𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @ sxan @midwest.social

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3 yr. ago

The worst things about kids are their parents.

I know. And you say it well; I, like many long-time Linux users, are so used to the CLI for everything that looking at the desktop today it seems everything is now doable in a GUI.

I do see this; my comment was more that more effort is needed to normalize GUI interfaces for the remaining cases. There's a GUI package manager (bauk?) that works on multiple distributions; I have my wife on Arch, and I always use that program when I have to install something, just to see if I can avoid opening a shell. It works pretty well for the most part... but EndeavorOS doesn't install it by default, and I had to drop into a terminal to install it the first time. It's stuff like that which still needs polishing.

Other areas have made great progress. I almost always use system-config-printer to do printer stuff because the Cups CLI tools are terrible and I use them so rarely I spend more time relearning them; it's just easier to use the GUI, and it works well.

I think the next tool we'll see (and need) is a GUI that will fetch install packages from source. For most Go and Rust end-user GUI programs, this could absolutely be done since both have a canonical methodology for installing or building software: go install and cargo. cargo build puts artifacts in a predictable location, and go install installs them in a determinable one. The same is true for a lot of languages, e.g. pipx. There's a supply-chain security concern, but if well-written this could be reduced by the tool. A really nice tool would be able to pull containers as well, like a sort of Flatpack-light.

That said: my octogenarian father bought a used laptop about 6 months ago and called me, cross-country, to help him install Linux on it (it had some version of Windows on it). I helped him create a Mint flash drive on his old computer and walked through the GUI install with him over the phone, and he's only called me once for help with it since, and that was to get the printer working; we solved it with GUI tools. He doesn't install software; he's running KDE and everything he's wanted to do there's been a KDE program for, already installed. But I don't imagine he's the common case.

I'm drifting. In any case: you're right, there are still a lot of gaps, but I think many of those actually do have GUI solutions, they're simply not used by distributions. It'd be interesting to see a distribution that tries to eliminate all of these cases by choosing software - like bauk - and installing it by default.

Hmm. Would that be good, though? Different rules, different moderators. Wouldn't an aggregation system based on subscription be better? Consolidating would result in a consolidation of power into the hands off a few.

Consolidation would also encounter trouble when server admins disagree with moderators about community rules. When conflicts happen - which they inevitably would - we'd have a situation where the community would split as some moderators recreate a new community on a different server. It was hard enough when lemm.ee shut down, and that have communities no option but to switch; if the reason for a move is policy and not server shutdown, the chaos would be far worse.

The more I think about it, the worse consolidation sounds.

I figured it might be a client thing. Someone else did mention Piefed does this.

This might be the impetuous to fire up a self-hosted instance.

Neat! So, I have to switch to a Piefed account or run my own Piefed server? Does this mean that Piefed performs this aggregation in your feed when you're browsing your subscriptions?

"Crap" is a swear word? Even my fundamentalist Christian, church 3x a week and weekly bible study groups father says "crap."

Yup.

My home security system is a doorbell camera and motion sensors everywhere. I can tell if there's movement in a room; that's all. No interior cameras - I don't trust any of them to not get hacked, regardless of my firewall.

I'm really suspicious about this. First,

Warning: Arch Linux only has official support for systemd. [1] When using a different init system, please mention so in support requests.

• From the Arch wiki.

None of the init systems listed on that wiki are written in Rust.

Rye is some sort of Python environment configuration system. There is a Rust process manager, but it's designed for containers. There's a drop in systemd service definition runner; last updated two years ago. There are at least three init systems written in Rust, but one was last changed 4 years ago, another 5 years ago, and the third 6 years ago.

I can't find any reference that doesn't lead back to the LJ article, and nothing that comes from Arch.

Artix supports three init systems, no-one of which are written in Rust.

This has the stench is AI.

My suspicion grows. Check this one out. It's a literal translation of the Linux Journal article. Same format. I don't know French well enough to detect of it's a transliteration, but it looks like one.

