BaumGeist

@[email protected]

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BaumGeist,

If I’m going to have a lot of icons on the desktop, I’d want one of the visually uncomplicated ones (top right, bottom left). Otherwise, if it’s just for eye-candy and what I have to see everytime my windows are minimized, I’d either go for mid-left or bottom-right. I fall into the latter category, but y’all in the former may consider that when casting your vote

Slow Nala completions - Janky hack m8 (github.com)

I’ve been using nala on my debian-based computers instead of apt, mostly for the parallel downloads, but also because the UI is nicer. I have one issue, and that’s the slow completions; it’s not wasting painful amounts of time, but it still takes a second or two each time I hit tab. I don’t know if this is the same for...

BaumGeist,

This is a myth that’s been addressed by the project. For starters, there are no disclosures about the amount of nodes owned by the Government/NSA/CIA/etc. You’re probably thinking how the project, in 2012, received 80% of its funding from the US Gov source.

You may make the argument of “follow the money”, or you could also make the argument that this type of tech this widely distributed benefits the government too (field agents for some agencies allegedly use Tor, as do foreign defectors) and compromising the network would lead to a potential vector to compromise their interests.

It’s also worth noting that Tor uses 3 hops (entry, relay, and exit nodes) and you can check the location/IP of your current route at any time to ensure geographic diversity. An actor would have to own all 3 to know what you were visiting and trace the traffic back to you.

BaumGeist,

there is no such thing as a zero-trust society (although I now want to write that scifi story and tease that idea out). As such, the cost of living in a society will always be some amount of infringement of privacy beyond complete anonymity. Even you were comfortable giving your address and name to 4 other parties (under the presumption that only they would use that information), and even then how many individuals within those organizations have access to that information?

Thus privacy cannot be thought of as an all-or-nothing battle. Privacy is a compromise between total anonymity (un-people) and convenience (you can’t get public utilities to your house if they don’t know where you live). The fact is that we have the level of privacy we do right now because of a lot of resistance and hard work. If it wasn’t for all the survivalists and conspiracy theorists and paranoid software devs and whistleblowers and tech journos and anti-authoritarian content creators and anti-surveillance artists and even ordinary joes like me who just want to use online services withouth the digital equivalent of the weird kid in class who stood over your shoulder and watched everything you did (x1000), things could and would be much worse.

If you must think of it as a war, consider it to be analogous to state-vs-collective wars of history: our “opponents” are organizations that are constrained by their hierarchical nature to certain unspoken rules of engagement, and we are a guerilla collective bound only by our shared value(s). Think the Texas Revolution, Vietnam, African National Congress, Zapatistas, IRA, Black Panthers or pretty much anything the Romans did with northern European Barbarians. I won’t sit here and lie to you that the devastation that happened to these peoples and their homelands was “winning,” but I can tell you that the dominators certainly didn’t get their way either.

BaumGeist,

Have only given my real address and name to the DMV, Phone Company, Internet, and rental property

BaumGeist,

I was hoping someone would comment telling me they already read that story! Thanks, gonna read it asap!

BaumGeist,

As someone once said: “The Technical Merits of Wayland Are Mostly Irrelevant”

BaumGeist,

They hated her for she spoke the truth. We (DIY people) hate to acknowledge that not everyone sees value in investing as much time and energy into perfecting their workspaces as the nerds have, and would rather have their tools Just Work™ so they can get to work on the projects they do care about. I say this as someone who still gets frustrated and argumentative when my friends say they prefer spyware-ridden OSes that remove control from the end-user because they don’t require end-user micro-management to maintain and work.

X vs Wayland might as well be Grub vs rEFInd or systemd vs SysVinit to most end-users: it matters from a technical perspective, but most people just want something that will allow them to go about their business without sinking hours into getting the “correct” option to work. And it’s important to remember that we all fall on either side of this divide with some aspects of our life, even if it’s not computer-related. How often do we agonize over finding the “correct” pipe wrench when our sink is leaking, despite what the plumbing nerds would criticize you for using? Do you sink hours into picking the right books on conflict resolution when you argue with your spouse, or do you post on AITA and hope they give good advice? Do you agonize over having all the right utensils and ingredients so you can eke out the most subtle flavors from your cooking, or do you use the pan that you got at the local superstore?

BaumGeist,

For the four groups enumerated in the article, this still is not important. It may affect them in ways they are unaware of, but you will not be able to change their minds using technical arguments at this point if they have not already been convinced by the wealth of information and support that is readily available.

