antisol

And it's compatible with winamp skins, so you can download the winamp base skin ( https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2... ) and have it look exactly like winamp.

  > I wish music had not move to stream

Nobody is forcing you to use streaming music services, you know. I have never used any of them.

If it phones home without explicitly asking the user for permission in advance, it's spyware.

  > I don't see why

I'll take a stab at this, setting aside all the arguments I could make about software freedom, etc etc (and there's lots of those).

Regardless of which distro you use or how into free software you are, there's a very simple truth: the more Linux users there are, the more people will develop software for Linux. More software supporting Linux == better.

This applies both to proprietary software that people might want (e.g I'd kill for a Linux-native version of FL studio, the only thing I use wine for these days), and also for FLOSS software (more Linux users -> more exposure to FLOSS ideals -> more converts -> more FLOSS software).

Having the ecosystem grow is a good thing.

No, we're not. Sorry, my bad.

It would seem I didn't read your post properly, I think I must have just been tired or something. I took "who is forced to use it" as a statement (i.e "I'm a user who is forced to use it") rather than a question. Reading it again now when I'm awake it makes a lot more sense!

  > 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer

That, or maybe they've just never really tried the whole "I'll start from scratch and get it right this time" thing and discovered for themselves how misguided it is.

It's also really easy to tell yourself "but this time I'll get it right!". I'm still guilty of believing it sometimes.

  > But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?

Or perhaps simple myopia and lack of long term planning? I don't know.

I feel like it's probably easy in a project like this to lose sight of what regular users want, or to feel like you know better and so should be able to dictate to them what they should want. And because you've had your head buried in the project for a decade, dealing only with team members who share all the same opinions, you're shocked when people don't find "but if you ever get a HDR monitor it might be marginally better" to be a compelling reason to have to re-write all the scripts they've been building and relying on for 20 years.

  > I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.

Yeah you might be right. I don't have anything to back up my opinion, I was really just trying not to assume they're stupid. And I feel like I have run into people like this.

Because if you name it something different it's harder to do the "extinguish" step of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

Oh yeah, let's echo passwords on-screen! Genius! What could possibly go wrong?

I expect there's an audience selection bias at work: Fewer greybeards and more spiky haired teens reading HN.

I think it's an awful idea. Apart from making things less secure it also makes sudo's UX inconsistent with most of the other coreutils. Luckily, I don't plan on doing any more ubuntu installs.

Pulseaudio was, is, and always will be trash.

The ALSA drivers for all the creative labs cards worked perfectly well. I never had any issues at all under ALSA, or under OSS before that.

I've had tons of issues with audio bugs once pulseaudio was introduced. To this day the most common solution to any audio issue I see is `pkill -9 pulseaudio`. And it solves the problem about 99% of the time.

It also introduced fun new audio bugs and indeterminate latency. Which still haven't gone away entirely in 2026. To such an extent that any time I have an audio issue, I reflexively `pkill -9 pulseaudio` and about 99% of the time the problem just vanishes.

On the first machine where I had pulseaudio foisted on me - an 800mhz single core Duron - pulseaudio used literally 20% of my CPU time...

...At idle. When no audio was playing...

...To do software audio mixing which my creative labs audio hardware was capable of doing better and for free.

When I filed an issue with the pulseaudio people, saying "hey, you're wasting 20% of my CPU time at idle when no audio is playing because you're ignoring the fact that I have superior hardware that can do audio mixing for free", they closed the issue saying that pulseaudio wasn't meant to be used in situations where you have dedicated hardware for audio mixing.

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"

Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities

Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!

Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:

"I want to make some incompatible changes in my thing that is being widely used by (say) thousands or millions of people. I could spend a bunch of time ensuring I'm backwards compatible as much as possible, or doing a compatibility layer which would make the transition seamless for most, but that's not sexy work, and it would be something I would have to maintain (also not sexy), and it would take me (let's say) 1000 hours to do. Instead, I'll just insist that each and every one of those thousands/millions of people put (say) 100 hours each into adapting to what I want to do"

It's disrespectful of your users. It devalues their time. It says that your (say) 1000 hours is more valuable than (say) a million people putting in (say) 100 hours each. And it's inefficient - wasting the time of many to save the time of a few.

