Posts by leppy232

4 in 5 Chromebooks sold to US students in Q2 as demand rises

Have you ever met teenagers?

Have you ever been in a school restroom?

Unusual perspective for a Register commenter here,

I've used Chromebooks in the grade school classroom (10th-12th). They sucked, I was extremely jealous of the one girl that came to school with a MacBook Air. At least hers wasn't kicked out of commission by rain. Genuinely had a better experience bringing my Inspiron 2200 in senior year.

Still, I do know that they're pretty durable from that experience. Unfortunately, they're about as useful as a brick.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: From empowering PC to Orwell's Telescreen.

Certainly, anything connected to the internet is already compromised if you're going to go that route. For offline use, you can at least claw back a little more breathing room if you use hardware with fully open firmware stacks... good luck with that beyond Raptor and maybe 12 year old ASUS boards.

Re: Does it run Photos*** though ?

The Affinity suite is compatible with Adobo formats and, while unofficial, I've seen Affinity employees in the forums helping people get it running in WINE. It's also a one time purchase, not a subscription model. In fact, I think that one time purchase costs less than a month of Adobo DD, but I might be wrong as I don't use it.

Re: From empowering PC to Orwell's Telescreen.

The time to be worried about PC invasion of privacy was in 1980 with the first ISPs that necessarily need to have access to whatever you do online, or in 1999 when the Pentium III came with serials, or 2006 when the Core 2 Duo came with a black box for monitoring your hardware that Intel claims is just for system administrators to monitor their servers even though it's still on chipsets that have never gone near a server room, or in 2009 when it was found that the NSA was wiretapping HDMI cables and Cisco routers, or in 2012 when AMD followed Intel's suit, or in 2015 with Alexa and its clones. This is really nothing, and honestly the least effective possible move they could do if they wanted that data, the IME/PSP thing is way more invasive because it's OS agnostic, you can't just neutralize it by installing Linux... or Windows 11.

Re: 3 Percent now and forever IMO.

"no consistent UI"

I dual boot with Windows 11 on my Surface Laptop 3 and in 15 minutes I can see the shiny new Windows 10/11 UWP stuff, some Windows Vista dialogs (like the long move dialog), some XP icons, and even a couple MFC windows still hanging around in the base OS.

"way to install apps"

You just tell the package manager to install something and it does it. I'm just a casual Linux user and even for me it's braindead easy, and I'd hope it would be for anyone who can read. But, there's also stuff like KDE Discover and GNOME Software and whatever the one Pantheon has is called, if you really insist on an app store interface.

"and programming API"

As I've said, I'm not a Linux power user by any means, I couldn't tell you how nice the Linux API is or isn't, but I couldn't tell you how nice the Windows one is either, and I doubt 90% of people could.

Pictured:

doesn't know about the Management Engine/PSP, and has a lot of trust in their ISP, and definitely doesn't see how the NSA could wiretap HDMI cables. I'm not saying any of these are necessarily happening, but they're definitely other vectors to have your life snooped on that doesn't require anything to change.

That year was 1998. KDE and Mandrake were released in '98, Windows 98 sucked horribly (and its 1999 expansion pack didn't really help), and Linux really started replacing Unix wherever it was used.

Asahi Linux project hooks up with Fedora: Remix that's not a remix coming soon

Something to note:

This is just for the reference distro. You can still use the Asahi packages on any ARM distribution you like, if you don't like Fedora. I don't as someone that's using it right now, but that's fine, since I can just use Slackware or OpenBSD.

Meltdown avoided: Intel rediscovers profitability

I'm happy to know I'm helping...

by not buying any of their products. I never have, but I made the conscious decision a couple years ago not to start. Hopefully we can get them sunk down below $5 billion. I'm not really happy with AMD's processor division either even if I do like how open Radeons are that they can run on POWER ISA or ARM or RISC-V computers without much issue.

Couple admit they laundered $4B in stolen Bitcoins after Bitfinex super-heist

Re: As much as I'm not a fan of the idea of billionaires existing...

The threshold for "pulling it off" in this instance is $1 billion. As soon as they hit that, they earned it.

Re: As much as I'm not a fan of the idea of billionaires existing...

I'm well aware that corporations steal $55 billion of workers' wages every year, $8 billion just off minimum wage workers in 10 states (https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/links/S241812-LINK1.PDF). $4 billion off of people who use crypto is very little skin off my back.

As much as I'm not a fan of the idea of billionaires existing...

if you manage to pull off stealing billions of dollars, as far as I'm concerned, you've earned it. That's entirely on them.

UK government's semiconductor brain trust meets for the first time

Here's hoping they at least meet up with RED.

If not, I'd be highly disappointed, considering they're doing good enough work that lkcl is now basically the main person in the OpenPOWER ISA TWG.

Meta says it'll ask Euro peeps nicely before hitting them with personalized ads

"ask[ing] Euro peeps nicely before hitting them with personalized ads"

...doesn't sound to me like it'll be waiting for a response back. I'm sure they will, though I'm sure they'll still be collecting the data anyway (you know, the actual issue).