U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050 (www.huffpost.com)

When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very...

BaumGeist,

Anyone still worried about the safety of the method is an ignoramus. “Dying slowly to lung cancer and the environment cooking me alive is so much better than the one-in-a-billion chance of having to eat some prussian blue”

Waste removal is my biggest concern. Unless the plans to expand also come with ways to recycle the waste, we’re just setting ourselves up for giant exclusion zones throughout the globe, most likely in small countries where the plants are imposed on them by foreign economic powerhouses and then they’re told to figure the waste out themselves.

Not to mention “just bury it” is neither futureproof nor is it good for the non-human inhabitants of our planet; sure if those concrete containment cysts in the desert ever fail it will “only” be leaking radiation into the desert, but any desert is still home to hundreds of species of living things and its own complex ecosystem. “Desert” doesn’t actually mean “devoid of life”; there are no good locations to bury it and forget it.

Let’s talk about the absolute devastation mining rare materials does to ecosystems and the exploitation of third world countries that it’s led to. We’re already implicated in so much violence against the earth itself and colonialist exploitation, and I’m supposed to support gods know how much more of that for Uranium from Kazhakstan (45% of the worlds’ production in 2021)? That’s basically begging for more forever wars over energy resources in the middle east.

“We’ll figure out long term solutions after the infrastructure is put in place” is how we got to where we are with fossil fuels AND landfills.

I’ll fully support any plans to make a push toward nuclear, but the foremost concern of that push should be waste recycling. After that’s figured out, everything else is small potatoes. It would even make the long-term costs cheaper than fighting for new material and figuring out million-year half-life hazardous waste disposal. A nearly unlimited energy supply that doesn’t fuel wars and is safer than the current system? Sign me the fuck up.

BaumGeist,

That’s cool as fuck! Now, how do we implement it?

I should have been a little more clear: I’m not worried about a lack of ways to properly neutralize and dispose of the waste, I’m concerned that they will not be implemented because they are deemed unprofitable.

Already the U.S. runs nuclear power, and yet we still haven’t implemented waste recycling (as of 2022 iirc the article I read); why? Presumably because ultimately it does not serve the interest of capital. So get plans to create that infrastructure into effect, and I’ll get on board with any expansion. Until that happens, it’s just hopping on the dick of this new tech because it’s bleeding edge and assuming the infrastructure to handle it will follow (which has worked so well for e-waste and cars and fossil fuels and plastics and…)

Not that sticking to fossil fuels in the meantime is a better alternative. We should focus on energy production that doesn’t have the potential to immediately kill us should the waste-containment fail: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric. Hell, we already have stockpiles of a majorly combustible fluid that requires an ever-increasing amount of energy to harvest, why not exchange it for one that doesn’t also cause biosphere collapse as a side-effect: Hydrogen?

None of these are environmentally friendly either, and so I’d still prefer to see nuclear in the long run instead. Strip-mining Uranium is still better than the massive amount of mining needed to get the rare metals necessary for solar at large scales, wind farms are destructive to local wildlife, hydrogen can explode and needs a constant source of water to produce while requiring a way to dispose of all the sediment generated, dams and massive water reservoirs are a blight on the landscape and disrupt entire ecosystems; I have no clue how geothermal is even harvested, but if the other renewables are anything to go by…

BaumGeist,

Great article, have a few issues with it though:

  1. Google docs are free (as in beer) and collaborative and just about as good, and Minihard’s web interface also works. This still doesn’t account for all use cases, bur that should be about 80% of people who think they can’t live with LibreOffice.
  2. KeepassXC is cute, but not modern because of it’s lack of cross-device sync. I use Bitwarden and it works great. Having options is great. I get their frustration with flatpaks self-contained package formats have only ever given me headaches. Also flatpak isn’t a feature that windows does either.
  3. I have no clue what their problem is with virtualization, but I’ve used virtualbox, vmm, and just the CLI for qemu, and I’ve never had the issues of cumbersome installation or a virtualization disabled error
  4. Speaking of virtualization, I’ve run old software and games with wine all the time. I’m sure there’s some performance hit, but it’s pretty negligible unless you’re one of those people that meticulously tracks performance metrics instead of just relying on feel (cough "5-15% performance hit in games boohoo cough)
  5. *some developers and sysadmins. I know people who act as counterexamples and use linux personally and professionally

