Ferk @ Ferk @lemmy.ml

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4 yr. ago

Thanks. I wasn't planning to go there anyway...

It's annoying how the title throws such a general open question and then they don't clarify this at all.. there isn't even a single match for "USA" or "America" in the whole article, you have to sort of guess.

I don't think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.

but for what benefit? [...] fedora is going to have off the shelf solutions

Yes, but that's my point: fedora is already fully featured.. the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn't be very different from doing he same with EU OS... at that point you don't need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).

Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician's friend. I mean, I'm not against a simple thing, but then I'd hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? ..will there be actual custom software? ..are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).

well, the actual software and configuration i’d argue aren’t the important part - owning the infrastructure is the important part…

But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I'm expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that's how these things usually go.

I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: "I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme"

Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.

Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?

I largely agree, that's why I was saying that I'm skeptical that all this will amount to anything substantial.

The will for independence exists in the EU, the problem is that the politicians don't have the balls for it and they would rather push to maintain the status Quo in all the things that matter. Instead they focus on small things that appear good on paper but don't really amount to anything. See for example the DMA and all it's promises of forcing big corporations to bend the knee and stopping monopolies.. even when a policy like that is written, it is hardly ever properly enforced. Has any company gotten any serious trouble for not implementing GDPR properly since it was introduced?

There has been a will towards more independence for a long time. Trump was just an extra push (and I'm still not convinced even that will be enough... all these initiatives sound good, but past experience has made me skeptical they will really amount to anything substantial).

But I don't see it necessarily as anti-american. It's more like we do need to cultivate local products and services more. Europe has for a while been falling behind in a lot of areas, combined with an aging population and an energy crisis, we really need to try and develop internally if we want to keep ourselves afloat, otherwise I'm not sure we can maintain a stable situation.

Yes, although Ctrl-M would be the "Carriage Return" character (\r). For the "Line Feed" newline character (\n) the Control combination would be Ctrl-J. Both of them would normally produce a new line when you press them on most terminals.

That's why if you open in nano/vim a file with Windows style EOL (/r/n), you might see a strange ^M symbol at the end of each line.

To be more precise, it's the "EOT" (end of transmission) control character, the 4th symbol in ASCII, from the non-printable character area.

This is true, but then why not base it off Guix (the GNU distro)? ..I'm sure Fedora is full of binary blobs and not-so-free software.

If they needed it, they could still add extra software and blobs to Guix, sourced by the EU... and I think doing that would allow it to carve itself a niche (a version of Guix with more compatibility would be interesting for many) rather than sticking a white label on Fedora and call it something else. I don't see a lot of value on this over just using Fedora directly, I'm not sure if it's true that Fedora & Red Hat do not benefit from this... wouldn't their support agents be able to just start providing support also to EU OS customers if they (both customers and support agents) want? Wouldn't it make it more interesting for private companies working closely with the government to choose Red Hat as a partner when it comes to enterprise Linux?

I guess we'll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I'm expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme. At most, with some extra software preinstalled. I don't think that's a threat to Fedora or Red Hat, but rather an opportunity for expansion.

IANAL, but as far as I know there's no problem with distributing MIT software as a GPL component, since MIT allows imposing extra restrictions (like the share-the-source limitations of the GPL) to the code, so you can in theory turn every MIT software into GPL, what you can't do is turn GPL software into MIT, so if the GPL software links MIT libraries that are part of its function, that instance of MIT software needs to follow the GPL.

Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don't think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.

China is the world's largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I'm not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.

But we'll see, maybe I'm wrong.

Silicon is like $3/kg (and that's the higher price, it's actually cheaper than that outside USA). I'm not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it's the second most abundant element in Earth's lithosphere (the first being oxygen).. I don't think the "line must go up" attitude around pushing for Moore's law is a worthy effort. I'd rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don't feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.

I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I'm not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don't think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.

Would using bismuth in chip production affect the price of medicaments?

Unstable economies allow that too. In fact, I'd argue it's more likely for people to be deceived and make concessions when they perceive a threat or a big problem that they feel requires urgent measures. Many times dictators have imposed themselves in times of struggle, using excuses like the need for special power for a strong and well coordinated response.

But I didn't say or imply that ethics is moot. Following our instincts is not moot, it is healthy, it's a proven way to our survival.

I think the wider term is "evolutionary ethics".

What it implies is that ethics is relative to our biology. It's not something universal. However, given that our biology is relative to nature (which is universal) and our development relates to our relationship with nature and the circumstances that made us what we are, ultimately there's a certain set of instincts that most living beings are likely to have if they are to develop to a certain level of complexity.

If someday we meet with some alien species out there in the Universe (if that's possible), it's likely they will have a different set of instincts and conversely a different set of morals. But many aspects of it are likely to be very similar if not identical.. things like the survival instinct, the desire to seek sustenance and the aversion towards things that can potentially be harmful, probably they will experience something equivalent to pleasure and suffering, like we do, as a mechanism for punishment/reward through which they have been conditioned to seek certain stimulus over others. They are likely to experience some form of empathy if they frequently interact with themselves and depend on one another (which is likely a requirement for the advancement of communication and joint engineering feats). It's more likely that our ethical frameworks will have more similarities than differences.

