Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Brodie Robertson" channel.

  1. 6:30 I like this bit from “Halloween II”: An important attribute to note which has led to volume drivers is the ease with which you can write drivers for linux, and the relatively powerful debugging infrastructure that linux has. Finding and installing the DDK, and trying to hook up the kernel debugger and do any sort of interaction with user-mode without tearing the NT system to bits is much more challenging than writing the simple device-drivers for linux. Any idiot could write a driver in 2 days with a book like "Linux Device Drivers" — there is no such thing as a 2-day device-driver for NT This tells you why Linux has better hardware support than Windows.
    130
  2. 16:26 One hilarious ad I remember from this time is made up to look like a newspaper, “The Highly Reliable Times”. The “headline” was the London Stock Exchange choosing Windows NT over Linux to run their trading system. Not long after this, there was a massive failure of said system, which cost traders millions. Microsoft tried to blame it on some kind of “network issue”. Soon after that, the Windows NT system was ripped out in favour of ... a Linux-based one.
    81
  3. Yes, Windows source code has been leaked, I think more than once. And yes, it is just as embarrassing as you might think it is. There was some include file where the exact number of spaces on a particular line had to be kept unchanged, otherwise the build script would break. There was a comment that said “we are morons” next to it.
    74
  4. When infowmation is lost, it cannot be wegained.
    65
  5. 13:23 Bear in mind on Linux, if there isn’t an official update for, say a binary in /usr/bin, I can install my own build from source in /usr/local/bin, which will hide it. It’s easy enough to remove that later, when the official binary is fixed. Similarly for libraries (though that might have more consequences I haven’t thought through here...)
    52
  6. It’s not just new features being added, but some old ones dropped as well. The one that comes to mind for me is the X font server capability. Nowadays all GUI apps do their font handling client side (e.g. using FreeType and Fontconfig). There is still the concept of “X fonts”, and the display server still supports text-drawing calls. But I suspect these don’t get a lot of use these days.
    48
  7. Easter eggs are normally something you have to use some specific action to trigger. Like one version of old MacOS from 1993 or so had a little breakout game hidden in the “About This Macintosh” info window, that you had to press some combination of keys to activate. This way, the “leetle joke” does not impede the normal functioning of the software in any way. In fact, it becomes something “only known to a select few” (that you can feel smug about).
    33
  8. 1:56 Best to distinguish between the X protocol (or perhaps “protocol family”) versus XLib, which is just one implementation. Remember there is at least one other popular implementation, XCB, which gets rid of various responsiveness/performance bottlenecks in XLib, while still implementing exactly the same protocol.
    28
  9. 10:47 “Dismissal without prejudice” means “you can bring the case again”. “Dismissal with prejudice” means “judge says, piss off and never come back”.
    24
  10. Looking at their “roadmap” page, several of the issues they cite seem not to be relevant any more. Also, the irony of wanting to build new GPLv3 components on top of one of the notoriously GPL-allergic BSDs seems to have been lost on them.
    22
  11. Anybody remember the London Stock Exchange brouhaha? Microsoft made a big deal about the LSE choosing Windows NT to run its real-time trading system -- even put out a fake newspaper ad titled “The Highly Reliable Times” with that as its headline. And then there was this massive outage. I think the system was down for several days. Microsoft tried to blame it on “network issues”, not Windows NT itself. But not long after that, the LSE ripped out that Windows NT system and replaced it with Linux.
    20
  12. 5:05 Actually, any material created for payment from the 🇺🇸 Federal Government, that would ordinarily be under copyright, is legally in the public domain. It would be nice if other Governments did the same. And also nice if it could apply to patentable things as well.
    20
  13. GIMP is more innovative than people realize. For example, its GEGL pixel engine can natively handle images with 32-bit floating-point pixel components, which Adobe Photoshop still struggles with.
    20
  14. 1:43 Not coincidentally, 2004 is the year that XFree86 made that notorious change to their licensing conditions, provoking the Xorg schism and, one might argue, actually revitalizing X11 development.
    16
  15. 2:12 In a lot of the OS calls that take PIDs, PID 0 is understood to refer to the current process.
    16
  16. This is why they say, Windows is a great OS -- if your time is worth nothing.
    15
  17. 7:11 Remember that the Free Software Foundation explicitly recognizes many non-copyleft licences as Free licences. So even in Stallman’s terms, “Free Software” does not have to imply “GPL” or “copyleft”.
    15
  18. The safest Easter eggs are the ones that will not appear in normal production use -- you have to explicitly invoke some (undocumented) function to trigger it. Like, for example, on particular festival days, if you were to click on the date (which would not normally respond to clicks), then this amusing but relevant animation will appear.
    14
  19. Worth noting that Linux drivers are written, not for the brand name on the package, but for the chipset inside it. So for example umpteen different vendors might sell a doohickey with their own brand names on it, and also their own proprietary Windows drivers (which would likely clash with each other anyway), but on Linux there would be just one common driver, which can work with all these products, and also work with more than one of them at once.
    14
  20. I wonder how you can commit to any compliance requirements for a piece of proprietary software that you don’t control. At best you can commit to “being up-to-date with all vendor patches” -- I can’t see how you can do better.
    14
  21.  @janglestick  Lessig’s Law says “the one who writes the code makes the rules”.
    13
  22. 11:33 I think this “clean and minimal design” is a fashion idea promoted by Microsoft, because trying to do fancy 3D effects turned out to be such a disaster for them, in the resource-hogging Windows Vista.
    13
  23. Back in the 1990s, there were these things called “Unix workstations”. What made them “workstations” rather than “desktops”, besides the higher-end hardware, was that they included both client and server functionality together in one box. Somehow, Microsoft managed to persuade users that they didn’t need such a wide range of capability. Windows NT “Workstation” had its server functionality deliberately crippled (and being a bit cheaper also helped), and yet it still managed to wipe out the Unix workstations. So now what users had on their desktops was just a “desktop” OS. If they wanted server-style functionality, they would have to pay extra for a separate product: Windows Server. And not just that, but they would have to pay even more on top of that, for “CALs”, one for each user of a server function. So really the “desktop” segment could be seen as a creation of Microsoft’s marketing department, as an excuse for nickel-and-diming its customers to death. And somehow that has come to be accepted as the way things should be. Linux, on the other hand, is essentially the last standing “workstation” OS. It doesn’t play by the “desktop” rules. It offers full server-side functionality in the same box, with no “CALs” limits. Think of it as Usain Bolt, and the “desktop” market as a three-legged race; would you really complain that an Olympic-class runner would do so badly in such a pointless and trivial competition?
    13
  24. The whole concept of tying the GUI inextricably into the OS kernel is one that should have been left behind in the 1990s.
    13
  25. 9:29 Also, I tried checking out the link about the supposed Java dependency, and all it seems to say is that the Java-related documentation is still built even if you disable the Java functionality. If you turn off the Java functionality, you will end up with a Java-free build, as expected.
    11
  26. SSH is one of the major ones that is so widespread, you can give them a pass.
    11
  27. It’s not “Microsoft Office” any more, it’s now “Microsoft 365”. Except it has never managed 365 consecutive days of uptime yet. If you are going to merge documents, learn from the software developers who use plain-text formats for that. Merging binary documents does not go well.
    11
  28. Does Windows have a PID 1? More like it’s a “PID e10d8a4c-f756-4f2a-98f8-8d395aaadab6” or some rubbish like that.
    11
  29. The right to reverse-engineer is explicitly protected under 🇪🇺 law.
    10
  30. 6:53 This is one area where most *nix shells are deficient. I had a look at the “complete” system that was added to bash, but only because it was preventing me typing file names that I knew to be perfectly valid for those commands. So I just turned it all off. I remember some older systems that had more of the sort of thing we need. Back in the 1980s I used BTOS/CTOS for a while, and when you pressed RETURN on a command, you got a form to fill in that showed all the relevant options for that command. And then later Apple’s MPW development environment included “Commando”, that would pop up a nice GUI dialog in a similar fashion. Where do we get something like that now?
    10
  31. 12:28 Every time I change some config file in /etc from its default state, I like to keep a copy of the original file with the same name plus an “-orig” suffix. That way I can use a simple command like “find /etc -name \*-orig” to list all the places I have made configuration changes. Of course, this doesn’t work when adding new files.
    10
  32. When asked why they can’t move away from Windows, people normally say “games”. Yet the Steam Deck runs Linux with a purpose-built UI, and it’s amusing to see Microsoft trying, and failing, to adapt its Windows UI to work on that form factor.
    10
  33.  @MegaLokopo  Make it a modular, replaceable layer, like Linux does. That way you have your choice of GUIs, or even no GUI at all.
    10
  34. 2:35 And also note that they only accept plain-text emails. No HTML! This already seems a surprisingly high entry barrier to some.
