Posts by JibberX

DOOM soundtrack added to National Recording Registry

I don't think I've ever heard the Doom soundtrack as my PC at the time didn't support the audio for whatever reason (which I've never bothered to think about for over 30 years)

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Using these programs and 'protocols' in a bandwidth starved environment seems utterly negligent.

Something ncurses and y'know simple surely makes sense, just on power and ease use in a Borg attack or whatever?

Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive

Re: XFCE "faster"

With the magic of Linux we are right in the weeds instantly.

Is the desktop environment the programs that come with it? Or am I muddling this with a "Window Manager"?

This is quite an instant rabbit hole!

It reads like you are burdened with the historical knowledge and the nitty gritty of what's happening underneath.

As an unashamed RISC OS fanboy, any of these desktop environments are utterly bonkers and Linux itself is just a giant blob of stuff.

There was me in the early days attempting to run Blackbox on a custom rolled Linux kernel to save the MBs on a crusty old, I want to say, 486 ThinkPad laptop.

Given I now run a laptop (AMD Framework) that has a GPU that can run PS4 games on a windows compatibility layer, a few GPU cycles to open a window isn't really touching the sides.

XFCE "faster"

Quote: "For us, Xfce is the sweet spot in the world of Linux desktops: all the functionality and customizability of the more famous desktops, but smaller, simpler, and faster. "

What metrics do you have for "faster"?

Is it lack of animations or something, I'm interested to know.

Re: Time for a Change

Hopefully some helpful advice from someone who has been on this journey...

Fedora is great!

They had some bust stuff for me for a few major versions so I moved to Cachy which isn't as scary as you'd think

Cachy has a genuine vanilla Gnome experience so Console is Console and not Terminal that's actually Ptyxis etc

However curiously, Arch and as such Cachy is a little conservative with Gnome release so only the "gnome-unstable" repo will get you 50 for now (and the ability to change the start day of a week, huzzah!)

Cosmic and Gnome, on Fedora and Cachy, don't play together so installed on the same setup Cosmic will steal icons and change the window furniture without asking (as least the last time I had a play - you have to go into Tweaks/Refine and set it back)

If you are used to Gnome and smashing the mouse into the top left corner and getting the overview then Cosmic might be a little disappointing (as I've now programmed this into my genome)

Cosmic had a real funkiness about icons on Flatpaks not being right in the places you would expect, but I've not checked in for a while but it bugged me out.

Limine will change your life and is default on Cachy, it just makes btrfs make sense.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Flatpak FTW

This article made me realise that Waterfox do a Flatpak which as I am in Fedoraland is good for me.

For those who develop HTML locally, always remember to allow filesystem access (using Flatseal) to wherever you are comfortable, that's a real oddity of browser permissions out of the box.

(I'm sure Flatpaks are evil somehow, but I live with it)

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: Deranged

Strongly worded but accurate.

To frame the article around the idea that blue checkmarks were anything other than completely randomly assigned is either shockingly naive or deliberately misleading.

India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering

"GCC" Definition Outdated?

"Global Capability Centers (GCCs) – the term for offshore tech teams multinationals create to serve their global needs – are a major source of IT jobs in India."

GCCs in India handle a range of "functions", including:

Research and Development (R&D)

Information Technology (IT)

Finance

Human Resources (HR)

Analytics

Yes, your people people are now outsourced - the snake is eating itself.

Not in my browser! Vivaldi capo doubles down on generative AI ban

Re: Good show

FreeTube on desktop and NewPipe on Android too

(Parabolic on Gnome for the GUI)

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

GOV·UK A·OK?

GOV·UK has a superficially consistent design, I know once you get past that layer its a little wild west, but its something.

I mean the fact there are about 84 entry points to my personal tax page and each page says something different depending on what the weather is, is another thing.

Bland but consistent.

I can only imagine what a smorgasbord board of technical and visual horrors the real (USofA)·GOV has, I was potentially stuck up a mountain in Feb this year in CA due to a surprise snow storm and there were at least 3 official sites offering up to date info on road closures and snow chain usage and well... total guess which one was right and if it worked on Mobile or if it was all a mirage.

Windows 10 @ 10: How Microsoft led developers round in circles

Windows 10, the last Windows you'll ever install.

Possibly not in the way they anticipated...

The end user bullying to 11 and general deployment of non optional features (to a maniacal level, even for MS) means I'm going to spend the weekend installing Fedora on my folk's laptops.

New GitHub Copilot limits push AI users to pricier tiers

Re: What are people using AI for anyway?

I've recently had the scales fall from my eyes with "AI" coding. (Once you get over that "AI" means anything and kinda live with the marketing buzzword)

Killer apps so far are:

- Reducing mundane tasks leaving time for improved (or actual) testing

- Working across multiple repos for code discovery

We work with over 400 repos with a similarish codebase, no doubt there are ways to manage that differently, but this is over 10 years+ of tech debt.

Yesterday I spotted a funky implementation of something, knew we fixed it somewhere else, ask the "AI" to find other repos with it and apply the fix to them - this is like a one liner brain fart that just seeped into production as it was empirically a totally solid solution.

Naturally it needs proper testing as no doubt each repo has a slightly different spin, but that'll be surfaced through testing.

This all happened while I was doing other stuff - "just" have to review the changes.