Windows licenses are cheap and you get things working out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’ll be productive from day zero… It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
You can buy a second hand computer with a decent 8th generation CPU for around 200 € and that includes a valid Windows license. All computers selling on retail stores already include a Windows license, students can get them for free etc.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand all the previous examples go out the door. All of the aforementioned “benefits” of windows cost money. Adobe is all SaaS, MS office is SaaS, AutoCAD is SaaS, windows itself is arguably SaaS, that hypervisor that isn’t jank is SaaS; those annoying janky hardware solutions that have drivers only for windows charge for those drivers and the bespoke UI programs that control the hardware, the securitybrisks of running XP for the aforementioned costs money, those sysadmin and developer solutions cost money (usually also on a subscription). If you want the well-documented and supported software that brings the streamlined experience that fanboys prattle on about, you don’t go with freeware; windows freeware sucks just as hard in the UX sense while also being proprietary and spying on you/designed only to upsell you to paid. And don’t make me get into the monetary worth of all the data the above programs and windows itself harvests. This rose-tinted windows experience isn’t “cheap” unless you’re in the global top 10-20%, the rest of us make do with freeware that sucks harder than linux. I’m one of the few who are lucky enough to be able to save 25% of my monthly income and some dick behind their keyboard is trying to convince me to throw 2 months worth of that away every year on software that doesn’t do the job better, just more conveniently.

Not to mention the spying! What is this? Stockholm syndrome? Battered user syndrome? Blink 3 times if Windows hits you!

As far as I can tell, most of the actual arguments that hold weight boil down to “For desktops, Windows is superior for businesses and jobs” and that’s not a failure of linux. That’s fine by me if it isn’t profitable, that’s not the point of FOSS. In fact that misses the point entirely.

BaumGeist,

Curious kids, tinkerers and business customers are all other options. Someone might have an app that spams connections to annoy neighbors, someone might be testing their new program/script they wrote, someone might have malware that replicates via bluetooth connections, and yes, someone might be trying to hack into every nearby bluetooth devices. Update your network hardware (modem/routers/wifi APs), don’t accept unknown connections, and you should be as safe as can be expected (unless you’re sysadmin levels of proficient). If the annoyance gets to be too much, just disable bluetooth when you’re not using it (or make it undiscoverable so your devices can stay connected)

BaumGeist,

LibreOffice, it’s way more powerful than OnlyOffice

How so? More features? If so, some people just use a small handful in MSOffice, and just want those for their office clone. Maybe OOP is willibg to sacrifice feature-completeness for a similar UI.

In fact, based on their negative assessment of LibreOffice for not being enough like Microsoft, I’m willing to be that’s the case.

BaumGeist, (edited )

I’m going to ignore your “Planned Usage” section. Why? Because that’s more-or-less about which software you install, not about the distro (well, not if you choose a well-enough maintained distro at least). If it was a question of family of OSes (windows, mac, linux, BSD) that might be different.

You want Debian, here’s why:

I’d like an OS that’s highly configurable

That’s most distros

but ships with good default settings

That’s Debian. I installed it when i was still a newbie to computers in general, and it hasn’t bit me in the ass yet.

and requires very little effort to start using.

See previous answer.

I don’t want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools.

My first Debian was a headless install on my laptop so I could customize the graphical stack. In hindsight, I wouldn’t recommend going that barebones unless you actually do take advice and RTFM. I went without a compositor for several years, as an example of why.

Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required.

On the flipside, Debian has GNOME, Xfce, KDE Plasma, LXDE and MATE as installer options. You can also install any Desktop Environment that works on linux, as it is more higher-level software than OS-dependent software.

Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low.

My other PC is also a Debian (need that on a bumper sticker). It’s my daily driver desktop (the aforementioned headless install is a laptop); I set it up based on installer defaults and have not had to do any low-level maintenance on it for the past 2 years that I’ve had it.

I think that means a stable OS,

Debian is stable af. The downside is that they don’t really have bleeding-edge software on the default Stable repository. Testing is newer, and still 99.9% stable, but also not the absolute newest. Unstable lives up to its name, I’m told, but haven’t felt bold enough to experiment.

