gary_0

A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea).

The explicit support for Linux is the main reason I bought a Framework (which looked slightly more attractive to me than System76).

Douglas Adams was bang on about how comedically unhelpful advanced technology was going to be. Every ridiculously convoluted user interface and neurotic computer he thought up (or worse) is imminently going to be our daily life.

I wonder if this move has anything to do with SATA SSDs being a common upgrade for older PCs, but those will just go in the trash now that Windows 10 is EOL and Windows 11 will refuse to run on most of them? (I assume only a small percentage will be switched to Linux instead.)

I've been using lazygit [https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit] which is a friendly TUI that makes selecting which lines to commit relatively painless. As a heavy user of hunk-by-hunk or line-by-line commits, I used to use tortoisehg, but on my current distro its showing some bitrot, so I decided to try something else.

I'm in a daylit room on a laptop screen in dark mode. Some of the text was literally invisible. If the site's owner is reading this, you should fix that.

If it had Ethernet ports I'd be tempted to just use my own wifi router and put the ISP's Trojan horse in a Faraday cage. All ISP-controlled hardware should be treated as just another untrusted WAN hop.

While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

Or you could patch the executable on disk or in memory, or probably some other hacks I'm not thinking of. I think he means that there's no Windows API or "proper" way to do it, not that it's literally impossible (it's running on a general-purpose computer, after all).

And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".

The nanny-state control freaks used "think of the children" so often over the years that it became a meme, and yet here we are. What a workhorse!

This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.

On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.

I mean, they kind of are? Obviously they can't set it to a million dollars a month, but where's the ceiling? Five hundred? A thousand? Who knows? And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?

They keep getting away with it, and nobody has any idea when the buck will finally stop.

They can set whatever price they want. Most customers have no choice but to pay; there is no competitor with anything approaching full compatibility or a similar feature set.

Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.

Maybe it's a typo and it's 1.6W.

MBAs got to make deals and lawyers got to file lawsuits. Everyone else got to give them money. God bless the bureaucracy.

Yeah, that's the one! And hmm, it's interesting that there's more than one video out there going "look how fast old computers were from a user standpoint". They've really been boiling the frog when it comes to terrible UX over the past 20 years.

Given the refinements to the hardware, the modern scale of manufacturing and accessible market, and the sheer amount of engineering manpower a tech company can bring to bear nowadays, you'd think standards would have risen into the stratosphere, but instead the tech consumer is cowed into accepting slow, buggy, abusive, invasive trash.

> Use Linux/KDE

I do. It's not without its problems but currently it's the least bad solution.

> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.

Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com they're usually quite responsive about banning obvious bot accounts.

> a nice DE that would embrace regular people

Then you want something that directly copies Windows. Gnome doesn't do that; it very much does its own thing, which confuses regular people who typically just want an unenshittified Windows.

I generously assume they simply considered a mechanism to grant permissions to be out of scope of the original spec, a merely horrific error and disastrous design flaw. If they were instead completely ignorant to the existence of screen recording, password managers, screen readers, and so on... inconceivable idiocy. Either way, as long as something like Wayland can happen, Windows has nothing to fear from Linux.

While Wayland has kind of been a disaster I disagree with your premise.

> 1. Security

Linux (and Unix before it) has always had security mechanisms built in. File permissions, setuid bits, namespaces. Any old program shouldn't be able to access /etc/passwd, and likewise the `<input type="password">` in my browser should be protected. Wayland's problem isn't that it tried to add security, but that the design and development process went horrifically wrong so that 17 years after the first release, people still have trouble with screen sharing.

> 2. Performance

The client-server model is obsolete and unsupported by modern applications (and nowadays there are easier ways to do remote GUI access) and keeping it was just a big pile of tech debt.

The problem wasn't that Wayland tried to fix things, it's that the process took 17 years and still isn't finished or particularly successful. My uneducated guess at why Wayland failed to succeed is that it went for extreme modularity and refused to say (back in like 2009) "Here's the security mechanism everyone has to use to take screenshots, etc. If this breaks your spacebar heater, sucks to be you." Rather than just define a single API where 99% of graphical applications and desktop utilities can do the sorts of things they already do on Windows and MacOS, and call it 1.0, instead they built a sprawling monument to bikeshedding and over-engineering.

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it

1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.

2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.

The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.

I think of anarchy as a theoretical end state, where power is perfectly distributed among each individual, but that this is less of an actually achievable condition and more of a direction to head in (and away from monarchy, where power is completely centralized).

Interesting thought. "Nerds as advocates" is how Firefox rose to prominence, and later giving the nerds the finger contributed to its downfall, IMO.

Another nice thing about the Pi is that you know for sure there won't be any major Linux issues; the official distro is tested for that hardware and that hardware alone. I'm assuming the same will apply for Linux on the Steam Machine, whereas most of the time when I install Linux on a random PC, I have to debug some issue with audio/networking/video (which is less common these days, but I guess I'm unlucky).

Speaking of which, I recently bought a Ryzen Framework laptop assuming the recommended Linux distro would run smoothly, but unfortunately I hit a few glitches, including a really annoying amdgpu bug that keeps making the screen flicker. I might have to mess with kernel boot parameters. Disappointing.

Since the Steam Machine is meant as a consumer product, hopefully it will run Linux solidly, and that's a big plus for me. I wouldn't touch Windows with a 10 foot pole these days.

Doesn't Linux make similar demands of the compiler, just not for bitfields? And I seem to recall Linus having some choice words for the C Standard's tendency over the years to expand the domain of undefined behavior. I don't think the Linux devs have much patience for C thinking it can weasel out of doing what it's told due to some small print in the Standard.

[deleted]