It also undermines their trust in you: if you're willing to force them to spend a bunch of time re-writing something that already works just to suit your whims, what's to say you won't do it again next year when you have a newer and even shinier whim?

Now someone will jump in to argue about how "FOSS developers are volunteers, they do it for free, you can't expect them to do the boring stuff". Which is false, false, and false: You'll find that for a large number of these projects (like say gnome and wayland) the core developers are indeed professionals who are paid (by e.g redhat) to work on it, even if they started off as volunteers. And the boring stuff is part of the job, too, otherwise don't call yourself a software engineer.

If you're working on a widely-used piece of software, then the users should be your god.

  > They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11

See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.

Davinci resolve has had native Linux support for like a decade now.

Isn't it interesting how perspectives differ?

See, I'd argue that the "nobody is forcing you" rhetoric, spoken out loud and with a straight face while vendors drop support for decades-old, stable, and well-established standards in favour of immature, incompatible, broken new shininess, is an extremely dated argument strategy.

Aah, this old thing. Pops up every decade or so.

Reminds me of the good old "Falsehoods programmers believe about time": https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Not on the same IP at the same time, but you could always add a second IP for ssh. Just configure sshd to only listen on one IP and <webserver> to listen on the other.

When your firewall guys "block" ssh (or anything else), all you need to do is run your ssh server on port 443 and then `ssh -p 443 user@host`.

Running on 443 means it will blend in with https traffic, making it much more difficult for them to detect and block (I've never actually seen anywhere that can detect/block it - you'd need to be doing deep packet inspection on encrypted traffic) :)

Yeah I discovered ~? a while back and had similar concerns, so I added:

  alias ssh="echo 'dont forget: ~? for SSH escapes!'; /usr/bin/ssh "

into my .bashrc

yeah it sounds like your environment is doing some weird mangling of the encoding. Maybe consider adding an 'alias man="man -E ascii"' into your .bashrc

You might also consider seeing if it's any different in WSL. Or you could, you know, just use Linux ;P

Why are you calling it "AI" if it can't even parse a goddamn man page?

The first one which immediately springs to mind: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-08/optus-sued-by-privacy...

I'm sure a search engine could help you find other examples.

  > But then again people today will also pipe curl to bash

OMG! I'm not alone! Thank you!

  > Security doesn't matter if the competitors' technology is so much better that nobody is buying yours.

This is true right up until the moment their entire database is available as a torrent.

    Listen carefully: OpenClaw is basically a real person you have hired, whose capabilities are vast and fast — in ways both good and potentially bad. But you’ve hired it in the absence of a resume or behavioral background check results. 

...Except that a human is culpable and subject to consequences when they directly disobey instructions in a way that causes damage, particularly if you give them repeated direct instructions to "stop what you are doing".

And also, when it says "You're absolutely right! I disobeyed your direct instructions causing irreparable damage, so sorry, that totes won't happen again, pinky promise!", those are just some words, not actually a meaningful apology or promise to not disobey future instructions.

Personally, I question the usefulness of an AI assistant that can't even be trusted to add an entry to my calendar.

    you withhold and limit access to your devices, your account credentials, and even its own full account permissions, from the start, to the same extent that you would withhold such access from a new hire.

No, like I pointed out, a new hire has signed an employment agreement filled with legalese and is subject to legal ramifications if they delete all my emails while I'm screaming "stop what you are doing!". And if they say "oh, sorry, I totally misunderstood your instructions, that won't happen again" and then do it again, they're committing a crime.

What's the point of hiring a personal assistant who is incapable of sending email? Isn't that precisely what you hire a PA to do?

    Would you let a human being with the aforementioned characteristics — brilliant and capable, but lacking a resume or behavioral background check results — directly use your personal computer or your work computer?

No. And I also wouldn't hire that person as a PA.

This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000.

* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.

it's possible one of those emails might have been from me ;)

Cool site! I especially like the list of RFCs.

Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)

Yeah audacious is where it's at. I've never understood why anybody would want to use an audio player that doesn't look like winamp. I even use (a lightly modified version of) the original winamp 2 skin: https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2...

Honorable mention to qmmp, too.

My biggest problem (of many) with client side decorations is that now when your program crashes, you can't just hit the close button to have the window manager kill it, because the process responsible for drawing and responding to the close button has crashed.

The trick is to avoid software using the newer gtk versions.