    9
  35. Gnome is the favourite of those who like to use something and complain about it. I guess for those used to proprietary platforms, this sort of thing makes them feel at home.
    9
  36. But the only way Microsoft could be “innovative” to compete against Linux was to ... copy Linux. Wholesale.
    9
  37. What a corny joke ... 😜
    9
  38. Linux already runs on RISC-V. A different group at Google has been working on its own kernel, called Fuchsia. But so far it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
    9
  39.  @BrodieRobertson  You can also build your own packages and replace the official ones installed on your system with them. I did this once, years ago. The Debian version of zip was lacking some (obsolete?) compression algorithm that I needed, and I was able to rebuild the package with that enabled.
    9
  40.  @underscore.  You mean proprietary apps? Proprietary software comes and proprietary software goes. What lives on is Open Source, and that has already mostly been ported.
    9
  41. I’m not really interested in vendor-specific tools. When are these vendors going to support SYCL/OpenCL? Build it on top of your vendor-specific layer if you must, but give us the option of writing to a standard API and not caring what brand lies underneath.
    9
  42.  @MegaLokopo  Windows 10 “IoT Edition” was a hilariously crippled version of Windows 10 that was useless without a regular PC running full Windows 10. Compare that to Linux running on the same Raspberry π, which fully self-hosts its own development and deployment stack.
    9
  43.  @BrodieRobertson  What GIMP is lacking is not so much functionality, but publicity/mindshare. Adobe can afford a 6-7-figure advertising budget to tell everybody how wonderful they are, no open-source project can match that.
    9
  44. I think an attribute bit is the wrong solution to the problem. Think about why the dot prefix exists: it gives applications a separate namespace to use for their own housekeeping, to minimize collisions with names that users might choose for their own files. Think if you had a hidden “config” folder, and the user, for whatever reason, tried to create a file or directory called “config”, they would either overwrite it, or get an error saying it already existed. The first possibility is unfortunate, the second is just mystifying, because they cannot see the item that supposedly already exists.
    8
  45. Imagine if just 100 Adobe users were to pool the money they would have given that company and use it to sponsor some work on some open-source project that they would like to see improved -- what a difference that could make.
    8
  46. Regarding that screencap playing in the closing credits, one command that may look slightly unnerving but is actually perfectly safe, is “rmdir -p”. This removes the named directory (assuming it’s empty), then removes its parent if that is now empty, and so on as far up the tree as it can go. So it always stops with an error, and it might be an error trying to remove a directory that is important to you. I did say it could be unnerving, didn’t I?
    8
  47. 9:29 Interesting. I tried following the link to the purported “freedom flaws” in Rust, and got a page in Hyperbola’s own wiki saying “Permission denied/Sorry, you don’t have enough rights to continue”.
    8
  48. “On top of the operating system is the rest of the system software. Here we find the command interpreter (shell), window systems, compilers, editors, and similar application-independent programs. It is important to realize that these programs are definitely not part of the operating system, even though they are typically supplied preinstalled by the computer manufacturer, or in a package with the operating system if it is installed after purchase. This is a crucial, but subtle, point. The operating system is (usually) that portion of the software that runs in kernel mode or supervisor mode. It is protected from user tampering by the hardware ...” -- Tanenbaum & Woodhull, “Operating Systems Design And Implementation”, third edition, page 3 That is the well-known “MINIX Book”, by the way. So you see, by that definition, Linux is very definitely an ”operating system”.
    7
  49. There are many levels at which you can get involved in Open Source. Coding is one thing, good documentation (including examples of use) is quite another (and often lacking). And of course there is helping out with queries from other users in online discussion forums. Right at the bottom of the chain come those who may or may not use the software, but are always ready to volunteer criticisms of why Open Source will never compete against «insert name of favourite proprietary product/company here». Things get done because people make the effort to do them, not because some armchair critic complains about them. To paraphrase JFK: “Ask not what Open Source can do for you, ask what you can do for Open Source!”
    7
  50. After the patch is done, you admit it was a fix for a security vulnerability, not before. The Samba project recently went through this. They had a fundamental problem involving symlinks, that took a year or more of rearchitecting the code to fix. Only when the job was done did they admit what the real purpose of those fixes was.
    7
  51. They’re doing it because Microsoft Windows isn’t the cash cow it once was. Windows is getting more and more expensive to maintain, and returning less and less profit as a result.
    7
  52. 10:41 “This is a certified UNIX® system! I know this!”
    7
  53. SaaS is not only still here, but Microsoft is phasing out on-prem versions of Office and Windows Server and going all-in on the cloud versions.
    7
  54.  @harriet-x.x  Like the infamous “NSAKEY”? It was a back door, but it was for the company itself, not for any spooks. The name was obviously an embarrassingly bad joke.
    7
  55.  @catayloprince4772  ISO 29500 defines “transitional” versus “strict” compliance. Here we are, getting on to 2 decades later, and Microsoft is still stuck on “transitional”, and nobody dares to use “strict” for fear of breaking compatibility with something.
    7
  56.  @catayloprince4772  The LibreOffice native format is ODF, a.k.a. ISO 26300. Much simpler to understand and easier to implement correctly.
    7
  57. It’s a dumb idea. It’s all about taking power away from the distro maintainers, and putting it into the hands of certain developers. Why do developers have to care how their software is packaged? They just release the source and let the distros deal with that. The developers that do care are the proprietary developers--the ones who don’t want to release their source code. Those developers also have a poor record of keeping up-to-date with all the dependencies for their products. In other words, is this about improving the user experience? No, it is not.
    7
  58. That whole “do one thing and do it well” is a half-truth. It relies on those small components running on top of much larger ones, like the shell, the kernel, the X server and so on.
    6
  59. The whole “do one thing, and do it well” is such a canard. Those small pieces never work without some quite big, monolithic pieces under them -- look at the size of a typical shell, the X11 server, the Linux kernel itself. systemd service files typify this: the power of systemd means you can register your service in just a few lines of configuration, as opposed to the lines of boilerplate needed in a sysvinit script.
    6
  60. And remember, that hardware support comes from the Linux part, not the GNU part.
    6
  61. GNOME is the one people like to use and complain about. I guess for those who are used to proprietary platforms, this makes them feel at home.
    6
  62. I remember Linus Torvalds’ scathing response to the idea that “SVN is CVS done right”. As far as he was concerned, there was no way that CVS could be “done right”.
    6
  63. 6:02 One way to tell whether something is still needed is to move it aside into a separate directory somewhere you call “delete-pending”, or some name to that effect. If after, say, 1 month, 6 months, however long it takes you feel happy, nothing untoward happens, then you can delete the contents of that directory.
    6
  64. The command ls -d ~/.[!.]* | wc -l reports that I currently have 251 dot files/directories in my home directory. Also, think of the privacy issues on a multiuser system: even if the files/directories themselves are not readable by others, it is difficult to hide their existence (or nonexistence) from other users.
    6
  65. Remember also that when you ask the Linux kernel for more memory, by default it always says “yes”. Because it doesn’t actually need to allocate any RAM until you try to make use of it. This is called “overcommit”. And then, if it turns out you are trying to use too much and the system runs low, the dreaded “OOM Killer” kernel thread wakes up and goes looking for victims to terminate ...
    6
  66. Microsoft’s server business is declining. Linux has already won there.
    6
  67.  @joshallen128  Back then it was the best. Nowadays I think the Linux networking stack is the most advanced. But Microsoft is still stuck with its derivative of the old BSD one.
    6
  68. And yet it is more efficient than any OS out there. It is more efficient than Microsoft Windows (OK, so that isn’t saying much). It runs better on vendors’ own hardware than vendors’ own OSes. If you think you can do better, by all means show us. If you are wondering where you went wrong, start by noticing that of all those subdirectories under “arch”, only one is applicable to the architecture you are building for.
    5
  69. They’re not into Discord or Slack or any of those here-today-gone-tomorrow fads, if that’s what you mean.
    5
  70. Visual Studio is really useless for anything other than Windows-specific development. As for “Microsoft Office”, its official name is “Microsoft 365” now. Except it has never yet managed 365 days of continuous uptime.
    5
  71. They have done things like port PowerShell to Linux. But nobody seems to want to use it.
    5
  72. Every time I see one of these armchair commentators saying some open-source project is useless to them because, and then cataloguing a long list of deficiencies, I ask them: why not help sponsor someone to fix it?
    5
  73. I have lately started adding man pages to some of my projects. I remember a saying from Jerry Pournelle back in Byte Magazine days: “You can never have too many examples”. I may not agree with some of his politics, but I took that saying to heart. Oh, and writing man pages directly in troff isn’t too hard, either.
    5
  74. The man pages are still the ultimate reference, though. For example, where online will you find an example for doing a keyword search through man pages in a specific section: man -s«n» -k «keyword»
    5
  75. Remember, GPL isn’t about preventing commercial use, it’s about combating vendor lock-in. A competitive free market is crucially dependent on having a level playing field.
