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Cake day: August 28th, 2024

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  • Anyway, the point is: if it works, then it’s good. Rust does not make Linux worse. If anything, it makes it better because it makes it more accessible to programmers who know Rust but not C. And that’s a good thing. It ensures the Linux kernel will be around longer than whomever ends up being the last C developer.

    Nobody is going to rewrite the entire kernel in rust. Parts of it are still written in assembler. It’s well over 30 million lines of code, 60% of it drivers. You can’t just go and rewrite that in a different language, hell it doesn’t even compile on the wrong C compiler version. You would need access to the hardware and run tests for every module you change at least or risk breaking stuff in production.

    C programmers will always be around since they are necessary to keep the old code running on newer hardware. There are thousands of companies relying on the Linux and BSD kernels, for example every network router, switch etc.

    I have nothing against rust, but there is always a danger of having too many programming languages used in the same project, especially if a error in one language can break something in a module written in the other. That’s just a nasty complication, especially for a time critical project like the kernel.


  • sysV is the init system linux distributions used before systemd, openrc, upstart, runit, smf etc. It’s pretty much the old daddy and comes from Linux unix roots. Even MacOS used it before they made their own called launchd.

    S6 sounds like a update to it since the capital V in sysv stands for the Roman numeral 5.


  • It seems absurd how it is possible for a single person to incorporate the innumerable components required for functionality in a personal system that does not crash 100% of the time due to countless incompatibility errors that come with doing something like this.

    It’s really just the package manager. Every package has a description that tells the package manager what it provides and what it needs(called dependencies). So if you tell it to install X, and X needs y and z to function the package manager will automatically pull them in as well as their dependencies. It’ll also know to avoid incompatibilities the same way, the packages themselves contain the information.

    90% of the real work in making a new distro is packaging, I.e. finding a way of feeding the package manager the information it needs to do its job by creating the packages. 0.1% of arch users deal with that shit.





  • Huh, didn’t even know my country had a sovereign tech fund. Looking more into it … yeah. It gets money from the federal government but it is in no way run or even associated with it. Looks like a GmbH is behind it, which is a for profit company in Germany. It has a volume of 17 million €.

    Also its name is literally sovereign tech fund, even in German, I.e. that’s not a translation, that’s its literal name. I wouldn’t say it’s sketchy, the people behind it definitely look legit, but it certainly doesn’t quite meet the lofty associations the name suggests.


  • I get visits multiple times a month because a Eula or something shows up on phones or tablets asking them to accept whatever. You know, the stuff nobody reads and just clicks accept on. Old people sometimes have trouble discerning where messages come from, anything from a pop up to a disclaimer for an update is “my phone asking me something”.

    Chrome OS is still corporate BS. They will manage to confuse people with legalese. I have elder neighbours come to me confused that were literal pages into that BS. I always tell them they can just accept everything google/microsoft/apple asks of them, but that’s the problem, they can’t tell where it’s coming from. To them it’s just a legal contract showing up when they wanted to read their mails, it’s scary and they rather want me to check everything is ok.

    Aurora is better for them. No legalese pop ups, fully automatic updates(no “click to accept”, “when do you want to schedule the update” or even an info that an update happened). I just tell them to make sure they turn off their PC at night and they will boot into the update next morning, never being the wiser. It just works.


  • Careful with gnome, it works for people that are unfamiliar with gnome, if you use extensions. Then gnome updates, the extensions break and you have to come over do maintenance, maybe use a different extensions which will look slightly different, throwing them off.

    And yes I’m talking from experience. It’s bad because there is no easy fix for a broken extension, you essentially have to wait till the author fixes it. It was dock to dash in my example.

    For old people you need point and click and the thing they have to click on should be permanently visible. They often do not understand the logical separations with virtual desktops and things showing up on screen only sometimes can be confusing. It’s easier if they have an area that’s always the same.