The IDE integrations channel your thinking into per repo usage and the power is in using "AI" across your entire codebase.

It's worth researching "AI" tools that can sit outside of a single repo.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

The kids use w3m these days (I think).

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Octogenerian Desktop Management - Living la vida Web Browser

My folks are both on Win 10 laptops and are both being cyber terrorized to upgrade to Win 11.

I KNOW that an in place upgrade to Win 11 is gonna be like replacing the laptop with a 10 year older machine.

As a daily Fedora guy I'm considering going that way as it'll be faster to fresh install that than the cycle of pain of either an in place upgrade to Win 11 - why is random stuff not working - to a fresh install loop, plus the joy of finding whatever files they've put wherever.

The only remaining hump is that Fedora isn't super keep on unattended complete remote desktop access... Its either beause its super secure, simply poorly thought out or deliberately obtuse... Y'know... Linux! Yay!

The other thing is the folks basic reality is most of their activity is web browser based, so that is OS agnostic making the shift less painful either way.

Figma bucks market trends, plunges into IPO waters after Adobe's failed buyout

Just use Inkscape kids, it's basically there, once they added Pages (Multipages) it has all I need plus y'know the idea that I have some files and a program I can use indefinitely for free....

I do see the benefit of online collaboration but that's like a 1% of the time problem.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

I've become a Gnome guy, or maybe its Fedora guy I don't really know.

I would be a Cosmic guy (PopOS! version, not the well meaning Fedora attempt) but I haven't quite cracked Printers, specifically WiFi printers - Gnome and/or Fedora makes that happen without thought.

I'm very much from the world of never really getting on with the Windows 95 Start menu paradigm - even though I suppose Gnome's app launcher is just that but simple.

My day-to-day reality is living in a web browser plus some light programming, hobbyist game development, classical file management, calendaring, proper email and note taking - its been 40 years of computing and that's basically it plus the occasional db sniffing and installing random things to make sure they do what I think they do outside of whatever is going on in cloudland.

One feature I'm still not sure doesn't exist in the macOSish touch pad gestureverse is why there isn't a simple alt-tab equivalent that simply swaps the last 2 applications - the fully jazzy super overview is just mind bogglingly overcooked if you happen to have 10 windows milling about.

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

Yes, I'm the Fedora GNOME user, and yes I like them both. I await the lynching.

Nautilus (or "Files", some classic Linux naming muddling) is hot rocking for what I need.

The writer seems to maybe be confusing GNOME 47 stuff with Fedora 41 stuff, other than a few tweaks and twonks I thought Fedora's GNOME was pretty vanilla, I've even given GNOME OS a punt to be sure.

I may have some buyers remorse on btrfs but I like to keep things vanilla (Hence GNOME affability I 'spose)

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

Re: Actually the Good book says ,,,

I dusted off my login to upvote any reference of this kind.

More please.

Free-Teams-gate: Docker apologizes for shooting itself in the foot

The cloud is just someone else's computer.™

Intel settles to escape $4b patent suit with VLSI

VLSI isn't famous for being one of the founding members of ARM? Weird vibes...

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

The Internet...? Or the World Wide Web?

I know they talk about BGP shenanigens but still, its just affects people looking and animated GIFs in Netscape right?

Lenovo ThinkPad X390: A trusty workhorse that means business but it's not without a few flaws

Lenovo X250 Owner Report

Bought an X250 (new, back in the day) thinking of IBM levels of reinforced concrete, instead I got a flaccid plastic bag with some components inside.

Keys around the nipple were broken on arrival, so not great pre sales checking... WARRANTY

X250 returned using UPS who are systematically worst package company I've ever dealt with in my life over the years, no option to use another courier.

X250 arrived back, internal battery not plugged in.

Day to day use, the laptop screen was being eaten by the palm rest, the chafing on itself in a laptop bag leaves a nice groove on the screen... WARRANTY

The self eating continued after the replacement screen was fitted. I think it was designed for the glass touch screen not the plastic screen I opted for so...

Couldn't be bothered with warranty anymore, so I have a slight crap screen, and now it runs without too much incident.

Be nice to spend a grand on a machine that didn't eat itself.

Sadly Lenovo appear to be the last sturdy(ish) manufacturer after Sony and Tosh capitulated.

It was a toss up between an X250 and a Dell XPS13, I will never know which was the better option.

Pros and cons.

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

Re: IP52

I bought the 8110 4G recently, screen scratched on the day of purchase. Must be all the diamonds (pocket grit, plastic screen) in my pocket?

Wish I'd seen the Cat before I impulse bought.

4G hotspot works abroad without buying extra tethering, so saving me a fiver a day already.

Removable battery on the 8110 might be good if I could find replacements, over the Cat, but that has 600 extra mahs.

Google kills AdWords!

Someone should tell Google Ads that they are a different company these days to Waymo... I guess they use the same designer...

Android devs prepare to hit pause on ads amid Google GDPR chaos

Wet fart

So as with other regs of this nature its complete unpolicability and likely nonenforcability will mean no one will know what to do, when to do it, and why.

Whilst its panic stations of the next fortnight, when's the first nonconformist going to be in the dock? 5 years?

Is the information commissioner really going to be able to enforce any of this?

I've read people likening this to kitchen hygene and so on, but its really just a confusion inducing mush.

Google are just riding it out until everyone realises GDPR has no teeth.