    5
  76. I stopped worrying about this a long time ago. I just use my computer to get things done.
    4
  77. The only reason WordPerfect had a “Reveal Codes” function was that it was just about the only word processor that needed one. Other word processors do not use codes embedded in the text stream to define formatting, so there are no “codes” to “reveal”. Surprising how few people know this.
    4
  78. This is why there is the LGPL for libraries.
    4
  79. This just shows how fragmented the BSD world is. There are something like half a dozen BSD variants, and maybe 50 times that number of Linux distros. Yet it is easier to switch Linux distros than it is to switch BSD variants.
    4
  80.  @SkyFly19853  It already has. Look at their ongoing development plans for on-prem Windows Server versus the cloud version, and you will see what I mean.
    4
  81. It’s the only video editor with an integrated compositor.
    4
  82. One handy feature of the journal system is it can show timestamps according to any timezone. This is useful because the timezone of the physical location of the server is probably the least important one--the one where you are located, or where a customer is located, will usually be more important.
    4
  83. Why are you so NT Windows?
    4
  84. The BSDs seem so fragmented. They can’t even agree on a common kernel. There are about 50 times as many Linux distros as BSD variants, and yet the Linux distros are so much more seamlessly interoperable by comparison.
    4
  85. A lot of these are just excuses. They can easily triage the bug reports.
    4
  86. My feeling is, if this continues for long enough, the WINE developers will figure out a way to defeat the check.
    4
  87.  @saint-nicholas  If they don’t, somebody else will. And publish a patch for it.
    4
  88. I just realized the other day, there are two ways one can pronounce “Xorg”. There is the official way, “Ecks-org”, referring to the display server software we all know and love . And then there is “Xorg” pronounced like “Zorg”, the alien planet where the mighty starship armada ... ... never mind.
    4
  89. 3:15 To me, “network transparency” means, if you disconnect your network connection, it doesn’t kill the GUI session. You can reconnect at some later point, and all the apps are still running. X does not manage this on its own. Something like RDP or VNC or X2Go is needed. But given they exist, there is no need for the X brand of “network transparency”.
    4
  90. Linux does Mandatory Access Control, which is a non-negotiable requirement in Government-grade security.
    4
  91. 4:00 What it actually means is that you don’t need a kernel module to implement the filesystem. These take a special kind of chops to develop, as mistakes can screw up your kernel, cause crashes etc. FUSE lets you write the filesystem code to run in an ordinary user process. So any mistakes should only mean that process dies, and your system can continue running.
    3
  92. USENET was like that. The World-Wide Web has moved in the opposite direction. And since that seems to be the Internet’s “killer app”, its centralization now dominates how we think about things.
    3
  93. Companies too often will repeatedly deny things, and then suddenly admit that they are true.
    3
  94. Multiple desktops were actually invented in the early 1990s as part of CDE (“Common Desktop Environment”), part of the OSF/1 initiative between a bunch of Unix vendors (basically, everybody except AT&T and Sun). So yeah, it was a *nix thing, and still works best on *nix OSes.
    3
  95. Another difficulty is, a lot of big companies don’t realize anybody in their organization is using any open-source software.
    3
  96. At least you know which packages to remove to fix things--they came from the problem repo, so just remove those.
    3
  97. I like the empty file idea. Remember, I want to track changes from default settings. If I wanted more versioning than that, I could use a VCS.
    3
  98. Remember, GPL isn’t about preventing commercial use, it’s about combating vendor lock-in. A competitive free market is crucially dependent on having a level playing field.
    3
  99. 8:01 Or offer the raw data for download somewhere, so people can do their own analyses.
    3
  100. HandBrake is just a GUI layer on top of FFmpeg. You can build FFmpeg with a whole range of different options, that’s up to you.
    3
  101. Groklaw did reveal their true pro-IBM colours later, in the TurboHercules case.
    3
  102. Before X, there was W (which ran on the V OS). Then X was created as its successor, and went through all these major version bumps until it got to 11. So then the major version stopped, but we kept seeing revisions--X11R2 etc, up until X11R7. And then the major R number stopped incrementing too, and now we have decimal points, up to X11R7.7.
    3
  103. “Pro bono” (“for the good”) immediately raises the question “cui bono?” (“whose good?”). The full phrase is supposed to be “pro bono publico” (“for the good of the public”).
    3
  104.  @SkyFly19853  In case you didn’t realize, they are slowing development of on-prem Windows Server to concentrate more on the cloud version. Basically, they are conceding the on-prem market to Linux. Trouble is, the cloud is already dominated by Linux--and that is also true of Microsoft’s cloud. So all in all, the future of Windows Server does not look bright.
    3
  105.  @SkyFly19853  That’s for Bing search. Which is just reinforcing the trend away from Windows itself.
    3
  106. 2:35 I would argue that network transparency is better handled through mechanisms like VNC. Consider that X11’s idea of “network transparency” means that, if the network connection goes down, all your GUI apps get errors trying to communicate with the display server and die. Whereas with VNC, you can disconnect from a running GUI session and reconnect, and everything is still there, and didn’t even notice you were gone. That, in my view, is the proper meaning of “transparency”.
    3
  107. Windows is an absolute mess. This is why you need special tools to migrate app installations from one system to another. On Linux, you don’t.
    3
  108. I think also Apple will stick with ARM a while longer, if only because of the sunk-cost fallacy.
    3
  109. Remember that macOS is a “Unix” system primarily in legal, not technical terms. They have licensed the “Unix” trademark, but that doesn’t mean that they work quite the way that people expect of a traditional “Unix” system. If you want that, you go to Linux or the BSDs.
    3
  110.  @BrodieRobertson  Yes, there is some aspect of technical terms, yes. But it doesn’t really cover all the things that are traditionally thought of as “Unix”.
    3
  111. I wonder how long before WSL 2 becomes a mandatory part of a Windows install. Then, to cut ongoing development costs, Microsoft starts relying more and more on the Linux kernel for hardware drivers. Then the Windows kernel eventually withers away, leaving just an API layer on top of Linux ... think of it as WINE with Microsoft branding.
    3
  112. I found an online example where someone needed to run a single-line shell command at boot time to enable a particular battery-saving mode in the kernel. The systemd unit file was just 12 lines, including options for controlling when the command should be executed. Someone else tried to do a sysvinit version, but that was 17 nonblank lines, nearly all of which was the same old boilerplate you see in every sysvinit script.
    3
  113. Blender is still a smaller download than any proprietary CG app, or any proprietary video editor, or any proprietary compositor for that matter.
    3
  114. If you want the ultimate in “stable”, how about Horsedung Linux! (“Stable” ... geddit?)
    3
  115.    I have started writing man pages for some of my programs, directly in troff.
    3
  116. Fun fact: if you create a ~/.xsessionrc file, this completely overrides any choice of desktop environment you may try to make in a display manager login. And if you further make that ~/.xsessionrc file, and the home directory it’s in, non-writeable and non-owned by the user, then that provides a simple mechanism for creating a captive GUI account.
    3
  117. FreeBSD are adopting the Linux Netlink API, though (RFC 3549).
    3
  118. 1:16 You could have scrolled that screen down just a bit, to give more content and less ambush ad.
    3
  119. I remember coming across a site which tried to give you access to a certain number of free articles per month. Of course they kept track of whether they’d seen you before by setting cookies on your browser. Which you could defeat by using private-browsing mode. Which they then tried to detect by noticing that things like the JavaScript local-storage API didn’t quite work the same in private-browsing mode. But, coincidentally (or not), there happens to be a Firefox addon that fakes out the local-storage API, to make it appear to be working as though in non-private-browsing mode.
    3
  120.  @MegaLokopo  You were the one who brought it up. In any case, Windows 10 IoT Edition is irrelevant to the issue of a replaceable GUI layer.
    3
  121.  @steven631764  What’s happening is Windows is bringing in less and less revenue, while the cost of maintaining its increasingly complex and buggy code keeps going up and up.
    3
  122.  @MegaLokopo  I made a relevant comparison. You didn’t like that? Maybe you have some personal stake in Windows IoT, and it made you feel embarrassed? You know what you can do.
    3
  123. For program-specific definitions, put them in a wrapper script.
    3
  124.  @generallyunimportant  I made it with uuidgen(1).
    3
  125. BeOS ties the GUI into the OS kernel, which is not something you expect in a modern platform.
    3
  126. “We” presumably meaning TempleOS users ... all two of them?
    2
  127. Microsoft Office macros are a well-known security risk. Nobody should be blindly accepting them from unknown sources.
    2
  128. Been using it for years.
    2
  129. Also, we normally pronounce SCO as though it were a word: “sco”.
    2
  130. True network transparency means you can addi it on as a separate layer or take it off, and none of the existing apps will even notice.
    2
  131. Where I come from, “Vim” is a brand of abrasive household cleaner.
    2
  132.  @dand337  Is there an example of theming done right?