Really though, I’m going to guess that any fixed-release update cycle distro will be as stable as Debian, and any rolling release will be about squashing compatibility issues to make sure you can have bleeding edge software. There are some distros that strike a balance more in the middle of those two, so that’s up to your preference and you should probably try out a few before you settle for what someone on the internet says is “The Best.” (The main difference between the others and Unstable is that Unstable is a rolling release, instead of fixed)

a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Apt is mostly a positive experience. As I mentioned, before, using thr Stable repository will ensure updates are stable and don’t break compatibility. I have never had the Pacman experience of not being able to update because there are unresolvable conflicts; the few times I had issues, they were simple enough to fix with a dpkg --configure -a and/or apt --fix-broken install. It can be slow, but frontends like Nala have made that less of a dealbreaker for me.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Debian’s core driving principal is FOSS. You definitely can still download and run non-free software on it, and there’s even a small section of the main repository that includes non-free sofrware, but the primary guiding principles of the Debian repository are the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Note that these principles are more restrictive than the FSF’s definition of Free Software, but the most part there is a large overlap.

Here’s a link to the installation page, which includes links to various installers and the installation guide.

The wiki isn’t as likely as Arch to come up in searches if you just search terms like “linux [software]” or “linux [issue]”, but it’s an invaluable resource, almost as thorough as Arch’s, and the Debian Project’s recommended way for ensuring accuracy to your system.

Finally: I’m going to do that annoying thing nerds online do and tell you that you asked the wrong questions, then answer the questions they claim you should have asked. The linux community as a whole supports and encourages experimentation. You’ll find your journey more fulfilling as a whole if you go outside your comfort zone and try new things, do it differently instead of sticking to recommendations and what you know. I know this message is at odds with how much I’ve talked up Debian, but I was answering the questions you asked.

The truth is that your tools should suit you and your needs and your style of problem solving. All softwares, including the most basic parts of an OS, are tools and therefore benefit from trying different options. Do you want “eh this is okay enough to get the job done” or “this is a fun and fulfilling way to complete projects”?

BaumGeist,

@Lodra

I’ve finished editing my response, I promise (probably). It may have changed “a little” if you already read it when i first posted it.

BaumGeist,

If that’s true, I urge you to submit your findings to the relevant bug bounty program of whichever browser and at least get paid for all the hard work you’ve been doing

BaumGeist,

That’s funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that info was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn’t find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives… and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.

Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.

I think I’ll give it another try and report back

Cross platform terminal emulator?

Is Termius the only cross platform emulator that includes Android as one of the platforms? It is quite good, in my limited experience, but too expensive for a hobbiest. I like that I can use my Linux desktop, MacOS laptop, and Android tablet/phone and the UX is the same across them all. The sync (trial for free, then charge) is...

BaumGeist,

That’s because there isn’t an APK, it’s designed to work with Plasma Mobile, which uses AppImages

BaumGeist,

Ah yeah. Looking back, I see that almost all of them are listed as compatible with android. Station and Clip appear to be the only ones that aren’t.

BaumGeist,

What would happen if Render changes their plans and I lose access to the database? Will I still have access to the last-stored cache on my browser extension and mobile phone?

Yes, the bitwarden client will simply treat it as being offline. You should check the docs on how to migrate to a new server so you can be prepared.

And since I’m running a Rust infrastructure, would it use less of the free plan bandwidth that Render assigns?

No. Bandwidth is up to the network stack to determine, not the programming language. Generally, your app and OS will use as much as avalable unless otherwise throttled.

I just looked it up, and their “bandwidth” is not a measure of bandwidth, but a data quota. The answer is still “no” because it’s about how much data is transferred in total, which has also little to do with the language in this case. Despite the difference of some negligible amount of bytes of overhead, vaultwarden’s limited by the format the database is in. To lower data usage, try reducing how often you automatically sync the clients with your server.

I’m planning to run Vaultwarden on a free instance of render.com, and I wanted to know if this was a good idea? Has anyone over here tried this?

I have not tried this, but i am opinionated: on one hand, self-hosting will always be your most reliable and private option. However, if you have judged other pursuits a more valuable use of your time and mental energy, then it’s probably worth the $20/month (or whatever) if and when your server lands in reorganization jail.

The biggest issue would be your privacy, which almost always goes out the door when money comes into the picture.

BaumGeist,

Here’s a professional security researcher/pentester explaining in depth why “leaking” IP is blown out of proportion

The relevant gist is

  1. The information is usually not identifying beyond general geographic regions (at best)
  2. if your threat model is that strict, there are other ways you should be obfuscating your IP than relying on VPNs, ISPs, and the apps/servers you’re accessing/using.
BaumGeist,

Since someone brought up Obsidian

You want Joplin. It’s a markdown-based note-taking app, so it uses the same formatting as Discord. It’s locally installed so it works offline. It has a mobile version for iOS and android, but also has windows and linux apps. You can have multiple notebooks and multiple pages per notebook, so organization is easy as pie.

