Video editor for Linux?
The Linux Foundation and Kernel devs don't really deal with the OS layer much. This is something that would need to be implemented at the desktop environment level; like GNOME or KDE. Neither LF nor Linus Torvalds has any say over that.
After he got a handle on it, Torvalds returned to the kernel. He's been much more mild-tempered since then. As he mentioned in Tokyo, he won't be "giving some company the finger. I learned my lesson."
This is probably a good thing.
Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about "artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what's the most likely next word that you're going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant. Do you think we will see LLM written code that is submitted to you?"
Torvalds replied, "I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code." But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. "It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all."
Indeed, Torvalds hopes that AI might really help by being able "to find the obvious stupid bugs because a lot of the bugs I see are not subtle bugs. Many of them are just stupid bugs, and you don't need any kind of higher intelligence to find them. But having tools that warn more subtle cases where, for example, it may just say 'this pattern does not look like the regular pattern. Are you sure this is what you need?' And the answer may be 'No, that was not at all what I meant. You found an obvious bag. Thank you very much.' We actually need autocorrects on steroids. I see AI as a tool that can help us be better at what we do."
But, "What about hallucinations?," asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own."
There were no questions about whether maintainers would start utilizing LLMs. The questions were focused on how maintainers would respond to LLM-generated (or -assisted) patches being submitted to them. This attitude seems perfectly reasonable to me, but it would have been more interesting to ask questions about whether maintainers would start using LLMs in their work. Torvalds might have responded with a more interesting answer.
Normally I would retort “But we paid money for it - so they need to support it”
For how long? 15 years? 20? 30? Should they still be supporting Windows 95?
Windows has the longest support period of any commercial operating system. iOS's longest support period for a phone was 8 years, Android is now 8 years for the new PIxel, macOS supports computers for anywhere between 5-10 years, averaging about 7, and Windows 10 will support computers for 10 years. Previous Windows operating systems have supported computers for even longer, but 10 years is still longer than anybody else. I've paid for a few Windows 10 licenses in my time, and I don't think I'll ever pay for another one. I don't use it enough to care about the limitations of unlicensed Windows.
Mind you, we wouldn't even need to be having this conversation if Windows was free software and some other organization took on the duty of maintaining it. That would be a lot less work for Microsoft and keep Windows 10 users happy. While I'm at it, I'd also like a pony.
When they rugpull Win10 I will just complete move to Linux. The only thing holding me back is some industrial software that I use for work and they’re in the process of multi-platform support.
I'd love to do that. I already use Linux for most of my work, but Adobe not being there means I need to fall back to macOS or Windows for some projects. While Photoshop is coming to the web (someday), After Effects and inDesign are unlikely to ever end up there. I can hope, but I'll likely be stuck on one of these other operating systems for a long time to come, I suspect.
Maybe Wine will some day support Adobe's terrible DRM...and maybe hell will freeze over, too.
It took an hour or two to compile and takes up about 5GB of space. The only program I'm really interested in is Xcode, which doesn't work at the moment.
I don't see a problem with this business model. They're doing work maintaining software they don't want to maintain, so charging for it makes sense. It's surprising to me that Windows doesn't already charge a yearly subscription fee for OS upgrades.
Many people aren't going to pay the annual fee and will keep using Windows 10 without the security patches anyhow, so obviously this will weaken a lot of people's security, but, well... Microsoft needs to make money. And it's not like they need to worry about their customers defecting to another operating system. You can't just download and install macOS on an old Dell machine. If they're going to buy a new computer, it makes sense to get a less expensive one than what Apple's offering, ergo they'll get a new Windows 11 computer.
And if they wanted to and could use Linux...well, they'd already be using it. Overall, I'm completely nonplussed about this announcement. If you weren't going to pay Microsoft money, nothing has changed. If you need a longer support period, you now have an easy option. And hey, there's always the chance Microsoft will backtrack and provide free updates anyway. Especially given the lack of details on pricing, it seems like they're sounding out the idea rather than fully committed to deploying it.
One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.
This is the reason I abandoned both Fedora and openSUSE when I tried them. I like plenty about both of them but things are just simpler on Arch. Despite Arch having less software than most distributions, it tends to be the software I actually want or need to use. The few programs not present can be installed from the AUR. Writing new PKGBUILDs is simple and there is no bureaucracy.