    2
  133. What is really pointless is having these “.” and “..” entries in every directory. The kernel has to have special handling for these anyway, so why bother cluttering up every directory with them, and have the kernel interpret their meaning directly?
    2
  134. Windows has a monolithic GUI tied into its OS kernel. So, no chance.
    2
  135. It is possible because those man pages are part of common packages available across just about all distros. Only man pages for distro-specific commands need to be distro-specific. For example, the man pages for bash, iproute2, coreutils, util-linux etc will be the same across all distros. As for apache, the apachectl command is the same across all distros, and it has a man page.
    2
  136. So you are a bit of an ... em-bezel-ler?
    2
  137. Hate the Government, not the people.
    2
  138. He did so well with Windows Phone, Windows RT and the Kin, didn’t he.
    2
  139.  @BrodieRobertson  So what did he win?
    2
  140.  @BrodieRobertson  Did he introduce that?
    2
  141.  @theParticleGod  There are no “embedded codes” in Word or any other current WYSIWYG word processor.
    2
  142. Containers really only work well on Linux.
    2
  143. Maybe wait until he piques your interest instead ...
    2
  144.  @marloelefant7500  How many network shares does desktop Windows allow? Last I checked, it was 4 for the regular version, or 10 if you paid extra for Windows Pro. Samba is a standard package on most Linux distros, fully compatible with Windows SMB file service. That has no inbuilt limit on how many shares clients can mount: the only limit is what your hardware can stand. It can even act as a domain controller, if you want.
    2
  145.  @marloelefant7500  Linux/BSD/Unix systems could run Samba, which is a full-featured SMB-compatible server with no restrictions. Where was there the equivalent of Samba for Windows?
    2
  146.  @marloelefant7500  It doesn’t exist because it can’t. Samba came into existence because there was an incentive to bypass Microsoft’s revenue model; it was implemented for *nix systems because they can handle it. Another workstation feature Windows doesn’t support is multiuser remote shell access.
    2
  147. People complaining about Free Software projects somehow “forcing” them into certain things is just hilarious. Sad, but hilarious.
    2
  148.  @shaunpatrick8345  What “monolithic Linux installation” is this? I thought SLS disappeared back in the 1990s.
    2
  149. If your business is crucially dependent on obsolete, unsupported software, then it is just one crash away from bankruptcy.
    2
  150. New distros get created for many reasons. Consider how Raspbian came about: when the first model of Raspberry π came out, it could run regular Debian, but was a bit of an odd fish because while it had hardware floating point, the core ARM instruction set was an older version, and there was no Debian build optimized for this combination--the one for the older ARM instruction set made no use of hardware floating point. So a couple of guys took it upon themselves to rebuild the whole of Debian just for the π. It had to be done on the π itself, and the bulk of it was done in six weeks.
    2
  151.  @terrydaktyllus1320  I’m sure this will become relevant the day you can show us a microcontroller running an appimage.
    2
  152. The FSF site has a detailed comparison of different licences.
    2
  153. 6:38 FYI Sign changes like that are not minor.
    2
  154.  @BrodieRobertson  Getting the sign wrong on a term in a formula may be simple to fix, but it could have quite major consequences.
    2
  155. You mean there was a whole millisecond of silence at the start?!? UNACCEPTABLE !!
    2
  156. Much lower overhead. Also simplicity.
    2
  157. If you want a Linux distro built around that philosophy, you know what you can do.
    2
  158.  @thomasqsa  Sounds like HandBrake is built wrong, then. It’s generally a bad idea to fork an upstream project as active as FFmpeg, unless you want to take it in a different direction. Which they clearly didn’t.
    2
  159. “Enforced”, he said. As though they’re police or something.
    2
  160. Windows is an albatross around the neck of Microsoft. Even they are having trouble keeping it viable.
    2
  161. The crazy thing is this parameter controls the number of separate vm areas your process can have, not the size of an area. The Linux kernel docs mentions the example of a malloc debugging tool which creates a new area for every single memory object your program creates -- now there’s a way to chew through your vm-area limit quickly ...
    2
  162. I don’t understand what you mean by “dog whistle”, unless you are trying to virtue-signal or something. It’s pretty obvious where this will lead, regardless of whether it’s Microsoft’s conscious plan or not.
    2
  163. This “Pamela Jones” described herself as a “paralegal”. There is some doubt as to whether such a person actually existed. Certainly Groklaw appeared very knowledgeable and well-researched, so there could have been an entire legal team behind that name. Funded by IBM, of course.
    2
  164. Microsoft’s attempt to stem the haemorrhage of developers away from the Windows platform. Too little, too late.
    2
  165.  @BrodieRobertson  Why, though?
    2
  166.  @JoeBot21  Why did they feel the need to introduce gratuitous incompatibilities into their different kernels?
    2
  167. No way those additional things will be needed for the Linux kernel. Just as the C code does not require glibc, the Rust part will have to be just as self-contained.
    2
  168. Is “Eris” taken? (She’s the goddess of discord, by the way.)
    2
  169. I don’t believe that story about it being an inadvertent bug for a moment. The programmers concerned were much too smart for that.
    2
  170. Sherlock Holmes’s older brother.
    2
  171. I don’t understand the bit about the developer having control over quality-control groups. Sounds like a hint at something that happens within Meta or some other large organization.
    2
  172. 10:01 This is really only an issue with coredumps. And you probably don’t bother with those.
    2
  173. 3:24 Aaah, but why was that interpreted as “00∶30” rather than “12∶30”?
    2
  174.  @Proferk  That’s reinforcing my point, not refuting it.
    2
  175. And the current spat between ARM and Qualcomm is not helping matters.
    2
  176. 8:34 Access to OpenGL and Vulkan might one.
    2
  177.  @UKprl  X2go is very easy to get going.
    2
  178. I still have an old Asus Eee 701 literally within arm’s reach.
    2
  179. There are notes for a proposed “X12”, which you will find on the xorg site somewhere. That’s been knocking around for years ... decades. The trouble is, X is full of legacy baggage (like graphics rendering calls) that needs to be dumped. At one time it even provided a font server, but luckily they were able to get rid of that. Once you remove this stuff, you realize the basic architecture of X, which allowed for having such things in the first place, is over-complicated.
    2
  180. The whole “Unix philosophy” bit is such a red herring. The example small components they mention invariably depend on much larger monolithic components underneath (e.g. the shell, the kernel, the X server). But they never want to mention that. Similarly, systemd may be a large piece of software, but it also lets you write small components -- service files can be very small.
    2
  181. Elden Ring was the one that initially had some trouble on Windows, back in February. But Valve was able to offer a fix that worked on the Steam Deck, so it worked fine there.
    2
  182.  @mskiptr  Trouble is, that “stability” has been rocked a bit by the ARM-versus-Qualcomm suit.
    2
  183. You could say that Groklaw was on the side of the Good Guys in the SCO lawsuit. In the TurboHercules one, on the other hand, they were pretty firmly on the side of IBM.
    2
  184. The whole “Unix philosophy” bit is such a red herring. The example small components they mention invariably depend on much larger monolithic components underneath (e.g. the shell, the kernel, the X server). But they never want to mention that. Similarly, systemd may be a large piece of software, but it also lets you write small components -- service files can be very small.
    2
  185. Multiple CPUs, yes. What’s the difference between a “CPU” and a “core”?
    2
  186.  @Bob-of-Zoid  GPU ≠ CPU.
    2
  187.  @Bob-of-Zoid  Quote: “some have GPUs”.
    2
  188.  @Bob-of-Zoid  CPUs and GPUs are different kinds of PUs.
    2
  189.  PhoenixRising  This would be a great way of reducing the bloat.
    2
  190. GIMP’s internal architecture is already structured that way. If you look at the plugin API, you see this thing called the “PDB” (procedure database) -- this is a registry of all GIMP’s operations, both builtin and provided by plugins. Not only can you invoke these operations from a plugin (that includes calling operations in one plugin from another plugin!), you can also type commands directly into the scripting console. Another nice thing is, this is scripting-language-independent. GIMP 2 provided an API for Python 2, but Python 2 is dead now. But I found a way to rewrap the API in Python 3 (see my pylibgimp2 project), and GIMP itself neithers knows or cares about the difference.
    2
  191. Funnily enough, Al’s Geek Lab did a feature on Xenix just a few days ago.
    2
  192. Let me guess: Microsoft Windows users?
    2
  193. Does a “free market” mean you don’t pay for things? And yet that is the essence of Capitalism.
    2
  194. I think there are several GUI desktop apps that could do with a bit more help. GIMP 3, for example, has been very slow in coming. I think Inkscape could also benefit from more contributors. And also various video editor projects. Just some off the top of my head.