Did I mention that it uses markdown, so it exports into multiple common formats; that I’m aware of: JEX (their own) which is just a TAR of the text files and some other metadata, RAW which is the untarred version, HTML, and PDF. It also embeds images, audio, video and PDFs.

It’s also FOSS, and written in javascript using Electron, so it’s more-or-less easy to rewrite any part of it to suit your needs. It is also easy to work with plugins if need be, either from the community or writing your own.

It syncs across clients using some common cloud data stores: Dropbox, onedrive, NextCloud, WebDAV, s3, and their own self-hosted Joplin Server to name the ones I know. Make sure to encrypt. The local files (resources) that are linked in the notes sync across devices too. Web resources stay as links.

It also has a bajillion other features, but I’ll spare you.

No, I’m not getting paid for this comment (Joplin Team, hmu), I just really like this app.

BaumGeist,

Companies in any city when a square millimeter of building isn’t covered in advertisements

BaumGeist,

Gods damn that sounds lovely

BaumGeist,

Is that the Boy Boy vid? Hell yeah. They have a patreon exclusive where they watched Yeonmi Park interviews and she makes the most batshit claims about how post-apocalyptic DPRK is. They do a good job at cutting through the bs fearmongering without dickriding any specific regimes (DPRK or otherwise)

BaumGeist,

I considered myself libsoc but not anarchist for a long time. Still kinda do. I believe in the ideal of a classless, oppressionless, non-hierarchical society, but I’m not out there living that ideal and doing praxis.

If all it takes to belong to any political movement is simply to claim you belong regardless of what your actions say, I don’t care for nor want your meaningless, substanceless labels. On the other hand, if it takes participation, then spending my time arguing online about whose fantasy football team political philosophy is better sure ain’t it either.

Either way, I’m probably just another lib with lofty aspirations. My best hope is that someone reads this, goes “you know what? That jaded shitlib has a motherfucking point!” And then logs out to go be an anarchist instead of just throwing the term around.

BaumGeist,

FOSH

BaumGeist,

Lobotomy

BaumGeist,

I love how much of a kamikaze this is: “yeah that thing LISP does terribly? Non-LISP languages do it too!”

BaumGeist,

Ok… but the comic doesn’t say that…

BaumGeist,

It quite literally says “LISP is ugly and confusing with those endless parentheses” and then fails to refute that claim

BaumGeist,

Does alsamixer allow you to change to the correct soundcard? What does pacmd list-cards output?

BaumGeist,

Looks like some people had success setting their specific model (auto detection failed for whatever reason), try changing to options snd-hda-intel model=mba42 (or model=mba6)—per kernel docs—in alsa-base.conf. This may (read: “probably will”) require a reboot for each model.

Should this not work: we may have to dig into dmesg to figure out where it’s erroring. This is currently beyond my remote troubleshooting ability (I don’t know what I’m looking for, but might know it when I see it)… Also, will you please take note of the output from lsmod | grep ‘snd’ during each attempt, and share what you find if they both fail?

Also per the docs: do headphones still work?

iPod management software for linux?

Is there any decent iPod management software for linux available? I have a 6th generation iPod that I use only for music and it’s really the last thing that I keep my windows partition around for. The more I use linux, the more unintuitive iTunes feels. I had tried GTKPod in the past and one other, but they didn’t support...

BaumGeist,

Rockbox is all well and good until you realize your car’s stereo doesn’t recognize your iPod Classic as a music player anymore. Hours of forum rabbit holes later: turns out it’s special firnware that Rockbox can’t access, and probably won’t ever be able to (unless apple voluntarily forfeits some encryption keys).

Like every other DAP, Rockbox gets your iPod recognized as a usb storage device by most vehicles. For the stereos I’ve used, this is a headache because they needed to index the entire filesystem at an agonizingly slow bandwidth… every time I started the car or had unplugged the iPod. One car slowly gave access to songs as they were discovered, gradually revealing the files to you over time, the other just displayed a message until completed (which hasn’t ever happened, even on hour+ car rides). The same things occured with my Onkyo DP-X1, except that indexing would finish within my lifetime.

It was easiest just to use the 3.5mm jack for the car stereo tho, due to the indexing being required every goddamn time the car turned off or the player got unplugged. Which is a shame, bc my stereo may be stock, but they are quite nice and expensive DAPs (i even tricked the iPod out with an iFlash for SD card capabilities and a custom shell) and should be able to stream digital audio over USB.

