Posts by gosand

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

The only upside I see to this is that it may increase the urgency to improve Wayland. Other than that, it doesn't affect me. But IBMHat is definitely a force in the Linux distro landscape, as is Ubuntu.

Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

Re: Well, in all fairness...

Fair point. ChatGPT hallucinates far less often.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

There was a bit of discussion on the Devuan forum about Pipewire and running it as a daemon. Someone posted a script that can be run at boot time to kill any potentially running instances and start up the new one. I copied that, made a personal tweak or two, and stuck it in my XFCE startup and it has worked every time.

Interestingly, I bought an external DAC/Amp last year and Pulesaudio started giving me some fits. My audio was always just fine before that. So I decided to check out Pipewire. Found some instructions that seemed reasonable - apt commands to uninstall Pulseaudio and install Pipewire.

Worked perfectly, and has been ever since. That is only 1 use case of course, but it's the most important one - mine. :) Again, there's a choice of things to use which is always good because there are many different use cases out there. Some may bemoan there are too many choices within the Linux ecosystem but that is what got Linux here and there is really zero reason to ruin that now.

"Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults."

OK, stealing that.

I've been using Linux on my desktop since 1998, and switched over fully to XFCE in 2010. I don't get the whole push for Wayland, but whatever... if they make it better, it works, and it is stable I would consider using it. As long as I have a choice to NOT use it. Honestly, since IBMHat is one of the main contributors to Wayland I am somewhat skeptical given the whole systemd thing. I have been using Devuan for 7 years now and everything works fine. I don't get why there is a division and there isn't an option to have systemd or sysvinit or etc. etc. Give me Wayland, but don't require it.

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Re: Why?

No it doesn't. Playing chess is simple. Winning is hard. Depending on your opponent of course.

I am terrible at the game, and my intelligence tells me NOT to play chess.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Microsoft - we're all about "could've", not "should've"

It's never been about the users. It's about the companies. That is the only way they keep being relevant. That's why we have Teams, and Outlook, and Excel...

And now with Copilot, it can access all of that for a more copiloty experience across the ecosystem. And Cortana wept.

CISA has a new No. 2 ... but still no official top dog

Re: Чудесный!

"personnel who worked on mis-, dis-, and malinformation, as well as foreign influence operations and disinformation, have been placed on administrative leave"

To clarify, this is just within CISA. Everyone else in the government who worked on these things are still very much employed. Some have even been promoted.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

There are many modern options

I have a Model M (1991 model) that still works with a usb adapter. I love it, but it's just too much. I got started on mechanical typewriters and first computer was a TRS-80. For some things, modern is better!

I dove into mechanical keyboards a few years ago, and they have certainly advanced even since then. Nowadays hotswap is very common - i.e. you can pull out the switches and put new ones in. No soldering required. There are countless variations of switches, but generally fall into 3 categories : clicky, tactile, and linear. For me, tactile is perfect. With each of these, you get into specifics, like spring weight, actuation force, etc. For the boards, there are many many variations from full size (104 keys) to 40% (41 keys). Not only that but with software you can remap keys onboard or program layers and macros. If it is VIA/QMK compatible, you can use non-proprietary software to do it. Yes, you can have it do fancy lighting, I disable that first thing. Then you can get into keycaps - material, profiles, etc.

I currently am using a Zuoya GMK67, I have one at home and one I take back and forth to work. It is wired/BT/USB but I only use wired. It has a media knob for volume/mute, which I love. I have chosen MMD tactile (62g) princess switches and cherry profile PBT keycaps. It sounds great and feels great, which is the most important thing. Curious how far the rabbit hole goes on customization? theremingoat.com has reviewed thousands of different switches. Some keycap sets sell for hundreds. Some custom boards are thousands. But you can get into it for very little, and configure the perfect keyboard for you.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

But enough about twitter.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Re: Jesus is depicted as looking like ...

If that were the reason for it, sure. But it's not.

The nationality/appearance of Jesus is irrelevant anyway, since it's all made up and bastardized over time.

Enlightenment reaches 0.27, continuing its quiet but persistent journey

Never got into Enlightenment.

Started on fvwm on Unix in '93 at work. Didn't install Linux at home until '98. Used Gnome, KDE, and eventually XFCE which I've been running for the last 15 years. I tend to not change unless something better comes along, and although I tried out Cinnamon/Mate, XFCE just works and doesn't get in my way.

Microsoft builds open source document database on PostgreSQL, suggests FerretDB as front end

Re: .........Actually Began To Surface Thirty Years Ago........

This is more than ten, so it's technically correct.

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Re: It ain't going to work

It's simple... because most big corporations want that support contract from a vendor. I have worked for many big corps over the years. For mission-critical things like the OS and databases (among others) they want and need a support contract. They rely on those companies for the hard problems, patches, etc. Many times they will have a policy requiring it. I've seen it first hand with Postgres. Even though we had tons of great DBAs, we relied on the chosen vendor for a lot of things.

That is why their distro was renamed from Red Hat Linux to RHEL back in early '00s. They became a Linux VENDOR for commercial purposes. It's so widely used because there is a company behind it which offers a sense of stability.

(RH 5.1 was the first distro I installed in '98 but I went Debian-based around '05 and am still today)

Researcher bags two-for-one deal on Linux bugs while probing GNOME component

"Originally"? I still use locate. In fact, I overheard someone at work talking to someone else about options for running 'find', and I said "Don't forget about locate" and he didn't know what it was. He ran it and said "I'll have to remember that, you can teach an old dog new tricks". He's a few years younger than me, but higher up and quite technical.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Self-reinforcing

I switched away from FF when it started sucking, and I had been using it since it was Netscape (save a year or so on Opera). But I didn't go to Chrome, I chose Pale Moon. It was great for a couple of years, then I had continued problems with it not working/crashing. I made the mistake of asking about it on their forum, where developers lamented about how users were 'morons'.

By then FF had fixed things and it's been great ever since.

Many years ago I managed testing teams at a large bank, and our platform requirement was to work on FF, but at the time FF wasn't an 'approved' brower. Can't install it, can't test with it. Tools to test on different browers are light-years ahead of where we were then. Not to mention that if things are coded to 'standards' and you don't have custom code, there are many fewer problems. Of course, Google is pushing things down that same road that MS did with IE, hopefully not to the same extent.

Microsoft whips out probe after Windows 11 users suffer the blue-screen blues

Probably not related...

Just spent 2 days with my daugher at university (via phone) because her laptop froze during an update (Win11) and then refused to boot. I walked her through doing image restores, etc. She finally took it to a local shop. I talked to the tech, and he said he has seen a lot of issues this week which was the first week of classes. He said the OS was corrupted and it's getting a re-install now. It's not an Intel (Ryzen 7) and probably isnt related to this story. She had been using the laptop over the past couple of months at home, so I am sure it's just some wild random coincidence. smh

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Can you install another init like in Debian?

You can install Debian without systemd, as noted in their wiki : https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_installation_time

I could only figure out how to do it from the old red-and-blue installer although it doesn't specify that on the wiki. I couldn't seem to get to a terminal from the calamares installer.

So I have Debian 12 running in a kvm with sysvinit.

If Xebian only supports calamares, I am not sure if you can do it. I'm running Devuan, and its updated version based on Deb12 is available. So if my dist-upgrade goes sideways and I have to reinstall, then maybe I'll try out Xebian. Not likely since the last few dist-upgrades have been quite boring and successful.

Good to have options.