Of course this also means that our ethics are clearly biased towards living creatures... it would be very hard (if not impossible) for an ethic framework to defend the ultimate death of the Universe as something good to seek. Even if it were true that this might be the ultimate destination / goal the Universe moves towards.

I'll have a look at those books if I can, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are just attacking straw men or caricatures of the idea instead of actually engaging in honest argumentation. That's what I've often found.

banned from connecting to wifi networks based on thier mac address

MAC addresses are easy to spoof in a Linux PC though. So you should be able to workaround that limitation if it's ever a problem.

In fact, in theory you can also spoof the IMEI in a phone via software, it's just that the software in phones is generally not as open and it would require rooting and some tweaking that not everyone is comfortable doing.

I mean... he isn't wrong. Goals / objectives are not something rational. Rationality is just maths and logic. A computer does not have an objective (not even the objective of preserving itself), unless you program it into it.

It's perfectly possible that at some point in our evolutionary past there were creatures that didn't really care about looking for food to stay alive, the only reason we do care is because we are descendants of the very few weird mutants who had the urge to seek food.. most of the ones who didn't seek it are not here anymore. To think that it's somehow a miracle that we exist, and that there must be something special/supernatural about us, is a survivor bias fallacy...

We have objectives programmed into us through our evolutionary development. We define things as "good" or "bad" based on our instincts (our.. "heart"), only because they happen to have been selected through evolution. They aren't really based on rationality (although reason can be used as a tool to try and predict if the action is really consistent with achieving the goals).

So any response that's in line with our animal instincts that we've developed across our evolution is as good of an answer as to what our motivations are.

Another thing is that this standard does not allow setting an absolute size.. you can only use fractions, for example, 2/3 of normal size, which can still be relatively big if your normal size is big.

I also expect making things bigger for emphasis (or adding headings) would likely be more common than making them smaller (that's what I hope at least). Outside of things like mathematical notation where superscript/subscript might be useful (see this comment for some examples).

The problem with the web is that some websites use absolute units that might not scale well (like px) to define the sizes.

Personaly I use KeepassXC autotype functionality for this kind of thing (since I'm already using it as a password manager anyway).. I have entries that are just notes and then have the autotype command be: {NOTES}{ENTER} so it types the content of the note and presses enter.

The nice thing is that I can leverage the autotype dialogs from Keepass so I just need to remember 1 shortcut and it will open a dialog showing different Note options based on the title of the window I'm in. It also works across platforms (which is great if at work you still need to use Windows). However, Wayland is still not supported well.

I haven't tried to use date/time placeholders, but in theory, they are suported in the keepass documentation (no idea if keepassXC in particular supports them): https://keepass.info/help/base/placeholders.html (check out the {CMD:/CommandLine/Options/} placeholder that lets you run arbitrary commands and optionally have their output replace the placeholder, which is very powerful)

In the auto-type docs they also have placeholders that even allow you to add delays, switch active windows, and press all kind of key combinations. Again, I've not tested if all of that works in KeepassXC but if not you can always use the official keepass app.

A compositor is normally a component in a DE, not a DE on its own. For it to be a DE in my book the "standalone" installation needs to, at minimum, provide: a launcher to execute apps, a toolbar/statusbar, and maybe a terminal emulator (or at least call some generic wrapper to automatically hook into one, something like xdg-terminal-exec).

I mean.. openbox is used in X11 desktop environments like LXDE.. I don't see why labwc (essentially wayland's openbox) should be treated like it cannot be a component of one.

And river has almost as a mission statement to become more of a framework than a DE on its own.. they even have the goal in the long term to remove things from it and instead expose more to the commands/API to make it more modular.. it's definitely not something intended to work standalone and they expect people to develop third party layout generator programs.

Maybe sway is the one in that list that might be the most "standalone", since it does have swaybar built-in.. but the default configuration still expects you to provide at least something like dmenu to use as launcher, as well as making sure you have your terminal, etc, since it does not list them as specific dependencies of the sway package, so officially they aren't really part of sway as if it were a DE suite.

It was just an example of what I'm doing for my particular situation where I don't have root access and I want some personal scripts for myself, I'm not saying you should choose the same location. If everyone is already sourcing the same file, I expect there's already a shared storage you are maintaining that everyone has access to.

About something breaking, I guess it's up to you and your team if you prefer functions, but it also means not everyone will need to be annoyed when someone else's code has a small syntax error. And also I expect the only errors you are able to get feedback about right now would be only structural syntax errors for the function declaration (I expect you don't have unit tests or anything like that for your bash functions..) so technically a function could still be broken and you wouldn't know until you use it.

Scripts also give the advantage of being able to use other languages beyond bash, if perl/python or others are available.

Anyway, you are free to have your reasons, I was just saying that root access is not necessarily needed.

The thing is that, if you are not sticking to POSIX, you might as well use more widely available alternative scripting languages like perl or python, which are often included in most workspaces by default, so I'd say it's more useful to get experienced in those than to get experienced in fish.