Comments by "Jeff Huffman" (@tejing2001) on "DistroTube" channel.

As a culture, we seem to have lost sight of the distinction between "people shouldn't do X" and "we should prevent people from doing X". Even in most cases of the former, the latter still does NOT apply, and trying to do it would send our society into an authoritarian downward spiral. Hopefully we'll rally and find some balance.
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Git-annex is absolutely amazing. You really have only scratched the surface. My personal favorite thing you can do with it is distribute large files intelligently through repos on external drives, aka sneakernet. Each repo keeps track of what other repos have and need during syncs, so you can set the external drive to "need" anything that the other side of the transfer needs but doesn't yet have, and then the sync --content will load exactly what needs to be carried to the other side, automatically. Once it gets the other side, the content will of course be loaded by the target, but it will also be cleared from the external drive, since the target repo now has it, and it no longer meets the criteria.
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@ameynarkhede8264 The issue isn't really with anything that already happened. It's with the plan to increase censorship capability. I'm not exactly convinced by the "just trust us, we'll only use our power for good" argument, no matter who it's coming from.
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@defalt2384 Qutebrowser does use the blink engine at its core, though unlike, say, brave, which is basically degoogled chromium with a few new features, qutebrowser completely rewrote all the high-level code, making it a truly distinct browser even if it still inherits a lot of its website compatibility from chromium. Browsers actually not based at all on chromium or firefox are pretty rare and not very good afaik.
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I resemble this more than I'd like to admit. Got a good laugh out of me.
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The problem is, who gets to decide what's factual and what's disinformation? Any sort of centralized mechanism for doing so is inherently incredibly dangerous, as history has proven time and time again. Censorship is censorship, and even with good intentions, it's a very scary thing. Mozilla is showing no recognition of these issues either, which is a pretty bad sign.
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You missed "poweroff". It's more likely to be what you want than "halt" in most circumstances (It is the same as "reboot -p" though). Also, the sysrq method is actually a slightly more graceful shutdown than just hitting the power button. It at least tries to flush writes to disk and unmount filesystems before shutdown, so if you can remember it, it's worth doing even if you have access to the power button.
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Anyone know of a keyboard-oriented browser (or a browser configurable enough to create a good keyboard-based experience), that's still compatible with extensions for chrome or firefox? I'm using brave with the surfingkeys extension right now, but there are some fundamental limitations to what an extension can do as far as keyboard customization. (for example, surfingkeys key shortcuts don't work while the current tab is still loading, some keys (like ctrl-n) are not capturable by the extension, and I believe some websites override the js code injected by surfingkeys.)
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The unix philosophy needs a bit of translation for modern times. The core principles are making your software components composable, using well-defined, interoperable interfaces between components, and defining the boundaries of components in such a way that each component has a single, easily abstractable purpose. Those core principles are still very relevant, even in the spaces where they aren't applied much right now. The linux kernel is one example, things like blender and web browsers are too. You could build something like blender in such a way the it was essentially just a UI, which made manipulation of underlying software components, which had interoperable interfaces, easier. The linux kernel could also be a LOT more modular than it is, if the infrastructure was designed differently.
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I think the fact that GPLed software can't feasibly be sold actually constitutes a "bug" in the GPL. The explicit allowance of sharing the software should perhaps be limited to only those who have bought a license (this would have to be worded in such a way that redistribution through distro package managers was clearly allowed). The other freedoms the FSF defines could all still be protected in a copyleft manner, and the license could automatically "convert" to full GPL after a set amount of time (initial suggestion: 10 years, though it would probably vary depending on the software). I think it's a reasonable compromise between the freedom of the end user and the need to pay for the development. We could call it something like "user serviceable software." It might catch on among more open-minded commercial software creators. You could also implement license-reminder systems, which, unlike DRM, wouldn't be designed to control what you can do, but just to help prevent accidental violation of the license, by requiring the user to make an actual action signifying that they believe the system is in error and they actually have a license in order to override it. (This would also be important if it was distributed through distro package managers, since users could easily mistake it for free software if they weren't paying attention) Somewhere in this set of ideas I think we can get a solution that actually works for the whole society. Right now, open source software developers are giving their talents away as a kind of charity, and I don't think that's a viable way for software in general to work for the whole society, but we should have a path that is, and is also ethical in regards to how it treats the end user.
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@Deborah Hearne Technically, yes. Realistically, no. The GPL license requires you to allow whoever has a license to make copies and give them to whomever they wish, granting them a license in the process. So basically, pirating is explicitly allowed in the license. Who would pay for what they can legally get for free? Some people actually would, yes, but It's really more like a voluntary donation than a price at that point, so I can't really call it "selling".
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@Deborah Hearne Correct. That's why I said "Technically, yes."
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@Deborah Hearne I'm really not sure how to respond at this point. Repeatedly asserting the same thing doesn't address the points I made about why it's not realistic, but at this point, I doubt continuing the discussion will be fruitful for anyone.
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I know I'm raising a raising a dead thread here, but I've found a good solution to this problem on nixOS (it should also work when using nix + home-manager on a non-nixOS distro): References (most recent first, but the reasoning of why to do this is explained best in the original one) https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/ https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/ https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings I think I prefer having grahamc's approach with snapshots rather than the tmpfs route, since I don't really want to take up system memory, but the idea is this: Delete everything every boot (maybe even more often)... EXCEPT what you have personally decided you want to keep. Using home-manager allows you to declaratively create your static dotfiles from a single central configuration file which you can comment all you like, and follow DRY principles with (it is, in fact, written in a full-fledged programming language), but for the data actually saved and/or manipulated by programs, you can instead add that a file or directory should be redirected to your permanent store. This means that a necessary part of installing and using any piece of software is determining where it saves information, deciding whether you want to save that information, and if so, changing your home-manager configuration to redirect that to your persistant directory, of course with comments to remind you, in your own terms, what program/purpose you're saving it for. Any program that silently adds files to your homedir will just get them obliterated, and so anything that IS there is either something you ran quite recently, or you have a comment about what it's for in your home manager configuration. A nice side effect of this is also that you know your backups work. As long as you back up your persistent area, you're essentially loading from a backup every time you boot. If some state you care about isn't getting backed up, you're going to know it pretty quick.
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You might want to consider using nixos to mitigate this issue. If you want to, you can install a particular package from a specific version of nixpkgs, rather than your normal channel. It will use dependencies from that version of nixpkgs as well, without holding back those same dependencies for the rest of your programs, so you can pick and choose what updates you want for that specific program, try a new version, and if it doesn't work, just go back. It should, at least, always allow you to use a known-working version if you want to.
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It doesn't have to be nixos, for that matter, you could use home-manager on arch, and get the same benefit.
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I never use ls -a, since ls -A is the same, but skips . and .., which are ALWAYS there and thus not useful information.
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Brave has a sync feature, though I don't actually sync much beyond bookmarks, so I don't know how how usable it is for more complicated stuff.
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