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

Re: But why?

"although I would ask why, if you want the FreeBSD tooling, why not run FreeBSD?"

Drivers.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

I'm waiting for...

Linux 6.9. Because I'm 22 and haven't quite grown out of it yet.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

I do like Wayland, but...

So far I can't use it. My laptop didn't come with a switch in the enter key, and I can't figure out how to remap caps lock to enter on Wayland like I can with xmodmap. I've tried gconf and setxkbmap, and neither worked. On-screen keyboards, or at least Onboard, isn't an option either. GNOME's does work, but it's annoying in other ways, and Plasma's just doesn't function (as of Fedora 37).

I will say this isn't the end of the road for X anyway; as far as I know all of the BSDs still use it as their default (or usually only) display protocol. I don't know if it'll be the end of e.g. Plasma on BSD, though.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Babyfaced Slackware user

I'm going to be using Arch Linux Power when demoing ppc64le Linux for people just for the AUR, but I've had a soft spot for Slackware for the last decade or so now, so I'm still happy it's still around and definitely plan on using it for personal use. BonSlack is a godsend for us PowerPC people. In general, I feel like it's a fairly well rounded desktop OS, a good continuation from Mandriva (alongside Mageia which I also love, but is x86/amd64/arm64 only) if you're not intimidated by commandlines. To this day when I use Fedora or Ubuntu, I still miss the terminal startx configuration tools over a display manager, for instance, because I don't want to type in my actually worth-a-damn-length password in every time I want to switch desktops.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

"Version 254 of systemd marks the 115th release of this ever-growing init system for Linux."

I would love to see the math that went into that. I suppose it isn't surprising, considering my experience with systemd.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

There's always ReactOS if you want to redo this article in a decade, or 15 years for the 25th anniversary of XP's EOL. It's already got one or two Vista functions and it might be closer to 50% by the time it actually releases, even if the last version it would be 100% compatible with for the 1.0.0 release is Server 2003.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: It's not the 1960s anymore.

By that age, I'd be as impaired by declining vision and fine motor control as a drunk 21 year old, so driving wouldn't be a good option then, either. I've done groceries multiple blocks by bike many, many times before, it's really not hard if you're in the right place. And that was in the middle of the desert, at 3 PM.

It's not the 1960s anymore.

Another, even.better option, is to have cities designed so that only major arteries have car access at all and only one lane in each direction -- with bike and foot traffic and a good rail system for commuting. Something something America is too big, curious how it wasn't too big in 1920 when every city, town, and village was designed this way if it had any car friendly streets at all.

There's plenty of good YouTube channels to check out regarding urban planning, and the Netherlands in general is pretty consistently held up as the poster child. Plus, as a train loving American, I just really want to commute on one.

Framework starts taking orders for 16-inch repairable, upgradeable laptop

Not a fan of the PCIe cartridge.

The rest of it is fine, even if I prefer the 3:2 of the 13", but the GPU cartridge is a poor conceptualization of a good idea.

If they had just shipped them as bare PCBs and cooling assemblies, and had you open up the laptop like you would anyway to install all the other parts, then it would be easier for other manufacturers to supply PCIe cards in the new format to any number of 16/17" laptop manufacturers without worrying about adding a new SKU for every laptop chassis/GPU combination in the world. I can't see how this won't just disincentivize other companies from adopting the same standards as Framework is trying to put down, which should be the goal if they want to bring repairability back into the broader laptop market.

That is, unless they want their own hardware ecosystem that doesn't play nice with other manufacturers, the same thing everyone hates Apple for, rightfully so. I do hope they'll reconsider it when time comes to redesign the 16" chassis (which will come, reviewers like to complain about a two year old laptop design for whatever reason and the buyers follow), but that will essentially leave first gen FW16 owners in the dust. There really isn't any good way to get out of that mess, but I suppose if they release the schematics like they have in the past (and which is perfectly commendable) you could still get third party support.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Didn't Netscape cost $300 for businesses?

I don't mind this, it's still free for personal use and should help at least a little with fundraising. $9 for LibreOffice is a price I'd be willing to pay. Hell, even if it's $9 a computer and I have 300 of them -- Microsoft Office is what, a few hundred per computer? And it's not as standards-respecting.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: Why?

OpenCore Legaxy Patcher probably.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 – using Asahi on an Arm-powered Mac

Re: Fuck apple.

Feel free to go SerenityOS or Redox instead, then. I'll be taking advantage of the only commodity non-amd64 laptop available to us Americans, and it'll make it real easy to go fully amd64-free by 2025, a personal goal of mine.

Lmao, RISC-V. They've been trying to get it going since 2010 with all the might of universities and some of the biggest silicon companies (and Intel) and even now it's barely competitive with a PowerPC 970. RISC-V is more of a warm and fuzzy thought experiment (whose governing body recommended people check out a literal scam) than an ISA.

Saying ARM is too fragmented... and then pointing to RISC-V, which has fragmentation as a selling point, as a way out is like saying a spring day is too cold and suggesting one go out into the vacuum of space instead.