Posts by Yankee Doodle Doofus

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: I'm British...

< "The passive is maliciously used to conceal the omission of the implicit by whom, by duck shovers and responsibility avoiders or shifters."

Indeed. Here in the U.S. the passive voice is commonly used by journalists when reporting on people who were shot by police officers. They mention that someone took a bullet during an "officer-involved shooting" or some other weaselly wording. When you see this you can be 99% sure that the shooter was a cop. They don't use passive voice when a civilian criminal is doing the shooting. I remember one from not too long ago that mentioned that a cop and his wife had been shot. The cop was dead, and the wife was in critical condition. From the headline and first paragraph or two, a person would likely assume that they had been shot by a deranged criminal during a home invasion. The truth? It was an attempted murder/suicide by the husband (cop).

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: Ignoring a system is good?

< "Perhaps I'm missing something here."

I don't think it is implied, and certainly not directly stated, that going a decade without updates is desirable. The point of that anecdote is the stability of the OS.

Rival browsers cry foul after Microsoft Edge slips through EU gatekeeper cracks

At my org, we used to supply Edge and Chrome, but we decided a non-Chromium-based browser would be a good thing for everyone to have access to, so we now supply Firefox and Edge. There were obviously a number of angry Chrome users after this decision, but Edge is incorporated into Windows, so if we wanted to add Firefox to the mix, it was either ditch Chrome, or support 3 browsers.

Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck?

With Valve, I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt on this. They sure get sued a lot, and on the surface many of their practices do seem monopolistic, but as a customer I don't feel they are wronging me in any way, at least not yet. Games are quite cheap if you wait for sales. As a long time linux user, they have actually improved my life and got me back into PC gaming after a 20+ year hiatus.

Out of curiosity, which distro are you calling a "kiddie distro", SteamOS or Arch?

"...my own SteamDeck tends to be hyper-finicky about running games on it."

I find this surprising. I have grown my Steam library recently to around 80 titles, and at least 90% run with no tinkering on my SteamDeck OLED. The remainder also all run fine, after consulting www.protondb.com and fiddling with launch settings and/or versions of proton. At least a couple of these games are listed as unsupported, but they work regardless. I am very happy with my purchase.

Re: Woa - desktops = production??

I don't think it would be that difficult to measure.

Prebuilt desktop sales + desktop motherboard sales

Re: Woa - desktops = production??

Well, Liam seems to be separating desktops from laptops here, and plenty of development happens on laptops these days.

Also, you seem to be saying that % doesn't matter so much, but when talking market share as Liam is, it's exactly what matters. The percentage of people who still buy desktop machines is WAY down, and now consists almost entirely of gamers and content creators, both of which likely dwarf the number of developers. The average consumer does all of their computing tasks on their phone. Desktop machines may never totally die off, but they are becoming a MUCH smaller share of the market than they were 20 years ago. I think that meets my definition of "dying".

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

Re: The Click Chain

Unnecessary destruction of trees? For tech books? These should all be e-books in this day and age. Why print on paper something that will be outdated information in just a few years?

Re: a "loo"

This makes sense. Here, what you call a loo is referred to as a "half bath". Which is not the most accurate term, as it's tough enough to bathe just one's feet (or head) in the commode, let alone half of the body.

Sorry, dumb American here. What's the difference between a bathroom and a loo?

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Re: their integrated graphics

I have an intel NUC with an 11th gen i5, and under linux, at least, the integrated graphics are sufficient to run Grand Theft Auto 5 at between 40 and 45 frames per second in 1080p with default settings. Yes, that's nearly a decade old game, but I was still surprised that it was able to pull this off.

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

As for Starfield, or any other games that don't want to run, ProtonDB is a fantastic resource. You may well get it running with ProtonGE (Glorious Eggroll) or an older version of standard Proton.

https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740

Indeed. I recently built a gaming PC, and the one piece of MS software on it? Their Flight Simulator, which runs perfectly using Proton, as far as I can tell.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Re: At the Weyland Yutani IT Department

or

sudo pacman -Syu

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

They already changed to USB-C last year. It's the imported used phone market it will affect, which as someone above pointed out will likely only help sales of new Apple phones in the EU.

< "Also USB C has been the de facto standard for several years (6 at least) for new phones."

Not for Apple devices, which is what the comment you are responding to is about, so your point is irrelevant to the discussion.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: vi vs emacs?

