• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • I honestly don’t know how this could turn out.

    It could be an amazing change that results in much more progress for hardware acceleration on guests of various types (since that is what vmware is good at) in kvm…

    Or it could mean that they are dropping that feature from vmware altogether.

    Regardless, I like this change because it means I would be able to run vmware machines and libvirt kvm machines at the same time, at least when I am forced to use vmware workstation.

    I also dislike proprietary software in general, so I think less proprietary software and more FOSS is a good thing.



  • I disagree, because they are not the same thing.

    Immutable means read only root.

    Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.

    I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*

    There is also “image based” which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.

    *only really before big updates tbh, but I know some people do configure snapshits before all updates.








  • Stallman doesn’t seem to get that pedophilia is wrong because of the hierarchy of power, and the power imbalances between older/younger people, not because of some inherent wrongness about being attracted to a prepubescent person. This is shown by how he condemns some pedophilia, but is accepting of 12+/past puberty. (I despise this logic, because it would also make gay sex and sodomy wrong, as well).

    I find this deeply ironic, because his primary issue with proprietary software is the way that it gives developers levels of power over users. From his article Why Open Source Misses the Point

    But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove.

    You would expect someone who is so in tune with the hierarchies that appear with software developers, publishers, and users, to also see those same hierarchies echoed in relationships between people of vastly different ages, but instead, we get this. I’m extremely disappointed.

    These failures to understand hierarchy and power, are exactly why Stallman shouldn’t be in a position of power. Leaders should continually prove that they understand hierarchy and the effects of their actions on those below them. Someone who doesn’t understand how their power could affect another, shouldn’t be a leader.





  • As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.

    Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).

    Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of “instability”. Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.

    The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).

    Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu “freezes” a Sid version, and those packages don’t get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.


  • Termux recently got moved off of the play store (kinda), and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.

    And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: “Child process limit”. Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.

    Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn’t bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the “secret” options before eventually removing that dial all together.

    TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing… for now.

    Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.



  • And before you start whining - again - about how you are fixing bugs, let me remind you about the build failures you had on big-endian machines because your patches had gotten ZERO testing outside your tree.

    As far as I know, the Linux Foundation does not provide testing infrastructure to it’s developers. Instead, corporations are expected to use their massive amount of resources to test patches across a variety of cases before contributing them.

    Yes, I think Kent is in the wrong here. Yes, I think Kent should find a sponsor or something to help him with testing and making his development more stable (stable in the sense of fewer changes over time, rather than stable as in reliable).

    But, I kinda dislike how the Linux Foundation has a sort of… corporate centric development. It results in frictions with individual developers, as shown here.

    Over all of the people Linus has chewed out over the years, I always wonder how many of them were independent developers with few resources trying to figure things out on their own. I’ve always considered trying to learn to contribute, but the Linux kernel is massive. Combined with the programming pieces I would have to learn, as well as the infrastructure and ecosystem (mailing list, patch system, etc), it feels like it would be really infeasible to get into without some kind of mentor or dedicated teacher.


  • So I don’t know how much you know about the shell, but the way that the linux command line works is that there are a set of variables, called environment variables, which dictate so me behavior of the shell. For example, $PATH variable, refers to what directories to search through, when you try to execute a program in your shell.

    The documentation you linked, wants you to create a custom shell variable, called SCALE_PATH, consisting of a folder path, which contains the compiled binaries/programs of scale you want to run.

    This command: export PATH="${SCALE_PATH}/bin:$PATH"

    temporarily edits your PATH variable to add that folder with the scale programs you want to run to your path, enabling you to execute them from your shell.