Arch is a pain upfront but I've found it tends to save you time later on. It's not without its downsides, though; the primary one being that I'm the one responsible for managing everything and there are plenty of things I don't know.
GNOME changed the way I used desktops. Dolphin changed the way I used file managers.
I always set Nautilus to use one-click behavior, but it doesn't have handles like Dolphin does. And Dolphin has a built-in terminal. And other niceties. I like Nautilus too. I think both desktops have some good ideas and I like to bring some KDE ideas over to GNOME and vice versa.
But if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that GNOME is much better designed than macOS.
I like them both. GNOME's desktop metaphor is nicer but it can be replicated on Plasma with a few shortcuts. Plasma has a few niceties not present in GNOME. GNOME is prettier. Dolphin is a better file manager than Nautilus. GNOME programs don't have a way of rebinding keyboard shortcuts.
It just depends on what I consider more important at the time.
The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don't live in India, so I don't know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It's the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn't affected?
You're not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn't realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.
Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don't want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don't think I'm contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That's the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.
Does Unity support Wayland?
Nope. However, UnityX, a prototype desktop environment (which will be available as a variant of Unity once ready), will include Wayland support.
I realize the name was likely chosen for completely unrelated reasons, but I can't stop laughing about UnityX being the only variant of Unity with Wayland support.
The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.
Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.
It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.
Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?
Maybe a different perspective could help?
YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn't pay if the user hits "Skip". Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.
I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It's beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain't free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it's more friendly than Google search ads...
I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.
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No idea. It was the first time I ever used Linux. Ubuntu just booted into GRUB rescue mode after a month, and the only thing I can remember doing is installing another desktop environment. On Arch, I've had KDE and GNOME installed side-by-side for years now.
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Installed KDE and GNOME at the same time. Ubuntu did not like that.
That's also my preference, but very few games are free software. And most of the games I want to play are encumbered with DRM or cost ten times as much to get DRM-free. Of course, I buy them DRM-free because the DRM doesn't work with Wine, but if it worked with Cedega...well, I might re-evaluate.
The purpose of the GPL isn’t to force companies to pay up to get out of copy left.
That's why it was created, but in practice, many companies make money by selling exceptions. See Cal.com
and CKEditor5, for instance. I didn't mention this at all in my comment, though, so I'm not quite sure which part you're responding to. By "level playing field", I meant that everyone can improve Sourcehut and sell a service with more features, but they need to release those new features under the same license, meaning they will make it back to Sourcehut proper. Selling exceptions isn't the only way to make money from free software.
The GPL is a better choice if you want to make money from the software. With a pushover license, your competitors can extend the program and profit from it in a way you can't because they aren't required to give the changes back. The GPL evens the playing field. Of course, you often see the original company requiring a CLA so they retain copyright over all of the code.
On the other hand, it does enable possibilities that you would be very unlikely to get otherwise. For example, Cedega (formerly WineX) forked Wine when it used a pushover license and brokered deals with game companies to make the DRM compatible with WineX/Cedega. That meant you could play these games on Linux-based OSes with Cedega, but not Wine. I really wonder if it would have been possible to make Wine compatible with some of these DRM schemes otherwise. Consequently, however, Cedega could not incorporate any changes from LGPL'd Wine, as that would have required them to license Cedega under the LGPL, too.
That's another issue. You can incorporate MIT-licensed software in GPL software, but you can't incorporate GPL software in MIT-licensed software. So going with the GPL gives you more options. As SerenityOS is building everything from scratch, this isn't an issue, but you can well see how it could be. The LGPL is far less disruptive to people who want to release their software under a pushover license. It only requires you give back any changes to the LGPL-licensed part, and does not cover other parts of your program. Personally, I really like the LGPL. It levels the playing field while being quite compatible. It's not perfect either, of course.
It's a tricky question, and there are no right answers. Ultimately, the decision is up to the developer and I can't fault any choice, including the decision to use a proprietary license.
Microsoft Exchange. For running an email server. It's easily the most popular use for Windows servers.
In fairness, it's so there's a log of why the machine was shut down. It's for the sysadmins in charge rather than Microsoft. In practice, most people just choose "Other" as the reason so it's fairly useless. I have no idea if there's a way to turn it off, though.
There's Lightworks, too, although it's geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It's powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There's no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don't need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.