I also prefer nano, but probably only because I have not put in the effort to learn vim, which most terminal junkies seem to prefer. I'm not a developer by trade, but when I need to edit or create a config file or simple script from the terminal, nano just seems very intuitive to me. I could likely be more productive in these situations if I was a vim wizard, but the amount of time I spend using nano probably works out to only a few hours total per month. It's hard to justify learning vim for this.

Desktop hypervisors are like buses: None for ages, then four at once

From the article:

--"The new release also allows cuts of Linux and BSD coded for the Arm architecture to run on macOS hosts."

--"Cloning VMs from the desktop into the Oracle cloud is another option, and the desktop hypervisor can then report on resource usage of cloudy VMs. Which will be handy, as sending a monster VM to the cloud where it burns budget will not be welcome."

Perhaps it's more a case of lazy reading than lazy reporting...

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Jellied conspiracy

El Reg is experiencing technical difficulties with the forums. I made a post earlier on another thread, and then I couldn't see it for at least 30 minutes. Previous to this, I had to refresh several times before I could get a forum page to load at all. It's no surprise that this moron is turning it into a conspiracy though.

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

< "this isn't even being judgemental about it — if you're in that situation, faced with those incentives..."

Exactly. The concept that incentives matter seems lost on too many people, in business, politics, and elsewhere. Your 20-year plan might be the absolute best one for the organization, but if you're fired after 4 years and the plan is then scrapped, what good did it do anyone? Sadly, the incentives in place often make squeezing out every possible cent of profit THIS YEAR the only real choice. Next year? Rinse and repeat. Do this for a few years, then move on to the next job at the next place before it all comes crashing down. It's somebody else's problem now.

Of course the Internet Archive’s digital lending broke the law, appeals court says

Re: Contradiction in terminis

< "I'm fine With Individuals negotiating on one time payment fir one piece of work."

OK, but that business model DOES NOT WORK in the context of authors writing books for income.

< "But I'm not comfortable with is one person restricting everyone else once it has escape privacy into the larger world."

< "People helping directly absent the inefficiencies of monetizing should be enshrined rather then curtailed."

These are great examples of why I questioned whether English is a language you are proficient in. If there are coherent thoughts behind these sentences, you have absolutely failed to communicate them.

Re: Contradiction in terminis

Out of curiosity, is English not your first language? I ask partly because of the odd use of capitalization in your writing, and partly because most of your sentences don't make any sense, and therefore I really have no clue what your argument actually is.

< "Stop worshipping the tools..." - What tool are we talking about in this particular situation? I honestly have no idea.

I notice you ignored my question about how you would feel being forced to do your work for no pay. What is your solution for authors who wish to make a living by writing books, if those books can then be legally downloaded for free by anyone, anywhere?

Re: Contradiction in terminis

There are definitely worthwhile discussions to be had about copyright law, especially about the duration of the protections it provides. Some of those discussions are occurring in this very comment section. Here we are talking about books which are still in print and available for sale. The authors in most cases wrote them with the expectation that they would provide income, not just for fun or "for good of all humanity". If the authors wanted to give the works away for free, there are ways they could do so. (Assuming they haven't already entered into a commercial agreement with a publisher for the works in question.) There are also established rules for how libraries loan out copyright protected books, both physical and digital. The Internet Archive was not following these rules, plain and simple.

Do you have a job that provides income and puts food on your table? Assuming you do, I would wager that there is some way it could be argued that the work you do can benefit all of humanity. Should you then be forced to do that work for anyone who asks without any financial reward?

What you are advocating for is by definition piracy. Different people have different opinions on piracy, whether it is ever justified, and if so in what situations. As far as I can tell, your opinion can be boiled down to "Capitalism is bad and everything should be free". Good luck with that.

< "But what of a factory worker who dies? Their income stops the day they die.."

The accrual of income may stop, but payment for work already done does not. The estate is absolutely entitled to cash paychecks and whatnot post-mortem.

Re: Contradiction in terminis

< "Copyright should have never been applied to non commercial activity in the first place."

But their activity did, at least in theory, affect commerce. Some percentage of the people who downloaded the books for free would have otherwise paid for them. I remember when I was a poor student, I would regularly rent VHS copies of films as entertainment for $3 or so. Then one day, I discovered that the public library had VHS tapes of popular films available for checkout. My rental spending dropped by at least 75% at that point. The library wasn't making any money, but my regular corner video rental place was definitely missing out on revenue that they would have otherwise had. This issue is not as simple as you imply.

