Posts by alkasetzer

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Minor correction, you do have vscode (and zed for example) you just have to play the arch and branch bingo to be able to do pkg install vscode (https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode).

You also have chrome (though it's the linux version running with the linux compat layer, here https://www.freshports.org/www/linux-chrome/). This last one has the advantage of supporting widevine (i.e. netflix and etc) with an extra from source build.

One thing that is working much better on this version is gaming (linux drm is on kernel 6.6/6.9 level and mesa is relatively recent 24.1/25.3, plus wine/proton also recent 10/10.20).

I know this is strange, but freebsd is more or less on par with alpine as base running flatpaks.

Kubernetes overlords decide Ingress NGINX isn’t worth saving

And now we'll have to figure out for each of the cloud providers we support (aws, azure, gcp, rh, or wtv other solution clients want to use) what each provide this week as the supported solution, figure out if provides all the used features and keep pace with changes on all.

Yei...

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

True, suspend to ram is broken. Depending on the kernel version I may be able to enter it (step one) and then I may eventually be able to exit suspend (step two) and use the computer with input/output devices (step three).

Linux is usually broken, freebsd is usually broken, osx is almost never broken, windows is occasionally broken (you are always one update away of this state these days).

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

I may be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty sure Windows Classic (i.e. up to XP) allowed you to have dark everything the just by going to settings.

It's sad that the mid 2000's appear to be the pinnacle of personal computing :(

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Re: Here is the problem

That's true, but on the other hand with the current behaviour on the Play Store is that you send a binary, and this is a mix of Java byte code (which is trivial to check) and compiled libraries (not so trivial to check), and as recent news have shown, Google scanners are not very good at picking up malware (and otherwise crap as it's mostly automated).

The registration change will not change any of this for Google and Android. You will still have random malware on play store and you will still have open source apps for which close to no one will see the code (I do check on occasion but on the other hand I don't have many apps installed, OSS or not).

What Google wants to change is that for you to make an open source app (or closed source, doesn't matter) and to share it with someone you will have to register with google even if you don't plan ever to submit it to the play store. Though you can still use adb to install said app.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

I had a toshiba with nub, while it was new i could ignore the nub and be happy but as it got older it started drifting hard. It got so bad that you couldn't use anything graphical without first disabling the thing, sadly there was no bios option for that so i had to resort to use a scissor to split the ribbon cable between the touchpad and the nub to not physically connect the thing.

And I agree with other posters, maybe in the past nubs made sense but in the world of 1080p to 4k screens they are very awkward to use, plus touchpads got much better.

Your use case may be perfectly adequate to nubs so be happy with that :)

Anubis guards gates against hordes of LLM bot crawlers

I've come across this some times in the recent past and this beats cloudflare "capchas" which have a tendency to get stuck in a validation loop and block me out of sites.

So we are trying to solve the issue of bots the wrong way. Login for everything as obviously companies can't be trusted to not exploit "free" stuff.

AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs

Re: only?

Well, most of the cpu issues found recently are mostly problematic for cloud operators and even then only if you share the servers between clients (which is often).

As for running random stuff on the desktop, yeah, that happens all the time (one has to install stuff to work or play or wtv).

These days as long i'm not part of a botnet I don't know what is the difference between having my data at third parties because i use google/apple/ms services or bad operators...

Lenovo shows what a Chromebook packing a MediaTek Kompanio Ultra can do

Re: Calculator

It can be specs like a calculator but if it's close to the 650€ mark it beats all Qualcom stuff because:

* It's already Linux and everything works out of the box (camera, touchpad, wifi, etc)

* Vulkan (venus) and OpenGL (zink) will allow decent performance with either box64 or fex for some light gaming

* The native screen resolution is something that the graphics card can actually drive at a good pace (even if you have to apply scaling to read anything from the screen)

* ChromeOS actually works as an OS (it's your choice of Web, Android and/or Linux apps)

On the other hand, Google is know to bork updates at a good pace, plus it's Google so your data is yours..

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: In six months...

I've seen that several times when using multiple providers. It's the shared data responsibility model.

It's the customer responsibility to setup, correctly backups, the operator responsability is only that you are able to access said backups (not that they will restore your data, you may have misplaced some required key, the system software version changed and is no longer provided and you didn't update when they sent you all those pesky emails telling you it that, etc).

Google's 7-year slog to improve Chrome extensions still hasn't satisfied developers

Although the major part of Mozilla funding comes from Google by setting Google as the default search provider, something that general users actually appear to want, it's also a fact that most of this money doesn't go to the development of firefox.

So if Mozilla drops the ball with firefox development, I consider it highly likeable that it could self-fund via donations and what not.

See: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

Re: Microsoft makes keyboards?

As a owner of one ms keyboard and user of some in the past. Yes, they are boring but (the old hardware before this copilot refresh) good, the old wave keyboards were actualy really nice to use for extended typing.

As for ms phones, I had a lumia 530, from the time nokia was ms, and the phones were nice. The OS (win 8, 7 was crap and 10 was okayish but too heavy) was also much better than it's normally given credit to it. Yes it was "windows" but the ux was actually thought out (and easy to use single handed), in general consistent, which is something that android lacks even today. What it was lacking was apps, which may or may have not been an issue depending on the particular social media poisons one took.

Additional Microprocessors Decoded: Quick guide to what AMD is flinging out next for AI PCs, gamers, business

Correction for standard Z2

Unless AMD materials are wrong the standard Z2 is 8C/16T (i.e. a rebrand of the old Z1 Extreme).

One funny thing is that the old Z1 extreme as 9-30W and these are 15-30. So maybe the vanilla 8040U?

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

Review and accompanying story.

Thank you for making me want yo buy this model, even with a significant other ban on more legos until expansion of places where to put them..

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Redox

Yes. This was obtained by checking the number of contributors to the redox kernel repo. Other repos have different numbers of contributors, the main (i.e. redox) has around 100 contributors (excluding commits for the same person from different emails).

The choice of just the kernel repo was to get a more or less apples to apples comparison with the linux kernel.

Redox

I may be wrong, but isn't the purpose of Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/) to be the Rust OS built on top of Rust by Rust developers?

I understand that the scope of Redox is much more than just the scope of Rust in Linux (i.e. the entire OS vs just the Kernel), even so the metrics for redox are:

* 9+ years in the making

* <50 contributors to the kernel only

So, while creating a Rust first OS (and kernel) is possible, I'm not sure that at this point there is enough developer mass to handle practical use of said OS (i.e. device maintainers). For OSes with a more limited support of hardware we already have all the BSDs (which for the most part work fine), Haiku and all the other niche OSes.

In any case this is FOSS and people are free to do what they want with their time.

Google bakes new cookie strategy that will leave crooks with a bad taste

Hmmm, what about if I store my home folder on a NAS and want to use the same browser profile on different machines (same thing as opening two browser instances)?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: What is unix anyway?

I did something like you are describing, having a dual partition setup (win10+linux) and using virtual box raw disk access, when I was under one OS I just executed the other in a VM. I could then either run applications from within the vm os (using vbox seamless integration).

Then Microsoft released WSL. Afterwards Windows performance got worse due to Defender and so on, so I just ditched the windows partition and started using Office365.

Wine is great and all, but things not always work as they should, and it's sometimes easier to just migrate to another application than working through all that pain.