You should be able to tether over bluetooth, too. If all of your wireless is dead, yeah, it's USB or ethernet adapter tethering.

It's on the Flip3; I'd be really surprised if it weren't on the Fold.

Go to settings and look for "hotspot." If you're looking for tethering, search for "tethering." You can tether over USB, bluetooth, and even over an ethernet adapter.

You can get them new if you're OK with row-stagger, non-split keyboards. Unicomp sells them.

I'm really tempted to try to find an old Model M to refurbish, just to have it. I don't think I can use them anymore; holding my hands like that is just painful now. But I'd like to have one, for nostalgia.

This is a great question! I don't know!

It's a while. I have a lever espresso machine; it takes a good 15-20 minutes for the boiler to come up to pressure. I can use much of that for prep, though, so once it hits 1.25 bar, I'm ready to pull a shot. The actual shot is about 30 seconds, so to get an espresso, no faster than 15½ minutes. I'm usually making cappuccinos these days, but steaming milk from that giant boiler only takes 30s or so. Pouring has to be less than 15s. Cleanup does take a minute, mainly b/c of the milk pitcher, which I fully wash. Rinsing the portafilter takes a hot second. I usually empty the knock box as needed as part of the prep.

I used to do this daily for several years; get up, fill (if necessary) and turn on boiler, then go do something else to get ready for work.

My time? A minute or a little over to prep the shot, maybe a couple extra seconds because I pour milk while it's pulling. A few seconds to steam, a few more to pour. A minute or two for clean up. Maybe 10 minutes on those days I'm emptying the knock box, washing out the drip tray, wiping up the counter that's accumulated coffee dust - but that's just kitchen maintenance, and I don't think that counts as "time to make an espresso".

So: around 20 minutes, all in. If the boiler is heated and we count my time prepping and cleaning, probably 3-4 minutes.

James is a perfectionist; he's going to take longer to do almost everything.

This is brilliant. I'd love to see a market flooded with these landfill-candidates running Linux, and perfectly usable.

I have Choc Browns(?). They're supposed to be tactile, but they're squishy, and I don't care for them. It's my fault for going for aesthetics; I doubt it's possible to build a truly tactile switch in so low profile.

I haven't found a good switch yet. I want buckling spring, but need the columnar, staggered ergonomic layout, and I think IBM is jealously holding onto that patent. I can't think why else nobody has put out a buckling spring switch.

I'm keying off your terminal comment.

I think Linux is to the point where you can almost use it entirely without the CLI, if your pick the right distro.

If there's ever going to be a "year of Linux," users should be ankle to use it without ever having to open a terminal. Some of us prefer it, and live in it, but most people don't have any interest in it; it should be optional.

You know, if all meetings were only held by people on the toilet, we could avoid all of those unfortunate embarrassing incidents when that one person forgets to mute.

I worked at a place once that had a system that was all bash that would take hours to run. I rewrote it in Ruby and got the run down to about 10 minutes.

This was 2000; I don't recall anymore how much of that was the runtime and got much was just refactoring and hindsight - god knows how old that jumble of bash scripts were. A lot must have been the interpreter; even just looping is far slower in bash than probably anything else.

Not a comment on your script; just remembering that win.

It's a little more than a linked list; it also has a cryptographically verifiable hash of the block contents, based on the hash of the previous block. That's what makes it a verifiable ledger.

One of the main reasons to use linked lists is O(1) insertions and deletions; the point of a blockchain is to foil such insertions and deletions.

If you've never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too.

I used it for a while trying to wean myself off NetworkManager, which has a lot of optional dependencies that distributions tend to link in. So, you don't want Gnome on your system, but you want NM? Too bad, you got Gnome.

Anyway, connman is pretty fussy and not very intuitive. I think it's better for systems that are always on the same network; it's a pain to travel and connect to open networks with.