Indeed. Numerous articles I've seen on this (not just here on El Reg) leave out this important detail. The IA pushed their luck and got burned.

The article left out the part where during the pandemic, the Internet Archive lifted the "one borrower at a time per physical copy" policy. They were indeed lending out digital copies on a many-to-one basis, and though the lawsuit concluded they can't even do one-to-one in the manner they had been, the lawsuit may never have been filed if the IA hadn't pulled that stunt in 2020 and riled up the publishers further.

Pop!_OS 24.04 and new COSMIC desktop reach alpha

Further update: I have now also installed the COSMIC alpha on my personal laptop. Another existing Arch installation, and on this one, I have been using Cinnamon, instead of going through customizing GNOME. Cinnamon will not as far as I can tell let you have the same bottom panel on all screens. You can put a new panel on each screen and try to make it look the same, but it's a pain in the ass and doesn't function the way I want anyway. This rules it out for a multi-display DE for me, but on my laptop, I am almost never using anything but the single built in 15.5" display, so Cinnamon is acceptable. Tiling isn't as much of a killer feature in the laptop either, as I am maximizing most applications most of the time, but I occasionally use window snapping to get a browser side by side with a terminal window, or something like that so I will likely enjoy COSMIC on the laptop as well.

I have installed it alongside Cinnamon, the way I installed it alongside my existing GNOME+extensions on my other machine. When I then chose COSMIC from the lightdm login screen, all I got was a blinking cursor on a black screen. I rebooted to the same result. Next I disabled lightdm and installed and enabled GDM. From GDM I could indeed log in and use COSMIC, but I also noticed something strange. GNOME was now listed as an option, along with Cinnamon and COSMIC. I don't think I ever had GNOME installed previous to Cinnamon on this machine, and it was never an option from lightdm. I can indeed now launch into a totally stock GNOME desktop if I choose to do so (yuck).

COSMIC seems to be working ok on the laptop so far also. One oddity is an extra network applet in the system tray that looks totally different than the COSMIC network applet. I think it is likely nm-applet, and I have tried changing the line in it's desktop entry from "NotShowIn=KDE;GNOME;" to "NotShowIn=KDE;GNOME;COSMIC;" but this didn't work.

Update: After being so impressed by the COSMIC alpha in my new Pop!_OS installation earlier, I used clonezilla to make a backup image of my main drive, where my daily driver Arch installation with GNOME plus a handful of extensions lives alongside the Windows 11 install that I try not to boot into unless it's absolutely necessary or it's been a few months since I updated it. I then installed the COSMIC alpha on my daily driver Arch installation, alongside GNOME so I can switch at login. It went without a hiccup, using the cosmic-session package from the Arch Extra repo, and I am using it now. I'm going to see how long I can last daily driving COSMIC on Arch where I already have all my needed apps installed, but keep the Pop!_OS installation as well to fiddle with occasionally. After a few more hours of COSMIC experience, I am even more impressed than I was before. It's hard to believe it's an alpha.

It's very late now, and I must sleep. More later...

Oh, and another minor* issue. If there was a time-zone selection in the install process I somehow missed it, and when I go into the settings to change it, it doesn't actually change. I can select my correct timezone (America/Chicago, as I am in the Central Timezone of the U.S.) in the drop down list, but it doesn't stick. I even tried other timezones to be sure it wasn't just the one I wanted that didn't work. No matter how many times I try to change it, the Time Zone in the Date & Time settings is set to Etc/UTC.

* I called it a minor issue only because this is an alpha. It's a major issue for a daily driver.

I made some comments above on the posts of others, and said I was excited to try COSMIC, but I'd probably wait until it was more ready. I also said that I didn't feel any need to try Pop!_OS.

Thanks partly to the fact that a few people confirmed that I could get a more Cinnamon/Windows feel than the default top panel and bottom dock gives, and partly thanks to the fact that a Pop!_OS and COSMIC developer is lurking in this comment section taking feedback, I decided to give it a trial, not just COSMIC, but the whole new alpha release of Pop!_OS.

