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332
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2 yr. ago

  • Almost two decades ago, as a teenager, I decided to give Linux a try as a bit of fun and as a learning activity. I put Ubuntu 6.06 on an old Windows 95 desktop which was languishing in a cupboard having been long replaced. The install disc was, I'm fairly sure, a freebie that came with a magazine. I was amazed at how easy it was to install and how smoothly it ran, and had lots of fun playing around with it and learning the ropes.

    Have had a Linux machine or two on the go ever since. At some point in the last decade I made the switch from using Windows as my main OS to using Linux as my main, and these days I only use Windows on my corporate-provisioned work laptops.

    I'm still an Ubuntu user. I've distro hopped occasionally, and Debian has a place in my heart, but I always came back to Ubuntu. There's a lot of meming about Ubuntu being terrible, but the reality is that it remains an incredibly polished, high-quality, "just works" OS which largely keeps out of my way.

    Over the last two decades I moved into software engineering as a career, although I've since moved out of the industry onto non-techy things. Linux continues to scratch my techy itch in my spare time.

  • To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn't likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose "bug for bug" compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).

    I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).

  • Celebrities and influencers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, endorsed Reece Lewis as a strong leader for the HyperVerse. ... Wozniak said in a video that he supported "Steven," proclaiming, "I can’t wait for the HyperVerse.”

    In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him.

    Oh Woz. How the mighty have fallen. Whatever they paid you, it wasn't enough. Also you're filthy rich already FFS.

  • I've not used that tablet, but I have a Star Labs laptop and it's an excellent bit of kit. Would heartily recommend them as a company.

    Can't vouch for the Star Lite tablet specifically, though.

  • We can't immediately convert all cars to EV, we don't have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.

    Well sure, but there's no suggestion of converting "all cars" to EVs "immediately". Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it'd still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.

    A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn't sound desperately unrealistic.

  • ChromeOS can run native Linux apps, so realistically if Adobe wanted to support ChromeOS they'd probably go for a Linux port anyway. A lot less work than trying to reimplement every single UI from the ground up as a web interface.

  • Thoughts on this?

    Jump
  • Most of the post is an "argument from authority": Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!

    It's amazing that he's so well qualified, even runs his own X fork, but isn't volunteering to do any actual work to maintain the project.

    Because that's what this ultimately boils down to, isn't it. Nobody's forcing anyone to use Wayland or drop X. But, all the X.org developers have moved on to Wayland and aren't coming back, and all the major DEs are also migrating to Wayland. So if you want to keep using X, you're going to need to do the work that other people used to do for you.

    For most users that's a fairly empty statement, as most users don't have the expertise to maintain X and window managers even if they wanted to. But apparently this guy is hot stuff; a highly qualified, highly experienced king of the display server world. So when are we going to see his X.org fork?

  • They sell them in the UK now. I've seen a few on the road. There are a couple of dozen showrooms in the country now, and my utility (electricity and gas) supplier is offering them on finance (amongst a few other options).

    So yeah, they're out there.

  • Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin

    There's no basis for calling MacOS Linux. There's a legitimate basis for calling it BSD, as Darwin was forked from FreeBSD, but BSD and Linux aren't directly related. Also, Darwin has diverged considerably from FreeBSD, and only a small amount of the stack outside of the kernel shares any code, so it's not necessarily meaningful to think of it as a "FreeBSD distro" in the same sense as you would ChromeOS a Linux distro (which uses, as I mentioned in my previous comment, a more-or-less standard Linux technology stack).

    In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores

    ChromeOS lets you install Linux native applications out of the box, although it does so in containers (Crostini, which I believe is based on LXD, another standard Linux technology stack). Once you enable Linux apps, it automatically hooks you up to the Debian repositories, and you can install using apt like you would on any other Debian install.

    Whether you consider Crostini to be "sideloading Linux" is a matter of semantics, but fundamentally it's no different from installing containerised LXD/LXC apps on Ubuntu or whatever, which is a common use case for developers and production servers.

    For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world.

    I think you're making an argument for why it's a bad Linux distro (from a certain perfectly valid point of view), but not that it's not a Linux distro.

    There are few if any other distros which are as locked down ChromeOS out of the box, but all Linux distros can be locked down, and if you've ever used a corporate provisioned machine in a workplace or education setting then odds are you won't have any admin freedoms regardless of the distro chosen. Sudoer privileges is something you might have on your own home machine, but not something that you can expect on every Linux machine. Even on devices you own, there are devices that you might buy (such as wifi routers, DVD players, smart TVs) which run standard Linux but which are as locked down (and more) than a Chromebook; it's just that most people don't expect to have unrestricted sudo privileges on their router in the same way as they do a laptop.

    For the record, I am not a Chromebook fan. I owned one once for a few years, and thought it was a disappointing, artificially limited experience, and I don't intend to have one again. ChromeOS is not my idea of a good Linux distro. But I'll still argue firmly that it is a Linux distro in all ways that matter.

  • I'm a fairly casual gamer these days, but nonetheless it's been a very long time since I encountered a game on Steam that wouldn't run at least tolerably well under Proton, with most of them running flawlessly. As long as you check the DB before buying, you're fine. As you say, it's only really the anticheat software which causes major road blocks most of the time.

    Performance is amazingly better on Linux via Proton than it is on Windows quite a lot of the time. It's an incredible achievement.

    For non Steam games, Lutris also provides as easy, one-click experience for getting many games working, and although I don't have a lot of personal experience with it (Steam covers most of my needs) when I have used it it's been a pleasure, and it has a good reputation.

    I use bog standard un-tweaked Ubuntu. One would assume that the performance on the specialist gaming distros may be even better still.

  • ChromeOS is as much Linux as anything else is. It's controlled by a greedy megacorp, but so is Red Hat (IBM) or, idk, Oracle Linux. Yes it's based on an unusual immutable design, but immutable distros are now cropping up out of lots of projects (Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, amongst many others, not to mention the Steam Deck). It avoids using the GNU tool chain, but the alternatives that it uses are already used by other Linux distros (like Alpine). It now uses the standard Wayland graphics stack, and is in the process of moving from upstart (a previously widely used Linux init system) to systemd.

    It's hard to come up with a definition of "Linux distro" that excludes ChromeOS without excluding a bunch of unambiguously Linux distros too.

  • Realistically they never would, and wouldn't have even when the UK was in the EU due to the wider prevalence of other socket types.

    But if you want an answer as to why they should, it's because it's an excellent socket design; just about as safe as it's possible to make a mains electricity connection, and practically indestructible to boot.

  • Exactly. Really, "fully charged" should just be conceptualised as being at a sensible safe point, with the acknowledgement that it's possible to "overcharge" the batteries to an even higher level, chemically speaking, but that all sensible devices don't let you do this.

  • Yeah, it can do that. There are Android and iOS apps (as well as desktop). It has list creation in one click. General notes are technically formatted in markdown behind the scenes, and some users like to write the notes directly in markdown, but Joplin's default view is a "rich text editor" mode which hides all that stuff away and uses familiar word processor type controls.

    Depending on your chosen cloud host (you can pick any you like) it can sometimes be a little fiddly to do the initial setup, but I think the default "Joplin Cloud" option is pretty straightforward.

    I use Joplin, and can heartily recommend it, although there are plenty of alternative options out there too.