    2
  195. Netware may have been a complex and fiddly product to set up, but I think its performance and reliability (and the third-party ecosystem that developed around it) made all that worthwhile. Which is why it took Microsoft several attempts to dethrone it from market dominance. Interesting to see people point to WSL and remind us of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”. My response is to look back at the Ballmer days and say that Microsoft already tried “Extinguish”, with every resource at its disposal, and failed miserably.
    2
  196. Microsoft is increasingly providing patches that either don’t properly fix the problem, or cause new problems requiring further patches. Basically, the strategy of “wait for Microsoft to fix it” is getting harder to reconcile with the needs of mission-critical production systems.
    2
  197. But Linux has no 16-bit ABI. How do you write a “16-bit binary” that runs under it?
    2
  198. Sounds like Linux kexec.
    2
  199. There is already an XDG standard, the .desktop file. This lets you define menu items, icons, even document templates. All the major open-source GUIs understand them. They even share common standards for letting you customize things. That’s why you can switch GUIs on a Linux distro and see all the same apps, icons, everything.
    2
  200. I set up Gitolite for a client a while back. It was easy enough for their staff to use to share in-house code.
    2
  201. “Levitating” window manager ...
    2
  202. Did Windows ever figure out the pass-process-context-to-the-new-userspace thing?
    2
  203. I did some work on another solution: wrap the GIMP 2 libraries in my own Python 3 wrapper.
    2
  204. You know, the guy who actually sent that Elton John song into space, and his car with it.
    2
  205. The BSDs are the classic illustration of the principle that the success of an open-source project doesn’t depend on numbers of users, but on the strength of the contributions from the community.
    2
  206. Worth pointing out what Microsoft did with PowerShell. Not only does it represent a major backdown from the formerly GUI-centric philosophy of Windows system management, one of its features is that it lets you look at the Windows Registry as though it were a filesystem, with key entries appearing as files and directories. In other words, Microsoft has admitted by its actions, not just that a CLI offers superior opportunities for process automation, but furthermore that the Unix/Linux tradition of text-based files grouped by subsystem in the /etc directory is also a better way of configuring the system.
    2
  207. 2:43 It looks like their scripting language is Haskell.
    2
  208. wget does bulk downloads better, curl does form uploads better. curl also implements a whole load of unnecessary protocols.
    2
  209. Windows backwards-compatibility support is pretty terrible. Drivers and apps break all the time. That’s why so many users hate to upgrade, and stubbornly insist on running older versions.
    2
  210. I still think Kathy Burke’s finest moments were as part of “The Slobs” on Harry Enfield ...
    2
  211. It’s going to be interesting to see how they use their ARM chips in a Mac Pro replacement. The everything-integrated-and-unupgradeable approach worked fine for laptops, but in the higher-end “workstation” market, the ability to upgrade and customize the configuration is very important. But a key factor in the performance of Apple’s ARM machines is the tight integration and doing away with expansion capabilities.
    2
  212.  @anon_y_mousse  Don’t forget the alien reptilian overlords of the Xorg/Zorg Foundation ...
    2
  213. Keith Packard, “Mr X11”. Also created Fontconfig.
    2
  214. Do you really want to entrust mission-critical business functions to obsolete and unsupported versions of software, though?
    2
  215.  @yeahaddigirl  Then you don’t want to rely on outdated PPAs, do you?
    2
  216. 3:07 procfs was turning into a dumping ground for every little bit of functionality that driver developers wanted to expose to userland. Torvalds gave them a telling off, and sysfs was created as a result.
    2
  217. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is all very well until it breaks and you discover you don’t have the ability to fix it ...
    2
  218.  @MegaLokopo  Maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned Windows 10 IoT in this context, then.
    2
  219.  @JohnDlugosz  It was true. That gave a performance boost on the hardware back then. Unix systems, with the X11 server as a user process, were at a disadvantage. But those days are over. Hardware is now much more powerful than in the 1990s. Linux can manage GUIs just as responsive, still with the X11 server (or Wayland compositor) running as a user process. And it maintains the advantage of modularity.
    2
  220.  @GSBarlev  Bruce Perens (original creator of BusyBox) has pointed out that getting such approval is not such a daunting task as it seems. The opposition of the kernel developers to GPLv3 never made much sense to me.
    2
  221. 1:00 Interesting to see one of their advertisers was 3CX. They sell a proprietary PBX product which I think was originally Windows-only. They now advertise it for Linux as well. I suspect they were forced into that because their business has been severely undercut by Free Software offerings based on Asterisk and the like.
    2
  222. Talking of 3CX ... have you heard that somebody got into their build systems over a week ago and compromised the distribution of a desktop client app of theirs by bundling malware into it. An antimalware product was sounding the alarm all this time, but it took this long for the company itself to admit it had been pwned. And its arrogance goes as far as banning people from its support forums who have been getting upset over its tardiness in dealing with this.
    2
  223. The way I check is, after 30 seconds, I try opening a link to my comment in a new private-browsing window (no cookies). If I can’t see it, I know it’s gone.
    2
  224.  @altrogeruvah  You make it sound like nobody else could have taken up the development.
    2
  225.  @altrogeruvah  Find some like-minded people and start your own project.
    2
  226. 4:16 systemd manages its dependencies based on relationships like “wants” and “wantedby”, not based on arbitrary numbering.
    2
  227. Fun fact: none of the official standard specs for “Unix” say anything about init systems. That’s why, for example, Apple’s MacOS can run its own proprietary launchd and still be officially called “Unix”.
    2
  228. The trouble with the AGPL is its infringement on Freedom 0 (the freedom to use the software as you wish). This is why I think of it as a non-Free licence.
    1
  229.  @Sekhatt  That’s a restriction on how the software is used, is it not?
    1
  230. Curl is just unnecessarily complex. Most of the protocols it implements already have their own perfectly good clients. It should stick to HTTP/HTTPS.
    1
  231.  @Fs3i  Like I said, most of the complexity is unnecessary. There is no need to support protocols that already have their own purpose-built clients.
    1
  232. I had a look at the source code. Counting up the number of lines in files in subdirectories called “lib” and “src” for both projects, curl comes in at about 190,000 lines, while wget is only slightly smaller at about 180,000 lines. So while wget handles fewer protocols, it has more functions for working with them. Like in order to do recursive mirroring of a website, it has to do some HTML parsing. I would say, all the other protocols that curl implements, that wget does not, are unnecessary. For example, media streaming: what is the point, when ffmpeg is purpose-built not only for handling the connections, but also the necessary media packaging? Why bother with SCP/SFTP, when SSH clients already include that? Or SMB, when you have smbclient? And Telnet, of all things--what is the point with that?
    1
  233.  @Fs3i  I use those other protocols too, so don’t say I don’t. I just prefer the more advanced forms supported by their native tools, not the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none versions in curl.
    1
  234.  @Fs3i  That’s why I don’t see the point in duplicating their functionality in curl.
    1
  235.  @jesse7631  Been using custom profiles in Konsole for years.
    1
  236. This is not a kernel issue. Or a “kernal” one, for that matter.
    1
  237. Hidden files are one thing, how about hidden files within hidden files? Do you store your email in maildir format? This creates a “~/.maildir” directory, and within that your inbox is represented by “cur”, “new” and “tmp” subdirectories, where each mail message is a separate file. If you create any mail folders, you will see them with names beginning with dots. Why?
    1
  238. 0:13 Just to clarify, this was a patch to enhance the in-kernel NTFS driver, which is probably not of interest to many people. For many years we have had NTFS-3g, which is a user-mode driver that installs via FUSE, and that offers seamless read/write access to NTFS volumes. Some people assume that a kernel-mode driver will automatically offer better performance than one running as a user process. But this is NTFS, remember ...
    1
  239. Private branch? Just rebase.
    1
  240. Why not contribute to making them better?
    1
  241. Seems to me it is only Windows users are still fooled by using OpenOffice. All of us on FOSS platforms have embraced LibreOffice.
    1
  242. Maybe Wayland is assuming a linear colour space. So the only need for colour calibration is at the physical display end (the Wayland server, e.g. Weston) and at the image input ends (image capture, scanners, cameras etc), and of course interpreting colour profiles attached to image data received from elsewhere (e.g. sRGB files). That seems to me to be the simplest way to think about things.
    1
  243. PipeWire also depends on systemd for process management. Without that, I think you lose some features.
    1
  244. “Pyro” for the Mac might have been the first.
    1
  245. KDE was always highly customizable. That was the whole point of the ”Plasma” concept from 4.x onwards. You can choose and combine widget components to give the style of desktop you want. There is even a widget that gives you a Mac-style dock. (Try doing that on Windows.)
    1
  246. GNOME is easily the most resource-hungry of all the open-source GUI desktop environments.
    1
  247.  @iamme659  Because setting the {253f01e9-
    1
  248.  @iamme659  043c-485f-8af8-
    1
  249.  @iamme659  797} registry key to {a913e8b6-
    1
  250.  @iamme659  6f37-4605-9117-1303bf
    1
  251.  @iamme659  } is considered normal for Windows users, isn’t it.