I had 180 or so GB of unpartitioned space on one of the drives in my main home workstation, so I threw the alpha ISO on a Ventoy and booted it up. I went into the installer, and chose the custom setup. There seemed to be no way to have it smartly use the unpartitioned space, so I clicked the button (I forget it's label) that brings up gparted. I tried to create the needed ESP and root partitions, but it seemed to hang and didn't actually create any partitions. I rebooted back into the ISO and tried again with the same result, then booted into a live gparted ISO and created the partitions that way. After this, the installer let me choose my new partitions under the advanced install. Installation went smoothly, and on post install reboot the PC launched straight into the new Pop!_OS installation. Automaticaly detecting other installed operating systems and setting up a way to boot into them as alternatives to Pop!_OS would have been nice, as this machine has Windows 11 and Arch on my main drive and on a secondary drive, besides some storage partitions, there are 2 different other Arch installations (used for playing with different DEs and things) and now this new Pop!_OS installation. For now I am having to select a bootloader from the boot menu of the PCs firmware to hop between Pop!_OS and my main grub which has all the other operating systems available. I imagine I can find a way to have my main grub list an option for this Pop!_OS installation, but maybe not? I don't really have any experience with systemd-boot.

So far I have only messed around with it for an hour or so. I'm writing this comment using the alpha right now. One thing I noticed right away is that firefox doesn't have minimize and maximize buttons but the distro specific apps do. I was indeed able to get the panel moved to the bottom, remove the dock, and add an app tray to the panel on the bottom. This is great. The panel can be shown on all displays simultaneously, another win for me. Having an auto-hide for the panel is also a must have for me, and luckily, it's an option. My only complaint is that it hides whenever any window is open on a display, not just when one is maximized or otherwise trying to use the screen area that the panel is in. This will probably be only a minor annoyance for me though, as the tiling is why I'm really here, and with that turned on, I'll rarely have a floating window anyway. The tiling seems great so far, and is definitely an improvement over using the Forge extension in GNOME as I am currently in both Arch at home and Debian at work. I love being able to stack windows while tiling, as well as being able to toggle whether a certain window is floating or tiling, and the whole experience of managing the tiled windows just feels better somehow than it does with Forge on GNOME.

Kudos to the COSMIC team for the great work so far, and thanks again to Liam for this article and those in these comments who convinced me to give the alpha a try. I plan to mess with it more in the near future, and I really think COSMIC can eventually replace the "GNOME with a hodgepodge of extensions" which I am using now, perhaps even before it leaves alpha.

< "The standard permits having more than one ESP partition."

Indeed it does, I've done this myself with success. For those who dual boot Windows though, this can be an issue. Windows does not seem to like having multiple ESP partitions on a single drive and sometimes breaks things on installation or updates. I've come to learn that mixing Windows and Linux on one machine is an "at your own risk" kind of situation, and it's usually Microsoft who breaks things, but not always.

Fantastic! Thank you both for the info! Maybe I won't wait for the beta to try it after all, though the idea of running an alpha as a daily driver seems unwise, and to see how it's coming along, all I need to do is follow Liam and others who test these things and write about and/or make videos about the experience.

Thanks for being a guinea pig for the rest of us Liam!

I am very excited to try COSMIC one day (maybe when it's finally in beta), but this article confirms what I suspected, that there is no reason for me to try PopOS itself, the desktop is the only part of it that intrigues me. I'll run it on Debian (work) and Arch (play), assuming it fits my needs/wants.

The reason why I am excited is the built in tiling. I hope there is going to be an option to make the desktop more like Cinnamon or stock KDE, meaning no top panel, with everything combined into a single bottom panel. Being forced to have a top panel is a dealbreaker for me, tiling or no tiling. Currently, I use GNOME with a handful of extensions and tweaks to get as close as possible to what I want, but I'd love to be able switch to COSMIC if it has better tiling than the Forge extension (which it sounds like it does).

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Re: Cartel Is in Full Operation

Any PC purchased new during the pandemic should be officially supported for Windows 11. We have a bunch of Dell laptops from 2017 and 2018 still in use at my place of work, and the 2018 models are supported. The 2017 models are also running Win11 now, but they are not officially supported. We had to jump through the usual hoops to install on those. These machines are all a bit long in the tooth, but with a battery replacement or RAM upgrade here and there, they are still fit for purpose.

Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

< "The biggest problem here is that they only provide support between 9am and 5pm Austrian time..."

This is indeed an issue, but I'd wager that if even a small percentage of Broadcom customers told Proxmox that if 24/7 support were available, they would become Proxmox customers, then Proxmox would gladly expand the support team to accommodate them. If they have any foresight, they are already working on this.

We know 'Linux is a cancer' but could CentOS chaos spell opportunity for Microsoft?

