In these corporate times we can stay free, share the code, and help our neighbors. Together we can share the joyous spirit of friendship, hacking, and arguing endlessly over which distro is best. In conclusion, Linux provides us with many good things, and should be celebrated.

In Phaedrus, Socrates talks about the invention of writing:
“it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

You used Linux two years before it was released?

I’m interested in reading more about coding java without an IDE, what’s your usual workflow? Do you use maven or gradle or something else? Are there solutions or scripts you use to make up for some functionality of an IDE?

In the same vein, everyone should sew their own clothes, plant and harvest their own food, learn how to medically treat their own injuries, etc?

I’ve noticed a pattern in distrohopping among my linux using friends. Many started with ubuntu back in the day, then switched to a less preconfigured distro like arch, gentoo, etc. You learn a lot being forced to tinker and fix things. But after that, many seem to have landed on distros of the debian or fedora kind, because they want to get actual work done and you can make any distro do almost anything anyway.

I don’t know about morality, but my view is that it’s part of the deal with free software: users can do what they want with it. If you willingly make your software free, that’s what you signed up for. In return, the devs have no obligations to listen to users or do anything they don’t want. If they only want to fix bugs in the flatpak, fine, that’s their choice. It’s their software, we’re all free to work on or use it as we want.

Plan9 would have some opinions about that.

It comes with both fvwm and cwm, and you can install all the usual ones or a full desktop environment. Personally I like cwm in the minimalist end and xfce for more of a full desktop, but it’s all just preferences. Which one do you like in Linux?

OpenBSD is surprisingly good as a desktop, as long as you don’t need something that needs shoehorning in or some fancy filesystem. But if you use it as intended, it’s good. Like, there’s no linux compatibility, no proprietary nvidia drivers, etc. You probably want to switch away from the default window manager though unless you think perfection was reached in the early 90s.

This is why my preferred way of communicating is to sit in darkness and construct one-time pad ciphers which I then put in a new safe that I don’t have the combination to unlock and is welded shut and dropped into the ocean. But other than that I like to use grapheneOS and matrix. I can’t be sure it’s 100% private, but I am 100% sure that facebook isn’t private, so I’d rather use matrix.

I’m at my age now and I’m just starting programming. My plan is to never do it for money, only because I want to as a hobby.

I just feel that it’s technically wrong to call it x64. x86 is the architecture. The x belongs there, so x86-64 makes more sense, but not “x64”. It’s a marketing term, but it still bothers me.

Isn’t “x64” still an x86 architecture?

Ok good point, maybe the kids today never heard Jokkmokks-Jocke?

How about Jokkmokk?

The picture called “Upstream and Prism programs” has the old logotypes for Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, and the old garamond version of the google logo, they must have been doing this for a while.

Where I work, the fax was a way to ensure that information could be sent in multiple ways, if one way would fail. In the medical field (at least where I live) we must have systems with backup systems in a few layers. We have a nice digital medical chart system, and I still have to print out many things and put in a binder that no one ever reads. Because the internet could stop working, or electricity could fail. We even have routines for which types of pen and paper can be used if we need to write things by hand while electricity is gone.

Does ex(1) count as specialized/higher ed? On BSD systems I just use standard ed(1).

If you don’t mind me asking, how is this affecting you? How do you feel about it?