    1
  252. I think the FSF and others have made the point that the Apache licence gives stronger protections against patent trolls than MIT or BSD do.
    1
  253. Remember they’re not really that “hidden”. On a multiuser system, the existence of a file with a particular name in your home directory betrays the fact that you have used a particular app. That’s a potential invasion of privacy.
    1
  254.  @mikeonthecomputer  You have to have execute access at least, if you want to share stuff with others. That’s all that’s needed to take a good guess.
    1
  255. I remember, back when I did an Ubuntu install, turning it into Kubuntu was as easy as “apt-get install kubuntu-desktop”.
    1
  256. Composting ... for those with a sense of humus.
    1
  257. I use different licences. I’ve even been using CC licences for Python/shell scripts.
    1
  258. A glitch in the maglitch in the matrixtrix?
    1
  259. I remember Linus Torvalds’ scathing response to the idea that “SVN is CVS done right”. As far as he was concerned, there was no way that CVS could be “done right”.
    1
  260. By the way, anybody else notice the “Influencer-Free Zone” T-shirt?
    1
  261. I could never quite figure out what a “Visual” was supposed to be. I think it’s a screen configuration.
    1
  262. I see there is a standard Debian package for it, so Debian derivatives like Ubuntu should have it too.
    1
  263. Any particular ones you can mention?
    1
  264.  @BrodieRobertson  That was the time of Windows Vista, as I recall.
    1
  265.  @BrodieRobertson  XP actually (mostly) happened under Gates. Vista was entirely Ballmer’s fault. Do we count that as a success or a failure?
    1
  266.  @BrodieRobertson  XP’s death was postponed to head off the threat from the Linux netbooks.
    1
  267.  @BrodieRobertson  One of Ballmer’s many messes.
    1
  268. Forgetting the program that interpreted the arcane syntax of all those commands--the shell. And the program that allowed that shell to execute--the Unix kernel. Both quite large and intricate pieces of code. So tell me, which “one thing” did each of those pieces do well?
    1
  269. A “market” is where people trade things with some kind of economic value, e.g. money. People downloading and using Free software does not itself create a “market”, so a phrase like “market share” is meaningless.
    1
  270. Windows just isn’t profitable for them any more. You can see this because they are putting less investment into it to fix bugs etc. So of course they are looking for ways to cut costs. WSL2 points the way: it seems inevitable that they will replace the old, unwieldy, difficult-to-mainta Windows kernel with a trim, adaptable Linux one at some point.
    1
  271.  @shaunpatrick8345  The OP was describing Windows that way. Unless you were using the term, what’s the word, ironically ...
    1
  272.  @shaunpatrick8345  Maybe you should recheck what “contrast” means.
    1
  273.  @shaunpatrick8345  That difference is there all right, You still haven’t explained what this “monolithic Linux” you were talking about was.
    1
  274.  @shaunpatrick8345  The Linux systems the rest of us use certainly behave very differently. That’s why I’m curious about the one you claim to use -- why won’t you tell us about it?
    1
  275.  @shaunpatrick8345  Yes, I have done lots of Linux installs, for myself and my clients. I use it every day, and I make my living from it. That’s why I am completely mystified by your comments. What kind of experience do you have with it?
    1
  276.  @shaunpatrick8345  See, that’s what I mean. It’s like you come from a Bizarro world where SLS is still king. Or maybe you are still installing Red Hat (pre-RHEL), when it would install a lot of unneeded stuff by default (they stopped doing that a long time ago). Or maybe Ubuntu is like that (I don’t use Ubuntu, so I can’t say). Not that I’m saying you’re lying, but you’re going to need to be more specific about examples before you can be taken seriously. What exactly is this “monolithic Linux” you keep going on about?
    1
  277.  @shaunpatrick8345  You still haven’t answered the question I keep asking. On Debian or a derivative (even Ubuntu), you can tell the package that your perl executable comes from with a command as simple as dpkg-query -S $(type -p perl) From here, you can trace the dependencies back to find out what needs it. Everything is there for a reason, and if you don’t need that reason, you can remove it.
    1
  278.  @karibui494  Software is “proven to be stable” until the day it falls over.
    1
  279. At one time, BSD had the best network stack. Not any more.
    1
  280. Obviously you need to start a new one.
    1
  281.  @yanlucasdf  Making proprietary software cross-platform is very expensive and difficult.
    1
  282. There is the VisionFive 2 from StarFive, which is an SBC very similar to a Raspberry π in price, performance and form factor.
    1
  283. “Datcord”? “Desafinado”?
    1
  284. Gues what: those systemd config files let you run any number of external binaries. That’s what makes them so easy to set up.
    1
  285. SVN initially made a big deal out of the idea of “cheap copies”. Prior VCSes made it difficult to create branches, because they had to keep separate copies of files even if they didn’t change. SVN fixed that problem, but it never managed to solve the issue of, having spawned off a new branch, how do you merge them back again? The one thing Git does better than any VCS is merging of branches. I think Mercurial has been trying to emulate Git on this score. Last I heard, they had made about 4 attempts to implement branching, none of them quite up to Git functionality.
    1
  286.  @fuseteam  It apparently has builtin “wget” and “curl” commands, which are limited compared to the real things. Even on Linux, it will use its builtins instead of the real commands. Somebody filed a bug report asking for this to be changed. It was rejected, on the grounds that the Linux port had to remain bug-compatible with the Windows version.
    1
  287.  @princessOfAwkwardness  You can understand why Linux users don’t want to put up with Microsoft’s stupidity.
    1
  288. Yes, Debian derivatives offer the “debsums” tool, that can verify installed files against the package they came from. And of course packages themselves are signed.
    1
  289.  @ChristopherCobra  If they can’t keep up with upstream changes, then that’s a “fork”.
    1
  290.  @ChristopherCobra  A lot of them are failures, yes. The ones that are not, it is mostly because upstream has gone moribund. Certainly not the case with FFmpeg!
    1
  291.  @schwingedeshaehers  That makes it difficult if you want to share some files with other users.
    1
  292. Funny how people assume that anything a big company does will automatically be successful. This extends to assuming that, if they haven’t heard of some product from that big company, then it doesn’t exist.
    1
  293. It’s a traditional Unix thing. I normally get rid of it, because if fsck ever has a need for it, it will recreate it anyway. So I feel it’s just clutter.
    1
  294. I look at the apt-get(8) man page, and “update” and “upgrade” are right next to each other. It says the first one is to “resynchronize the package index files”, the second one is to “install the newest versions of all packages”. Simple.
    1
  295. I wonder which one thing you would say the Linux kernel does well. Remember it’s over 20 million lines of code now.
    1
  296. I can remember when a DMCA takedown was filed against the youtube-dl source code repository on GitHub. That raised a storm of ire, which rapidly led to forks.
    1
  297. So Slackware has finally adopted PulseAudio ... just in time to see it superseded by PipeWire. Is he going to adopt that? But while PulseAudio does its own process management, PipeWire doesn’t--it leaves that to systemd. So how will he handle that?
    1
  298. I still enjoy the effects in KDE. I was disappointed to discover the Desktop Cube had been removed some months back, apparently because it was written using old, obsolete OpenGL calls, and needed a rework.
    1
  299. Unfortunately, it was getting to the point where someone had to speak to him about it. He has tried to do better since then, with mixed results.
    1
  300.  @JoeBot21  You “can’t say for certain”, and then proceed to do exactly that. If the core is “more coherent and better integrated”, isn’t that the exact opposite of being fragmented among the different variants, as it is?
    1
  301.  @economicprisoner  I’ve come across incomplete man pages, but never one that said that. Could you point me to an example?
    1
  302.  @economicprisoner  Just a note that info is part of GNU, and Latex is, well, Latex. Neither are somehow Linux-specific. Do you get a man page for either on your favourite BSD?
    1
  303.  @rishirajsaikia1323  What about DragonFly BSD? Seems that started from FreeBSD, but is no longer compatible with it. And this is true of all the other BSD forks. Why do they do this?
    1
  304. Vim is to text editors what PHP is to programming languages.
    1
  305.  @anon_y_mousse  If you thought that was high praise for PHP ...
    1
  306. May have been true of KDE 3.
    1
  307.  @No-mq5lw  You’re not thinking of Windows “Fisher-Price” XP, are you?
    1
  308. 5:07 One thing you didn’t explain is: what exactly is “lowmem”?
    1
  309. 4:51 The C category permits non-Free JavaScript, so long as it is not essential for the site to function. The B category prohibits this altogether.
    1
  310. 5:31 I think that’s pronounced to rhyme with “pachyderm”. Presumably a portmanteau of “hacky” and that word.