Re: getting ready to move to Debian

< "Isn't it the case that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just another Linux distribution that mainly just builds and packages existing Linux software from third parties?"

Not really, no. Red Hat have many paid developers on staff, writing their own software and making changes to 3rd party software included in the distro. Many of the packages available in other distros are actually developed by Red Hat. They are also one of the largest contributors to the linux kernel and numerous 3rd party open-source projects. They purchase the codebases of proprietary software and use it in house and/or release it as open source. Now that they no longer make the RHEL source code or configuration files available to non-customers, there is no longer any way to truly be sure that everything in Alma or Rocky is 100% compatible with RHEL. Being 100% compatible with RHEL was the main reason people used Alma and Rocky in production, because lots of proprietary 3rd party linux software is only supported on RHEL, so having perfect compatibility was a way for non Red Hat customers to be sure that they could purchase this 3rd party software and be able to run it. Red Hat does not want this, as it cuts into their bottom line, and they will likely do whatever they can to ensure the copycats are no longer compatible, so as to lock in existing customers and draw in new ones. They have made moves in this direction for a while, but it's only gotten worse since IBM purchased Red Hat, 5 or 6 years ago I think it was. Regardless of what their PR teams are pushing, IBM is not really a fan of open source, and they absolutely hate a fair fight.

Re: getting ready to move to Debian

Moving to Debian is a very sensible option, given the fact that Red Hat has made it clear that they want to put a stop to copycat distros like Alma and Rocky. So far, both distributions have been able to work around the roadblocks that Red Hat have put in place, but there is no guarantee that they will be able to continue to do so.

Re: MS Linux...

The difference here is that systemd is available in many (indeed most) linux distributions, as it is FOSS in nature, so systemd itself does not lock anyone into the RedHat ecosystem. I think the comment you are responding to has other quite valid concerns, regarding totally proprietary code being inserted as core functionality into Azure Linux.

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

< "Without affecting their right to keep or bear arms, why not place severe restrictions on ammunition, cartridges, primers and propellant?"

Without affecting their right to free speech, why not cut out the tongues of those who say things we don't like? /s

Re: The unthinkable option...

< "What the military will buy are cheap and cheerful that will meet a minimum spec. They aren't particularly interested in weapons that are built to last..."

Um... No. There are a lot of problems with the (U.S.) military, but underspending on equipment is not one of them. Quite the opposite, really. Any weapons purchased will have passed a ridiculous number of tests in nearly every conceivable condition before orders are placed.

< "On the other hand, the majority of gun _deaths_ are inflicted with the dead person's own gun."

True. It's called suicide, which is a problem that gun control will never solve.

Firefox 130 lands with a yawn, but 131 beta teases a long-awaited feature

< "But I can still bitch and complain, right?"

Yes indeed. It's a fundamental right of all people. I'm not sure I could get through a single day otherwise.

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Re: The Glaringly Obvious

"The 'archinstall' script makes Arch Linux the easiest and best Linux to install and use."

Arch user here. I hope you are being sarcastic? The archinstall script is great, when it works. I haven't tried it in a few months, but it seems they break something new with each new monthly ISO. Sometimes it's a desktop environment choice that doesn't work, sometimes it won't install at all. And the install script is completely worthless if you are trying to dual-boot. I love Arch, but recomending it to anyone who doesn't like to tinker is a bad idea. Calling it "easy" should be a crime.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

Re: ff

That is an interesting omission. The article did mention that you can sign into your Firefox account to sync your bookmarks, history, etc., but a way to import from the browser itself without an account would be appreciated by many, I'm sure.

Re: MacOs Versions

"that is pure BS and you should know that"

You seem to be ignoring the word "officially" in the sentence which you are calling BS. What Liam wrote was absolutely true. The tool you mention is not "official".

This is a valid complaint, but not one that should be directed at browser developers. It's Google/Bing/DDG/etc. who can fix this.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

I came here to say I don't need an LLM to help me call someone a tool, I've been doing it without assistance for decades.

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: 3 years of updates ?

You are probably right about that not being too hard to pull off, but unless the phone runs "stock" Android, a new version will still require resources from the maker of the phone. "Stock" Android on a new device would not sell, as if I understand correctly (I've not used it myself), it's not a very user-friendly experience.

Re: 3 years of updates ?

< "The money to maintain the OS has got to come from somewhere..."

A subscription probably wouldn't fly, but if it's a quality device, I'd happily pay $100 more up front for a commitment more in line with that of the Pixels.