I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Niri is very promising on a ultrawide. Not so good on a 3:2 laptop. I maintain a config to experiment with it but it’s a big commitment to change not just your desktop environment but your whole workflow and then to have different environments on devices with different screen aspect ratios.

Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to work in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.

Waiting for Canonical to up sell proprietary utils features by subscription. Ubuntu’s regular release cycles were brilliant in 2004 when there weren’t a lot of alternatives but why does it still exist?

deleted by creator

They exist. Firefox and chromium are open source. Big companies pay their dev costs but they can be forked. Chromium is a descendent of WebKit which is a descendent of khtml from the KDE project. The engines have been open source for decades It’s the proprietary crap they put on top which is the problem.

It’s a coalition of crazy. It isn’t entirely clear who is going to be in control of what or for how long. It could get very messy.

It’s a bad combo in my opinion. The HDMI forum hates Linux so we mostly use display port. If you need HDMI 2.1 or higher for 8k I don’t know if it will work. It might end up with a really low frame rate. It is a crazy low end graphics card for 8k. That’s a low end 1080p card as far as games go. DRM is a problem with crappy companies like Netflix, so you will probably be watching upscaled standard def pictures. They must want us to pirate.

Deviant Ollam posted an interesting video, This is How a Constitutional Crisis Will Begin about changes happening in prisons and makes an interesting point that the trans community make a convenient target for triggering a constitutional crisis.

You target a small, basically insignificant and harmless group, then ignore any court rulings while the media and public remain silent and disinterested. Its a pathway to uncontested executive power that can then be extended to persecution of other groups.

Arguing for privacy from government feels alarmist, distant and theoretical as long as there is rule of law and a sound participative democracy. But what happens to constitutional guarantees and legal protections if the courts lose their power and independence? Suddenly privacy becomes a very real pragmatic concern. Not only could you be in a targeted group but you could be guilty by association.

Spam, spam, spam

It isn’t relevant to the Linux kernel at all. Even though Torvalds wrote git to support Linux development they operate on a different development model (email, patch sets etc). It is very relevant to the wider ecosystem (Linux distro vs Linux kernel). Most open source software development is hosted on one of these platforms and even non-developers sometimes need to interact with them. Anyone starting a project or looking to share it finds themselves asking the same questions.

I prefer this sort of engagement farming question to the ones asking which laptop to buy or which distro or desktop environment is best. Though it is arguably healthier and more productive for me to be doing almost anything else with my life. I increasingly feel like I am filling out a captcha every time I answer such a question. It feels like something any reasonably competent human could discover trivially hitting a small number of websites and reading. Even the people who cut and pasted low effort LLM responses pretty much nailed most of the facts - arguably more than good enough. What is the point of participating here really?

In my opinion Github in its current incarnation mainly exists to steal the IP of programmers and lock it up in proprietary AI services controlled by Microsoft. It dominates for the same reason Facebook or Youtube dominate. It is the only platform normies know and it benefits from massive network effects. It is US owned and operated which is becoming an issue for lots of people. Github is a proprietary closed source platform. I believe it was originally mostly written in Ruby but they have likely replaced all the performance bottlenecks using other languages. In my opinion their site is a usability nightmare.

Forejo is a fork of Gitea by Codeberg, a community run non-profit from Germany (still a liberal democracy under the rule of law) and hosted in Europe. They provide free hosting for open source projects or it is easy to self host. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and remains active. All those forks are written in the Go language and it requires a single exe, a config file and an sql database to run making it very easy to self host even without containers.

Gitlab is a service like Github or Codeberg that can also be self hosted but it is written in Ruby, a slow and inefficient interpreted language, which like Javascript or Python has lots of crazy fragile run time dependencies. The open source project was originally a work of Dutch and Ukrainian programmers and it was a Dutch company but they took VC money and IPOed and I don’t know that I would assume it is European controlled. Some open source projects like Gnome moved there as it was the main alternative to Github. Can’t recommend vs Gitea/Foejo for self hosting.

