pushed useless crap like the activity view to people

This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.

slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.

Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?

They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).

They removed it because nobody wanted to maintain the code, which was generally agreed to be subpar, and it was blocking development elsewhere in Nautilus. They acknowledge it was a dumb idea to implement this functionality inside of Nautilus in the first place when they should have done it in the shell. They realized they were leaving users in the lurch here, so offered a few solutions like installing Nemo Desktop. They even developed a GNOME shell extension prototype before removing it that users could move straight to.

Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?

It wasn’t part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.

Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.

I have a lot to say about the Pinephone, but in the interest of not re-iterating what has been said before, I’ll just say this:

Correctly inserting the SIM card was the most harrowing experience I’ve ever had with a phone.

You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects.

Guilty as charged.

It was interesting to hear your perspective!

I’m a newbie programmer (and have been for quite a few years), but I’ve recently started trying to build useful programs. They’re small ones (under 1000 lines of code), but they accomplish the general task well enough. I’m also really busy, so as much as I like learning this stuff, I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it. The first program, which was 300 lines of code, took me about a week to build. I did it all myself in Python. It was a really good learning experience. I learned everything from how to read technical specifications to how to package the program for others to easily install.

The second program I built was about 500 lines of code, a little smaller in scope, and prototyped entirely in ChatGPT. I needed to get this done in a weekend, and so I got it done in 6 hours. It used SQLite and a lot of database queries that I didn’t know much about before starting the project, which surely would have taken hours to research. I spent about 4 hours fixing the things ChatGPT screwed up myself. I think I still learned a lot from the project, though I obviously would have learned more if I had to do it myself. One thing I asked it to do was to generate a man page, because I don’t know Groff. I was able to improve it afterward by glancing at the Groff docs, and I’m pretty happy with it. I still have yet to write a man page for the first program, despite wanting to do it over a year ago.

I was not particularly concerned about my programs being used as training data because they used a free license anyway. LLMs seem great for doing the work you don’t want to do, or don’t want to do right now. In a completely unrelated example, I sometimes ask ChatGPT to generate names for countries/continents because I really don’t care that much about that stuff in my story. The ones it comes up with are a lot better than any half-assed stuff I could have thought of, which probably says more about me than anything else.

On the other hand, I really don’t like how LLMs seem to be mainly controlled by large corporations. Most don’t even meet the open source definition, but even if they did, they’re not something a much smaller business can run. I almost want to reject LLMs for that reason on principle. I think we’re also likely to see a dramatic increase in pricing and enshittification in the next few years, once the excitement dies down. I want to avoid becoming dependent on this stuff, so I don’t use it much.

I think LLMs would be great for automating a lot of the junk work away, as you say. The problem I see is they aren’t reliable, and reliability is a crucial aspect of automation. You never really know what you’re going to get out of an LLM. Despite that, they’ll probably save you time anyway.

I’m no expert, but neither is most of the workforce (although kernel work is, again, much more in the expert realm).

I think experts are the ones who would benefit from LLMs the most, despite LLMs consistently producing average work in my experience. They know enough to tell when it’s wrong, and they’re not so close to the code that they miss the obvious. For years, translators have been using machine translation tools to speed up their work, basically relegating them to being translation checkers. Of course, you’d probably see a lot of this with companies that contract translators at pitiful rates per word who need to work really hard to get decent pay. Which means the company now expects everyone to perform at that level, which means everyone needs to use machine translation tools to keep up, which means efficiency is prioritized over quality.

This is a very different scenario to kernel work. Translation has kind of been like that for a while from what I know, so LLMs are just the latest thing to exacerbate the issues.

I’m still pretty undecided on where I fall on the issue of LLMs. Ugh, nothing in life can ever be simple. Sorry for jumping all over the place, lol. That’s why I would have been interested in Linus Torvalds’ opinion :)

There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.

The Linux Foundation and Kernel devs don’t really deal with the OS layer much. This is something that would need to be implemented at the desktop environment level; like GNOME or KDE. Neither LF nor Linus Torvalds has any say over that.

After he got a handle on it, Torvalds returned to the kernel. He’s been much more mild-tempered since then. As he mentioned in Tokyo, he won’t be “giving some company the finger. I learned my lesson.”

This is probably a good thing.

Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about “artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what’s the most likely next word that you’re going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant. Do you think we will see LLM written code that is submitted to you?”

