that the distro gatekeepers update their packaging policy to require **all** packages be “container-ready”. For packagers, it may become harder to negotiate (and keep) an exception than to make an insane package split. 😔

@ptesarik @ironchamber @booters
You just really want to believe that people have *reasons* for the stupid shit they do. It has fuck-all to do with containers and everything to do with "some dumbass made a choice in the 90s and I have post-hoc rationalized it." Just like you're doing now.

This is The Way. The Linux Way.

@jwz @ironchamber @booters Oh, I'm not saying the reasons are good, but yes, I really want to believe that most people don't inflict pain on themselves without a reason.

@ptesarik @ironchamber @booters I understand the urge to disbelieve that. And yet.