the number of times i’ve seen a scratched lib turn fash surprised me… at first.

If Trump is walking the “way way worse” path on Palestine it’s only because Biden laid the path down for him in the first place.

hey man remember when the democrats were in the house and senate and obama was president and they dismantled ACORN? haha damn that’s wild, bro.

I use Bazzite on my Steam Deck because I wanted to get LUKS encryption for the hard drive (and otherwise do not wish to manually maintain the computer). I cannot take what is effectively a general purpose PC out and about without encryption. Especially not with the current political climate in my country (USA).

From dealing with SteamOS, I am already familiar enough with how to set up a full dev environment on the immutable distros. So while that is not a challenge for me, it is still a hassle to deal with. I’d rather just directly install my libraries and binaries rather than do workarounds in containers (and then remember the containers).

I think we’ll truly be in the immutable desktop distro future when I can do something like install the base distro image AND simply dnf install something (e.g. nvidia-vaapi-driver or gcc) on top without having to layer it with rpm-ostree. That is, my dnf installs should transparently live on top of the base distro, and that way my base system will never break even if something on top of it does. The problem with layering with rpm-ostree is you are running the risk of a future failed upgrade. It would be like if your MacBook said “sorry, you installed a weird XCode library and therefore we cannot upgrade the OS” – and that should obviously never happen. Restoring my computer to a base state could be as simple as dnf remove * or a GUI option to “Revert to base + keep user files” and that should leave me with a functioning basic system.

Anyway, even though I only use an immutable distro on one device I do see it as the future of Linux desktop computing. I am not up-to-date with the development efforts, but I think we’ll eventually reach a day when using and configuring it, even for advanced users, will be no more difficult than traditional distros. Maybe by 2030 that will be the case.

I made my remarks w.r.t. rpm-ostree and the Fedora family of distros because that’s what I use. Obviously the other immutable distros have their own versions of these tools and their own versions of solving the problems related to them.

I think 10 years ago this would’ve been unpopular, but today maybe not so much:

systemd is great software. I don’t use distros that refuse to ship it. Especially the init system. Thanks, Lennart!

Between Steam promoting Linux and GOG promoting DRM-free software, I will never purchase from another storefront that doesn’t even pretend to do something good for the broader community (Origin, Uplay, Microsoft Battle.Net, iOS App Store, etc).

Preach!

When I was in unspecified foreign country I went to a graveyard with my family. It was very different in that the bodies were buried basically right next to each other and you basically just walk over the bodies of the interred to get to where you want to go.

It was a bit distinct from how we do it in America where, much like our suburban houses, you have to have a pointless giant green lawn surrounding where the body is buried.

Just yesterday I asked Llama 3.3 70B params how to do something. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be able to tell me the right command to run because I knew beforehand I was asking it something really obscure about how to use tar. I gave it all the relevant details. Imagine my surprise when it… told me the blatantly wrong thing. It even invented useless ways of running the command incorrectly.

The fact that it was made into a movie as well…

Braver than the troops.

After learning about the absurdity of copyright law in the USA I’m not really convinced or compelled to give a cent to these companies. It’s not just paying for the content. It’s giving these big corporations money so that they can lobby for laws that are against the interests of most people.

Italy seems to be leading the way to an even more bleak future. “Bleak future” seems to really be the order of the day, huh?

There is another issue on their tracker that was opened many years ago about relicensing to GPL, but it kind of became one of those things where a bunch of people came in and discussed it back and forth to death with no resolution.

I remember the lead developer of the Rust version of Coreutils gave a talk about the project once and he addressed the licensing question by essentially saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t care about this. So I just picked one.” You’d think someone so involved with open source as that guy (seriously, he has a hugely impressive pedigree) would care, or would at least give a justification.

The rust coreutils project choosing the MIT license is just another gambit to allow something like android or chromeos happen to gnu+linux, where all of the userland gets replaced by proprietary junk.

And yet that’s a popularly welcomed approach, for some reason. Just look at the number of thumbs down this has. https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781

For small programs the FSF/GNU even suggests considering not using the GPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

https://text.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

the order is actually Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

You’re right. I wasn’t familiar with rawtherapee but just seeing that home page immediately clued me into the fact that it was some kind of image program. Didn’t even need to read a single word.

Come to think of it, there have been a number of times where I’ve wondered about what a foss project does/looks like and I think a single screenshot would’ve just been a big help in understanding how it behaves.

I would have to choose GIMP (in spite of this awful name) because that page loaded without javascript and the photoshop page requires me to enable javascript.

I know I’m being a bit facetious, here, but… Adobe can afford to hire full time front end devs and designers. FOSS projects can’t really compete with Adobe’s investors.

I would love decent RISC-V hardware