    1
  311. “Lorem ipsum” is the traditional text. But how about “Corporate ipsum”, e.g. Professionally whiteboard market positioning sprints. Enthusiastically embrace long-term high-impact vortals, then proactively harness ubiquitous technologies, to credibly extend disaggregated manufactured products, to uniquely exploit content-free ideas. Conveniently scale plug-and-play services, then energistically evolve fully tested epicentres of excellence, then enthusiastically evolve premium innovation, then enthusiastically initiate 24/365 clouds, and progressively e-enable high-quality e-commerce. Appropriately benchmark long-term high-impact infrastructures, to rapidiously impact resource-sucking leadership skills, to continually drive open-source human capital, then fungibly scale innovative strategic theme areas. Holisticly promote backward-compatible portals.
    1
  312. Quote: C grade: “any such code used by an important site function either (1) is free software ... or (2) isn't necessary, so that the function works properly even if JavaScript is disabled in the browser.” B grade: “All code sent to the user's browser must be free software”. Note the “all”. Seems pretty clear; the non-Free JavaScript must be optional at level C, and is not allowed at all at level B.
    1
  313. 6:00 I notice that in the Debian repo there are separate packages for “libfuse2” and “libfuse3-3”. Typically this happens because of incompatible ABI changes. Otherwise you should be able to upgrade to a newer version of a package with the same name, and existing code dependent on that should just keep on working. Consider that the transition from “libc5” to “libc6” happened about 2 decades ago, and even with all the new stuff that has gone into GNU libc since then, there is still no “libc7”, and it could be there will never be. That’s because they found ways to keep all the changes so far backward-compatible.
    1
  314. These days, BSD is copying things from Linux. Like WireGuard, for example.
    1
  315.  @OcteractSG  That’s the story I don’t believe.
    1
  316. Their attempt to extinguish Linux was a complete failure. The whole “Linux is a cancer” claim and their “Get the Facts” campaign went down like a lead balloon. So now, they are trying to turn Windows into Linux, with WSL, and open-sourcing some of their own tools and porting them to Linux. Meanwhile, the quality of the Windows OS itself continues to go downhill.
    1
  317. 8:56 Umm, no. A wider confidence interval means the result is likely less significant, not more. A sharper peak (narrower confidence interval) is better than a flatter one.
    1
  318. There was a survey of the VFX industry released a little over a year ago. And 60% of their machines run Linux, and that is expected to increase. So that is one content-creation market that doesn’t seem to care that much about Adobe products--at least, not any more.
    1
  319. The question is putting limits on the freedom of others who use your software. Speaking of which, consider that the AGPL is the only supposedly-“free” licence I know of that impinges on Freedom 0 (the freedom to use the software as you wish). Does this make it a non-Free licence? I think there is a case.
    1
  320.  @SkyFly19853  Bing is way behind Google. And Google is sufficiently spooked to be trying AI-aided search itself. It could throw the search market wide open again--the opposite of a monopoly.
    1
  321. There are some other pieces of open-source software that are Linux-only, e.g. Asterisk, Docker. Even WireGuard for FreeBSD had its hiccups. I expect this list will only grow over time.
    1
  322. KDE is more customizable than it ever was--that was a key point of the Plasma rearchitecting. And there are plenty of other GUI frameworks, if you don’t like those. Or you can run Linux with no GUI whatsoever--it’s your choice.
    1
  323. Try a “man://” URL in Konqueror. “info://” also works.
    1
  324. Do those doubled letters represent longer vowels? I gather “a” and “ä” represent different sounds, too, and each one can be doubled.
    1
  325. SELinux was created by the NSA, remember. Windows still doesn’t have anything like it.
    1
  326.  @erkinalp  It has nothing like that. It doesn’t even have much of the original multiuser design that was supposed to be in Windows NT. Remember, Microsoft tried to bring Docker (a fairly lightweight isolation mechanism) to Windows, but had to give up.
    1
  327. If you write server code, creating systemd service files to control them is easier than for any other init system.
    1
  328. Users don’t really matter in Open Source. What matters is community contributions. A project with millions of users can die if nobody contributes to keeping it alive. Conversely, a project with a minuscule number of users can survive and thrive, if it has a strong community around it.
    1
  329. I have a problem with the AGPL, in that it is the only purportedly-“free” licence that tries to limit Freedom 0 (the freedom to use the software as you wish). For this reason, I think of it as a non-Free licence.
    1
  330. 1:33 Actually, this is what containers (e.g. LXC) already do.
    1
  331. The reason why Windows is a mess is largely down to the app developers (plus apathy from Microsoft). Back in the pre-Windows-95 days, configuration was done with these text-based .INI files. Which are such a neat idea that some software on Linux still uses them (and there is a standard Python module for parsing them!). But Windows never had a standard place to put the things. So they ended up scattered everywhere. Instead of defined a standard Windows equivalent to the /etc directory, Microsoft decided to make app developers get rid of .INI files, and put their config information in the Registry instead. But that just created a new mess. As for the rest of app installs, if Windows had a standard Linux-style package manage to keep track of where things went, that would make it much easier to reduce conflicts and manage upgrades en masse , as well as do clean uninstalls. Again, Microsoft shows no enthusiasm for the idea.
    1
  332.  @lale5767  Ever wondered why a Windows install requires half a dozen reboots?
    1
  333.  @lale5767  You tell me what they’re for, then.
    1
  334.  @lale5767  Conway’s Law says “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it”. It is well-known among seasoned Windows users that you can fix 90% of problems (or at least make them go away for a while) by rebooting. You would think that Microsoft itself, with its special insight into the operations of a platform that it created, would have a better answer. But it appears that it does not.
    1
  335. I prefer “git checkout -b «newbranch»” to create a new branch from the current point and switch to it, all in one step.
    1
  336.  @mskiptr  And the question marks over the future ownership of ARM.
    1
  337.  @BrodieRobertson  Just looking at the main build script for Blender, for example, I count 11 occurrences of “if(UNIX AND NOT APPLE)”. Obvious things that are omitted on the MacOS build include: FreeType, portable build, the man page and X11. Also I’m not sure if FFmpeg is supported.
    1
  338.  @BrodieRobertson  That’s what I mean about “traditional” Unix. You wouldn’t imagine running a system without X11 (even Wayland is going to need XWayland for some time yet). Yet that is what Apple offers.
    1
  339. The irony is that there is a single section marked “if(UNIX AND NOT (APPLE OR HAIKU))”, to do with X11. So even Haiku manages to include itself in the other “if(UNIX...)” sections, Apple does not.
    1
  340. 10:39 EGL is a cross-platform API to allow an app to get an OpenGL context tied to a GUI window. Curious: how do things like “Gallium” and “Linux DRI/DRM” fit into this?
    1
  341. Look at the build scripts for cross-platform open-source tools, and count the occurrences of things like “if(UNIX AND NOT APPLE)”.
    1
  342. If you think your point is not being addressed by any existing distros, feel free to start your own.
    1
  343. I remember Linus Torvalds’ scathing response to the idea that “SVN is CVS done right”. As far as he was concerned, there was no way that CVS could be “done right”.
    1
  344. GIMP already uses GEGL for all its pixel manipulations. This copes seamlessly with a whole range of bit depths. This is why GIMP can natively handle EXR files with 32-bit floating-point pixel components, and Photoshop cannot.
    1
  345. GIMP already uses GEGL for all its pixel manipulations. This copes seamlessly with a whole range of bit depths. This is why GIMP can natively handle EXR files with 32-bit floating-point pixel components, and Photoshop cannot.
    1
  346. It’s an incompatible ABI change. For example, I currently have both libfuse2 and libfuse3-3 packages installed; one has a library called libfuse.so.2, the other has libfuse.so.3. That way client code linked against one version will not accidentally pull in the wrong version, since the file names are different.
    1
  347.  @mudi2000a  Unfortunately, Vista’s networking performance was not the best. There was a long blog post from a Microsoft engineer about the effort they tried to put into minimizing the impact of file copying on network performance. They just couldn’t do both.
    1
  348. Back in my Mac days, Apple would use “d”, “a” and “b” suffixes on version numbers to denote “development”, “alpha” and “beta”. So you might see a version like “1.0d23”, which you would immediately understand as being far from finished, with not even the feature set finalized as yte. The next release, “1.0d24”, might be better. And so on.
    1
  349. And VSCodium is pretty crippled in terms of the addons it will accept, compared to the proprietary version.
    1
  350. The “Unix Wars” was really the story of how the entire proprietary Unix market self-destructed, its fragmentation leaving it open to a takeover by Microsoft’s Windows NT.
    1
  351.  @mskiptr  You can already do that. The API is object-oriented: PDB calls will return a reference to created objects, which you can then pass to other PDB calls. So you can write your entire image manipulation process as a series of script commands, in any supported language.
    1
  352.  @mskiptr  Do it the way I said.
    1
  353.  @mskiptr  But you can’t invoke GIMP operations with those libraries. Oh, you want GIMP to record a script for you as you invoke its operations? I think there are plugins for that.