What's your favorite Enigma / Riddle / Sentence Puzzle?

Tomorrow is a big event at my university. I’d like to make a fun thing where the people of the Board Game society I am in can try to find me for a riddle, kind of a Where is Waldo in a place where there is a crap tone of people to find the NPC that’ll give them a Riddle (Maybe something to win? No idea how I could do that...

BaumGeist,

Clouds?

BaumGeist,

He got it measured and the other guy’s judgement was simply wrong

BaumGeist,

Undecidable

BaumGeist,

What kind of horseshit twist is that? Are you literally 14, OP? “There’s an immortality pill, but OH NOES 😱 it goes in your BUTT 💀💀💀!!!” Have you considered writing for Black Mirror?

I’m taking it even if it’s the size of a horsecock, regardless of which hole it goes in.

BaumGeist,

It’s $5 for every time you fantasize or $50 (+time and materials) for each video. Either way, pay me

BaumGeist,

This kills the human

BaumGeist,

Thousands of selfless individuals contribute to FOSS
Tech journos: 🥱
Some profit-driven business contributes to FOSS
Tech journos: ✊🍆💦💦💦😩

BaumGeist,

I love how you can tell this was edited by the first dude to pat themself on the back for disliking something benign, and then OP’s comments prove that’s the case

BaumGeist,

Small communities are still meaningful to community members. Cutting off useless appendages doesn’t make a platform worse because “less users,” that’s a “quantity > quality” mindset which has been proven demonstrably untrue by all of the large social media brands that currently exist

Arguably a “meaningless presence on the web” is a good thing, because it doesn’t incentivize people to join who are just in it for the memes and shitposts but don’t give a damn about the community.

BaumGeist,

Yet those platform thrive and grow

Yes because they’ve focused more on quantity than quality.

including Reddit

I rest my case

until you’ve to go into Reddit because there’s no content and/or people here

Idk if we’re talking about the same platform, but the reddit I was on for years had 2 major kinds of communities:

  1. Loud shouting matches with tons of no-effort content drowning out the quality discussions, where people with the worst opinion or stalest jokes struggle to be top comment
  2. Small communities that get a handful of new posts per week, where the community is engaging but relatively inactive.

Now these two aren’t exactly mutually exclusive, so there were small dogshit subs and >100k subs that were enjoyable (as long as you avoided the comments).

What I realized was that the smaller communities weren’t generally better because the people were a different breed, but—because of the slow pace and small size—people didn’t feel driven to treat it like a popularity contest; those who did would get frustrated and act out until they were kicked or blocked by the majority. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it was still better than the large communities.

I’ve blocked !memes, which means I’m limited to the second kind of communities here.

BaumGeist,

Then the problem is that it’s abandoned, not that it has stagnated (which can also be phrased as “stabilized” depending entirely on context and the speaker’s/author’s personal feelings about the project). Once again, I’m not saying that Xorg is good, but that particular critique needs to stop; it’s major flaw is that even the “maintainers” are sick of it and want it to die, not that it has ceased major developments.

Even the article acknowledges this:

Having something as central as the window server being unmaintained is a major issue, as it means no bug fixes, no security patches…

But it also falls into the “Bells and whistles” side of the critique immediately after:

… and no new features

and it even starts of explaining the problems with X by saying it’s in “maintenance mode.” I couldn’t care less about new features, the Pareto principle implies 80% of users don’t need new features regardless of how much dopamine they get from seeing the marketing hype. “Maintenance mode” isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. Abandoned projects that most GUIs still rely on is a disaster waiting to happen.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

That’s an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples. Do I take it on faith that changing code can break things with X? Yes, but I, having worked with code, just assume that’s what happens to all software. Do I believe that Wayland has found a way to do away with that problem of software architecture (and not necessarily protocol architecture)? Not unless they’ve somehow found a way to compartmentalize every single module such that every aspect is fully isolated and yet has interfaces for every potential use case that could ever be dreamed up. Any devs in the comments want to pipe up and let me know how that endeavor has worked for them in past projects?

BaumGeist,

This is an excellent counterexample to claim 1, and I wish this was the top response to my comment. It not only negates the claim that “maintenance mode” isn’t bad, it also provides specific examples of when it is bad.

BaumGeist,

Stop putting words in my mouth. I never mentioned spaghetti code, and i said nothing about being better or smarter than either Xorg or Wayland devs

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