Iridiumkoivu

First time?

Guys, there’s now a non-zero chance that we will see a proper official Halo game running on top of a Quake 3 Arena derived game engine within our life-time. Childhood fantasy might become real. “:D”

Amen.

Hmmm... They talk about inability to reach out to people at Twitter... but isn't this more about market correction? I often thought that EFF on Twitter was artificially boosted because they were often visible in contexts that really had nothing to do with their core mission. Current Twitter management did state afaik and understand to stop this kind of thing from happening.

So of course it probably feels bad from EFF's perspective that they are no longer receiving the "50 to 100 million impressions a month" and instead get more realistic "2 million views" per post. Which I'd assume is probably better reflection of the natural size of their audience.

Even if this comparison is wrong... Another way to think about this is The GNU/Linux desktop marketshare. For a long-time it was some fraction of a 1% of users. Those users cared about their digital rights (among other things) more than the inconveniences it caused them. And that group is a really small faction of the whole desktop market.

I'm not saying EFF's message isn't important. But I doubt that it ever was interesting enough to naturally receive "50 to 100 million impressions a month" even back in 2018.

The cancer is spreading...

Interesting. I wonder what happened to Étoilé which was supposed to fill this niche and was chucking along fine until about 2015 or so. It got pretty far too with the underlying components.

Yeah, that’s a good one. I also thought that he had passed away because of his age and how the title was not very informative.

( ;^^)b

To me this seems to be true. From what I’ve seen CoCs are overwhelmingly used as a tool to enforce and reinforce a certain kind of ideological point of view.

As a result of this typically CoCs are used to block contributions or block contributors from projects where the people enforcing the CoC they wrote wield it as a weapon against men whose perceived personal politics they disagree with. And typically rumours are enough to trigger CoC proceedings against them.

Not cool.

I agree with this sentiment.

Btrfs has destroyed itself on my testing/lab machines three times during last two years up to point where recovery wasn’t possible. Metadata corruption being main issue (or that’s how it looks like to me at least).

As of now I trust BCacheFS way more. I’ve given it roughly the same time to prove itself as Btrfs too. BCacheFS has issues but so far I’ve managed to resolve them without major data loss.

Please note that I currently use ext4 in all ”really important” desktop/laptop installations and OpenZFS in my server. Performance being the main concern for desktop and reliability for server.

This very much my experience as well with current Twitter/X. I think I can at least express myself without having to ponder if the service itself will ban me for saying that ”the king has no clothes on”.

I finally see on my timeline art and music I like. Not to mention the interesting technology-related discussions.

It’s not all sunshine but things are clearly better with a wider range of opinions being present on my timeline and more variety in content. I just wish I could better filter foreign (esp. USA & UK) political content out of my feed.

Wait for the sales figures of the next Metal Gear and PES games. They're likely going to be absolutely awful.

MGS5 was worked by Kojima and even with all the trouble with Konami, people wanted to show support for Kojima. Gamers did discuss about boycotting the game but since it would have been a disservice for both Kojima and gamers that boycott didn't materialise.

However when Konami for example removed "A Hideo Kojima Game" text from the MGS5 there was a protest by gamers to get it back there.

I agree with your comment. We have to keep in mind that "communism" is a word for utopian society (e.g. no state, no "money", no classes, and common ownership over the means of production) which is the end goal of "socialists" stemming from "Marxism" which is a socio-economic analysis of class relations. The core of "socialism" is the question about ownership of the means of production (as explained by Marx).

The chief reason for why free and open source software isn't "communism" in any sense of the package of things that word contains is that in practise it almost always leads to a very controlled extreme planned centralised collectivist systems. Free and open software development and communities on the other hand are based on extremely individualistic non-centralised non-planned and non-governed system.

If free and open software was inherently "Communist" or "Marxist", then we'd have "ONE FREE OS, ONE FREE DESKTOP, AND ONE FREE DESIGN". Instead we have several free software operating systems, dozens of competing desktop environments, and uncountable number of designs for every individual taste. If you want to know more about this point of view, I recommend you read the "Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek.

It's true that in free and open source software we people share the code and tools (i.e. the means of production) to some degree. However we people still inherently govern the domains of our work and we get rewarded for the work that gets done. Instead of "money", hackers often get rewarded e.g. by "fame". Eric S. Raymond explains quite well in his book Cathedral and the Bazaar how this works and in great detail too.

But most importantly there is no central planner which would dictate how things work and coordinate the operations. If some guy doesn't like how a free and open software project is being developed, he can fork the fuck out of it and create a competing project. And this makes it sound more like anarcho-capitalism than anything else. We don't have "centralised state" that would set the framework where code is allowed to happen and "market of ideas" operates. This fits into agenda of our current corporatist society quite well and even companies which are in direct competition can benefit from it pouring resources to projects of mutual interest.

It's true that when we inspect how free and open software projects are developed, we at times counter cases of central-planner but often we notice that this entity is restricted by the pressure from the users and the fear of having project forked and lost "fame" / "reputation". This is basically why "dictators" that lead their projects aren't sole rulers of their domains. Most commonly we see governing bodies of few selected individuals aka. oligarchies that manage the free and open software project.

What do you think of Propel?

I want to add that if person wants a very OS X like desktop for GNU/Linux then Étoilé DE is very much the thing.

http://etoileos.com/etoile/

Only downside is that it isn't very mature yet. And in fact is in a need of developers. Alternative to Étoilé is the Window Maker with GNUStep and GWorkspace but it isn't everybody's cup of tea.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/

Sounds like you want Debian or Debian-based distribution. I recommend you'd try vanilla Debian first because it gives you only what you want when you want it. No extra BS.

If you did like older OS X (10.6) you'd probably want to at least try Elementary OS which is essentially a Ubuntu on steroids and without the Canonical's BS trying to attain the polish of OS X. I would stay away from Mint as much as possible because it's not well optimised distribution in my opinion.

Even if you choose Ubuntu, you can always replace the complete desktop with something else. For example you can have Ubuntu without Unity. In fact many people do run Ubuntu with Gnome 3, KDE 4, Enlightenment e17, XFCE, CDE, or something else.

If Linux isn't your thing you probably might want to also check out what FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) camp has to offer. It might be little bit more familiar for you. And if you really want, you could run Darwin with XNU kernel and have a free and open source system which is made out of the same blocks that form the core of the OS X.

iTerm is pretty handy on OS X. There are lots of terminal applications out there for GNU/Linux. E.g. Gnome Terminal is pretty damn good and does wrap the text. But that doesn't mean it's the only one out there.

As for Alfred... there are several different similar "Quicksilver" replacements. I'd suggest that you check Gnome-Do. But again it's not the only one out there. You might also find it funny and useful to use something like Guake Terminal which is Quake's console stylish terminal that you can access by pressing tilde.

I'm giving you Gnome programs but KDE has its own completely equivalent programs too.

If you're new to GNU/Linux you probably want to start with KDE or XFCE. (Disclaimer: I'm using XFCE because it's flexible and small.) You probably might find the kind of polish OS X offers in Gnome 3 but it requires quite a bit of tuning to "feel good" as a DE.