For single developers, small groups, arguably all you really need is git and email if you don’t need or want all the extra fluff. That can work even for large projects like the Linux kernel. Sites like github tend to serve as single points of contact for lots of projects. It is their front page, issue tracker, everything which is one hell of a dependency on another company. It has Facebook-ized the code ecosystem. I think it also sort of serves as a linkedn for some people.

Just did a rewatch with daughter. She wanted to watch after seeing the musical episode. Still stands up in my opinion even though we know Joss and some of the cast weren’t perfect.

The Season 6 rapey tech bros were still a very hard watch and skipped an episode or two in that season but hard not to see it as a bit prescient - it was before Gamergate and the right wing radicalisation of young men online. Should have paid more attention. It went a bit over my head first time.

Working through Angel now. Will see how that holds up. Has been a long time between watches. I kind of started House again though so …

Wife can watch unlimited Supernatural and I think she might hold a record for rewatches of Voyager.

Ensemble comedies like UK Ghosts and Community seem popular for rewatching with family. I think that is probably a general theme along with animations. Less serious shows tend to do better I think. Psych and Monk are probably more likely to get a rewatch than a serious procedural.

Prosecution only happens for criminal offences here and copyright infringement would be a civil matter. I have not heard of civil actions against downloaders for years though I may be out of the loop. The notices scare people off and some ISPs might kick you off under their terms of service but they don’t take people to court.

I have never seen a copyright warning. My old, old ISP never forwarded them on principle. And now there are VPNs.

Reply that you work for Meta and Mark said it will be ok.

Can’t relate to the whole listening to oldies radio stuff but listening to new music from fantastic young bands and realizing you are probably never going to another live gig in your life is a bit unsettling. Also realizing you should have learned stuff like musical instruments decades earlier when you had more flexibility and it felt like learning was faster.

I think the ctrl-y vs cmd-shift-z was a Windows vs Mac thing. A lot of commercial gui software originated on Mac including Photoshop (and much of Microsoft Office) and Mac remains popular with the creative crowd. Older Linux gui software used to be weird, either cde/motif stuff or things that looked like they were developed on an Amiga. Keyboard standardization was never a thing with linux - eg emacs and vi.

I believe ctrl-shift-z is standard across many Gnome and KDE apps now. All the ones I could quickly test anyway. Inkscape and Gimp kind of do their own thing but Inkscape definately has ctrl-shift-z showing as the primary redo shortcut for me although it seems to support control y as well. So I think Gimp is just weird as usual. The UI doesn’t conform to the expectations of contemporary Linux users let alone people from other platforms. I would probably just assume Gimp was broken, close it and open Krita instead.

AMD is by far the best choice for foss drivers. Intel might be an option in the future but I have no experience with their new cards. A second option would be good for Linux users but it’s unlikely to be NVIDIA.

Systemd provides a modern user space which fixes a huge number of problems. At first I found it difficult to learn but it had things I needed and I made the effort. I will always be nostalgic about things before systemd because I started using linux in the mid 90s.

I’m not going to throw away my GPU and multi-core CPU and go back to a 386 running dos because multithreaded applications and speculative execution scare me. There is no way to match what modern systems can do by taking old architectures and just adding more gates or faster clock speeds. And there are parallels in software architecture.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a BSD or a non-systemd linux distro if you like. They are still perfectly usable in a lot of situations doing the same stuff people did for years in these systems. If you have a server with a static set of devices that runs a fixed set of services at startup you don’t really need systemd. I still have some systems like that but systemd also handles those cases more efficiently and robustly.

You see these sort of link dumps from people who think vaccines cause autism or that some diet will cure cancer. Whatever the intention behind it I always associate it with a bad faith attempt to fuck with people’s heads by bamboozling them with more information than they can rationally analyze.

Believe what you want but you might want to consider that all the experts working on systemd and using it productively might know their shit.

Not excusing Chinese companies but everyone does the same shit. I bet a lot of US companies that behave the same or worse will be looking for trade barriers to protect their business so their interests will be stoking fear of Chinese competitors. I don’t really give a shit which country is doing it, I am not buying what they are selling.

US companies have a stranglehold on government, education and business and are getting access to my families data despite my personal objections. Far more concerned about that than a Chinese service I have no intention of using.

Deepseek can at least be self hosted if you want AI in your life. I can happily live without it.