True. The Universe is way too big, both in terms of time and in space, and the chances for a civilization to form are low enough for it to make it extremely unlikely that we would be close enough either in time or in space to be able to notice each other. We also often assume that intelligent life, once it sprouts, it will adapt and survive forever… when most likely we would only be able to survive for a very short interval in the life of our own star (which on itself is a glimpse in the span of the Universe). If we don’t destroy ourselves first while playing with our own technology.

This is also one of my gripes with the theory about “we are most likely in a simulation”… one of the assumptions it relies on is that it’s possible for a civilization to last long enough to be able to develop the technology to simulate a reality like ours.

the OS community found -often painful- ways to deal with excentric or even toxic and erratic developers.

Do you have an example? I’m honestly not sure what you are referring to here. And I’ve been around for a while.

100%

JSON is not the optimal solution for either humans nor for machines… it’s a compromise in-between that is more complex to parse than most binary alternatives (and even some text-based ones, if the data can be represented in CSV tables for example), while also often requiring post-processing through beautifiers and similar to be able to visualize it cleanly for humans.

There are situations where it’s the format that makes the most sense… like in the web, where you are already working with javascript anyway. But it’s not a golden bullet to use everywhere.

Yes, me too. This also solves 2 problems in 1 shot, since I often want to sync / backup other contents between devices too, so it’s perfect, specially for those of us with a NAS at home.

Thanks! I’ll try with nofail and see if the lockups stop!

Another thing to look out for: SDCards or USB flash drives that might randomly fail to “spin up” and hang, unplugging those helps.

Honestly, that could be it now that you mention it… I have had for a while an external hard drive plugged in that I’ve used for some backups.

The thing is that this would mean you also need to list the non-free projects that you are looking an alternative for (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to map them to their free software equivalents). And in order to not repeat the same lists, you will end up also having to list equivalents between closed source software (since the alternatives to Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop are likely gonna be the same).

This essentially would make it a subset of existing places like https://alternativeto.net/ where you can find alternatives to a software and filter to only show the alternatives that are open source.

That’s actually a good idea. A very simple “click the frog” captcha might be solvable by an AI but it would work as a way to make it more expensive for crawlers without wasting compute resources (energy!) on the user or slowing down old devices to a crawl. So in some ways it could be a better alternative to Anubis.

I’ve also wanted to try out Guix for a while… part of the reason I’m leaving a comment is just so I can recheck these posts later :P

But when I do I for sure will start out from nonguix because I’m quite confident that my hardware won’t be supported (I even have a recently purchased Wifi 7 card that relies on ath12k module that I’m quite sure won’t be in the official Guix repo… maybe I’d even need to compile it myself…)

I see in the nonguix readme that there’s a way to generate an iso that includes already a nonguix kernel, so I’ll have a look at that.

It even looks like you can create a writeable image to run from a USB thumbdrive, which looks very interesting, I gotta try that!

guix system image --image-size=7.2GiB /path/to/this/channel/nongnu/system/install.scm
dd if=/path/to/disk-image of=/dev/sdb-or-whichever-drive-is-usb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

I’ve been burnt by Arch before which is what has got me into exploring other distros. I might ultimately end up again in Arch like you, who knows, but it looks like the way Guix works is well suited for hosting your own repo too… I think I’ve seen before someone hosting their own Guix repo in github, including also a bunch of configuration for their system, which got me curious.

Like many things, unfortunately, much of computing is run on feelings, tradition, and group loyalties, when it should use facts, evidence, and hard numbers.

So true…

Though I’d say “feelings” is ultimately what always determines the objective… but the means to reach that objective should always be based on facts, evidence and hard numbers. Not tradition nor group loyalties (nor whether any particular group “betrays” any particular preconception we might have had of them).

I honestly couldn’t care less what the management of Mozilla thinks… I only care about the actions they take that affect the software I use. I agree that we’re still better off with Firefox. The alternatives at the moment are either worse, lacking or counterproductive to the development of their common base.

I’m keeping my eye on the likes of qutebrowser and ladybird (I would have added netsurf too, but I’ve been waiting on that one to catch up to the level that I’d need for far too long to have any hopes).

Is the data and public keys being replicated in the communication between instances? it’s not made clear how the federation actually works, because “enabling users on different servers to share data with end-to-end encryption” (from https://foks.pub/) is something all services with TLS / HTTPS support already do…

Also… one big plus for the OpenPGP HKP protocol is that technically you can self-host your own key in a static HTTPS server with predefined responses and be able to have it interact with other servers and clients without issue. I’m expecting the more complex nature of FOKS might make self-hosting in this way difficult. I’d rather minimize the dynamic services I expose to the outside publicly if I’m self hosting.

If that approach is enough then tail -f /var/log/* could work too with multiple files, it’ll “follow” all the files and display only new lines.

I feel that generally, when the issue is that the person is an arse, then the complaints are often not about the software. You might see people campaigning to boicot the software out of spite, but they won’t give you a technical reason, other than them not wanting the creator to get any credit for it.

When the complaints are about discrepancies in the way the software is designed (like it was with systemd), there’s no reason to expect the person to be an arse. Though him not being an arse does not make the criticism about his software invalid… in the same way as him being an arse would not have made the software technically worthless. Don’t fall for the ad-hominem.

I don’t know why they are downvoting you, it’s true. I’m dealing with this kind of problem currently… sometimes the boot lasts forever to the point that I have to use AltGr+SysRq commands to force kill everything… other times it simply boots as normal. It’s not consistent at all.

At least before with the old init it was relatively simple to dig into the scripts and make changes to them… I feel now with systemd it’s a lot more opaque and harder to deal with. I wouldn’t even know how to approach the problem, systemd-analyze blame does not help, since the times I actually get to boot look normal. But I do believe it must have to do with the mountpoints because often they are what takes the longest. Any advice on what should I do would be welcome.

Also, I have a separate Bazzite install in my living room TV, and while that one does not get locked, sometimes NetworkManager simply is not running after boot… I got fed up to the point that I wrote a workaround by creating a rc.local script to have it run, so I can have it available reliably when the system starts (that fixed it… though some cifs mountpoints often do not get mounted… so I’m considering adding the mount command to the same rc.local script too…).

In case someone somehow didn’t know yet: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

I feel we are gonna need to reach at least that 1.4M with all the companies being against it and actively lobbying. I bet they they are gonna be extremely nitpicky with the signatures to invalidate as many as possible.

Or not buying any new Ubisoft game that requires online. I don’t want to buy something that isn’t gonna last.

What qualifies as “expert” setting can be very divisive… for me, it would be removing this menu entirely. Or even switching from KDE to sway or similar ^^U

But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful. It helps finding the category the app you just installed belongs to. If you install an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before): which category should it be at? games? education? development? graphics?

How does this give incentive for that?

My understanding is that this only happens in newly installed apps, not recently updates ones. They are only highlighted because the user installed them, not because the developer did anything.

It’s a screenshot of the application launcher, the menu to launch apps already installed, not the software store.

It’s more about which category a particular specific software belongs. If a kid installs an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before). Which category should it be? games? education? development? graphics?

I personally don’t use this kind of menus with categories, I prefer dmenu style launchers where you type to search what you need. But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful.

You are mixing different ideas of freedom. Software freedom is not the same as freedom of choice of software.

You don’t need Linux to have choices of what software to use, you have that in most (all?) proprietary systems, in some you might even have more choices than in Linux… even if it includes proprietary software.

This is analogous to how being a free person (not a slave) is not the same as having freedom to choose who to work for, even if some of them are slavers (ie. having freedom to choose your master).

Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.

What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn’t really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there’s no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.

But there’s no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.