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

  1. 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
  2. 10:41 “This is a certified UNIX® system! I know this!”
    7
  3. 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
  4.  @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
  5.  @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
  6.  @catayloprince4772  The LibreOffice native format is ODF, a.k.a. ISO 26300. Much simpler to understand and easier to implement correctly.
    7
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. And remember, that hardware support comes from the Linux part, not the GNU part.
    6
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. 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
  15. 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
  16. Microsoft’s server business is declining. Linux has already won there.
    6
  17.  @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
  18. 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
  19. They’re not into Discord or Slack or any of those here-today-gone-tomorrow fads, if that’s what you mean.
    5
  20. 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
  21. They have done things like port PowerShell to Linux. But nobody seems to want to use it.
    5
  22. 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
  23. 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
  24. 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
  25. 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
  26. I stopped worrying about this a long time ago. I just use my computer to get things done.
    4
  27. 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
  28. This is why there is the LGPL for libraries.
    4
  29. 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
  30.  @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
  31. It’s the only video editor with an integrated compositor.
    4
  32. 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
  33. Why are you so NT Windows?
    4
  34. 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
  35. A lot of these are just excuses. They can easily triage the bug reports.
    4
  36. My feeling is, if this continues for long enough, the WINE developers will figure out a way to defeat the check.
    4
  37.  @saint-nicholas  If they don’t, somebody else will. And publish a patch for it.
    4
  38. 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
  39. 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
  40. Linux does Mandatory Access Control, which is a non-negotiable requirement in Government-grade security.
    4
  41. 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
  42. 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
  43. Companies too often will repeatedly deny things, and then suddenly admit that they are true.
    3
  44. 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
  45. Another difficulty is, a lot of big companies don’t realize anybody in their organization is using any open-source software.
    3
  46. At least you know which packages to remove to fix things--they came from the problem repo, so just remove those.
    3
  47. 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
  48. 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
  49. 8:01 Or offer the raw data for download somewhere, so people can do their own analyses.
    3
  50. 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