    1
  354. Should someone buy them all up and shut them down?
    1
  355. I don’t understand this “Unix philosophy” thing. The small bits don’t work without the big ones.
    1
  356.  @larry_the  Everything digital is made up of bits, so I don’t know what point you are making.
    1
  357.  @larry_the  That’s still not saying anything.
    1
  358.  @larry_the  So if everything is made of smaller programs anyway, where is something that doesn’t follow this “Unix philosophy”?
    1
  359. Open source doesn’t magically appear out of thin air, you know. It needs someone to do the work (hint, hint).
    1
  360.  @Kneedragon1962  Think of WSL as an admission of defeat. The camel has been allowed into the tent, it’s only a matter of time before it pushes the Arab out.
    1
  361. I think the one that is not GIMP-specific is supposed to be called “GTK+”.
    1
  362.  @henlofren7321  And what do you do when an official Microsoft patch fails your acceptance testing? You can’t reject it outright: it’s simply going to stay in your pending queue until you give up and let it in.
    1
  363.  @henlofren7321  When was the last time Microsoft was successfully sued over the quality of its software?
    1
  364.  @henlofren7321  If those lawsuits were really successful, Microsoft couldn’t keep getting away with it, could it?
    1
  365. Microsoft: “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody!” 🐧:\>
    1
  366.  @SkyFly19853  Nobody cares about Windows 7 any more. Certainly nobody in the Linux world. Stop living in the past.
    1
  367. The Blender folks did exactly this some years ago, and all credit to them. To compare, I just did ldo@theon:~> ls -d ~/.[!.]* | wc -l 251 ldo@theon:~> ls ~/.config | wc -l 203 I think that shows that a large number of apps have already converted.
    1
  368. Apple pioneered the use of OpenGL for on-screen drawing, but it never really did any of the fun effects.
    1
  369.  @xard64  That’s only very basic stuff. Compiz and its successors do a lot more.
    1
  370.  @xard64  And of all of them, the Linux version was the one that ran well on the least powerful hardware.
    1
  371.  @xard64  Linux KDE 4 was able to run fancy 3D animations and transparency on an Asus Eee 701 PC with a 900MHz uniprocessor Celeron. I know, because I had one.
    1
  372. But when the religion itself decides which idols are “true” and which ones are “false”, that does tend to point up the circularity of the whole belief thing.
    1
  373. Microsoft made patent claims against Linux. Or rather, they made vague patent threats, claiming at one point that Linux was infringing something like 200 of their patents. But they would never publicly say which patents those were. Instead, they strong-armed a few Linux-using companies into making deals to hand over some amount of money -- while keeping all terms, including those all-important patent citations, secret.
    1
  374. That’s called a “warm boot”.
    1
  375. Look for “pylibgimp2”.
    1
  376. Remember they’re not really that “hidden”. On a multiuser system, the existence of a file with a particular name in your home directory betrays the fact that you have used a particular app. That’s a potential invasion of privacy.
    1
  377.  @guy_autordie  You are thinking of “Space Oddity”. Hint: “I Think It's Going To Be a Long, Long Time...”
    1
  378.  @guy_autordie  Of course, I can’t be sure which one of them Mr Musk sent into space ...
    1
  379. At one time, they even tried to unify the look across KDE and GNOME, with a project called “BlueCurve”. Quite controversial at the time, as I recall.
    1
  380. If you impose field-of-use restrictions, then it’s no longer FOSS.
    1
  381. It’s pretty neat, though, that you can pass open files and other process context from the old userland instance to the new one.
    1
  382.  @terrydaktyllus1320  Open Source is all about choice. Some of us want to do things our own way, others just want to concentrate on what they’re good at.
    1
  383.  @terrydaktyllus1320  It’s all about choice. Others want to set up systems that work best for them, you don’t agree, that’s your choice.
    1
  384.  @terrydaktyllus1320  Maybe you should stick to systems that don’t offer you a choice.
    1
  385.  @terrydaktyllus1320  You are the one trying to make it somehow personal and off-topic. All I did was point out the feature that the video was about. Who was the one trying to “hijack” what, again?
    1
  386.  @terrydaktyllus1320  Seems like you completely missed the point of the video. Maybe watch it again, and stop “whining” about being reminded of what this discussion is about.
    1
  387. 4:15 Possibly the first open-source licence?
    1
  388. 2:05 sysfs is basically the API for accessing (and managing) the kernel’s view of your system hardware, and of its control of that hardware.
    1
  389. I see “desktop” as a concept created by the marketing departments of proprietary platforms. They are careful to distinguish “desktop” from “server” by carefully excising anything resembling “server”-style functionality from their “desktop” products, precisely so they can sell the “server” ones at a higher price. Linux tramples all over this distinction. That’s why it is best called a “workstation” platform, with both “desktop” and “server” functionality rolled into one. So when is the year of the Linux “workstation”? I’ve got news for you: Linux has been king of the workstation market since the last of the Unix workstations went extinct. That’s about two decades ago.
    1
  390. There’s no way to force all the Linux distros to adopt it. This is why we have 300-odd Linux distros!
    1
  391.  @replikvltyoutube3727  I wasn’t even talking about PowerShell for Linux, just about the Windows version.
    1
  392. It’s easier than that, you can just redefine the HOME environment variable.
    1
  393.  Dwight A. Spencer  I heard of chroot(8) and chroot(2), but never chroot(3).
    1
  394. They already tried “extinguish”. Remember “Linux is a cancer”? What could they do now that is worse than that?
    1
  395. Remember, the thing with package managers is it’s only the distro maintainers who have to worry about them. Upstream developers just release the source code with the necessary build scripts etc, and leave it at that.
    1
  396. And the brown theme was an integral part of that. They stuck with shades close to that for several releases, only gradually moving to something a bit more purple.
    1
  397. Conflating constructive, peaceful tools with destructive, violent weapons is always going to end badly.
    1
  398. What can Linux do? It can run the entire backbone of the Internet, allowing people to communicate all over the world. It can run your own machines, allowing you to do all the wonderful and useful things that computers can do, for you and your loved ones, without limitations. What can a gun do? All it can do is blow holes in things. And hurt people, like your loved ones.
    1
  399.  @xX_Lol6_Xx  Please, no. What a horrible way to get food, when you contaminate both the food and the environment with toxic heavy metals.
    1
  400. Apple seems to hate GPLv3. That’s why they dropped recent versions of bash. And also why they funded LLVM, so they could get away from GCC.
    1
  401.  @tadeuszmarin5704  From what I was told, “Windows CE” was not based on the Windows NT kernel at all--it was an entirely separate development, now abandoned. It was probably designed from the beginning to have very limited functionality anyway.
    1
  402. When you buy something that expensive, how much more would it add to the cost to think ahead, consider how long that hardware is likely to be in service, and extract some commitment from the vendor regarding reasonable levels of support over that duration of time?
    1
  403. But the FSF is already willing to accept non-copyleft licences as fitting within their definition of “Free”. If that isn’t already “ruinous compromise”, then what is?
    1
  404. If you impose field-of-use restrictions, then it’s no longer free/open source.
    1
  405. The whole “Secure Boot” concept turns out to be a complete waste of time. When security holes are discovered in signed binaries (e.g. the Kaspersky one), they are supposed to go on a revocation list so that Windows PCs will no longer run those binaries. But it turns out Microsoft cannot actually issue such revocations, because those compromised binaries are in such widespread use that it would render large swathes of the entire Windows installed base unusable. Which would likely lead to a murderous customer mob storming the Redmond Bastille ...
    1
  406. What kind of GUI architecture does Plan 9 support?
    1
  407. All my customers’ important servers run on Debian Stable. On my own workstations, Unstable is it.
    1
  408. Buy them out and shut them down!
    1
  409.  @notuxnobux  Actually, it does. The way X works, is every UI widget is a “window”. Typically window decorations are created by wrapping the client-created window inside a window-manager-created window.
    1
  410.  @splitprissm9339  Forwarding whole sessions is exactly what you normally need.
    1
  411. 7:41 I would put “exec” in front of those command invocations. Just to save a process slot.
    1
  412.  @altrogeruvah  Did you support it?
    1
  413.  @altrogeruvah  Maybe it failed for lack of support.
    1
  414. There is a lot of obsession with brand names. Too often, form takes priority over content. But then, that sums up most of the history of GUI design, doesn’t it?
    1
  415. There’s already one or two Raspberry π competitors based on RISC-V, which are very close to it in both price and performance. There’s your “desktop”. Or perhaps more correctly in terms of functionality, your “workstation”.
    1
  416.  @mgord9518  Why, do they tend to maintain their value? Or maybe they deprecate them instead?
    1
  417. It’s actually a misspelling of a very old word: “N’Gome”, which means “Can’t figure out KDE”.
    1