Torvalds replied, “I’m convinced it’s gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code.” But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn’t too worried about AI. “It’s clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all.”

Indeed, Torvalds hopes that AI might really help by being able “to find the obvious stupid bugs because a lot of the bugs I see are not subtle bugs. Many of them are just stupid bugs, and you don’t need any kind of higher intelligence to find them. But having tools that warn more subtle cases where, for example, it may just say ‘this pattern does not look like the regular pattern. Are you sure this is what you need?’ And the answer may be ‘No, that was not at all what I meant. You found an obvious bag. Thank you very much.’ We actually need autocorrects on steroids. I see AI as a tool that can help us be better at what we do.”

But, “What about hallucinations?,” asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, “I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that’s why I’m not so worried. I think we’re doing just fine at making mistakes on our own.”

There were no questions about whether maintainers would start utilizing LLMs. The questions were focused on how maintainers would respond to LLM-generated (or -assisted) patches being submitted to them. This attitude seems perfectly reasonable to me, but it would have been more interesting to ask questions about whether maintainers would start using LLMs in their work. Torvalds might have responded with a more interesting answer.

Normally I would retort “But we paid money for it - so they need to support it”

For how long? 15 years? 20? 30? Should they still be supporting Windows 95?

Windows has the longest support period of any commercial operating system. iOS’s longest support period for a phone was 8 years, Android is now 8 years for the new PIxel, macOS supports computers for anywhere between 5-10 years, averaging about 7, and Windows 10 will support computers for 10 years. Previous Windows operating systems have supported computers for even longer, but 10 years is still longer than anybody else. I’ve paid for a few Windows 10 licenses in my time, and I don’t think I’ll ever pay for another one. I don’t use it enough to care about the limitations of unlicensed Windows.

Mind you, we wouldn’t even need to be having this conversation if Windows was free software and some other organization took on the duty of maintaining it. That would be a lot less work for Microsoft and keep Windows 10 users happy. While I’m at it, I’d also like a pony.

When they rugpull Win10 I will just complete move to Linux. The only thing holding me back is some industrial software that I use for work and they’re in the process of multi-platform support.

I’d love to do that. I already use Linux for most of my work, but Adobe not being there means I need to fall back to macOS or Windows for some projects. While Photoshop is coming to the web (someday), After Effects and inDesign are unlikely to ever end up there. I can hope, but I’ll likely be stuck on one of these other operating systems for a long time to come, I suspect.

Maybe Wine will some day support Adobe’s terrible DRM…and maybe hell will freeze over, too.

It took an hour or two to compile and takes up about 5GB of space. The only program I’m really interested in is Xcode, which doesn’t work at the moment.

I don’t see a problem with this business model. They’re doing work maintaining software they don’t want to maintain, so charging for it makes sense. It’s surprising to me that Windows doesn’t already charge a yearly subscription fee for OS upgrades.

Many people aren’t going to pay the annual fee and will keep using Windows 10 without the security patches anyhow, so obviously this will weaken a lot of people’s security, but, well… Microsoft needs to make money. And it’s not like they need to worry about their customers defecting to another operating system. You can’t just download and install macOS on an old Dell machine. If they’re going to buy a new computer, it makes sense to get a less expensive one than what Apple’s offering, ergo they’ll get a new Windows 11 computer.

And if they wanted to and could use Linux…well, they’d already be using it. Overall, I’m completely nonplussed about this announcement. If you weren’t going to pay Microsoft money, nothing has changed. If you need a longer support period, you now have an easy option. And hey, there’s always the chance Microsoft will backtrack and provide free updates anyway. Especially given the lack of details on pricing, it seems like they’re sounding out the idea rather than fully committed to deploying it.

One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.

This is the reason I abandoned both Fedora and openSUSE when I tried them. I like plenty about both of them but things are just simpler on Arch. Despite Arch having less software than most distributions, it tends to be the software I actually want or need to use. The few programs not present can be installed from the AUR. Writing new PKGBUILDs is simple and there is no bureaucracy.

Arch is a pain upfront but I’ve found it tends to save you time later on. It’s not without its downsides, though; the primary one being that I’m the one responsible for managing everything and there are plenty of things I don’t know.

GNOME changed the way I used desktops. Dolphin changed the way I used file managers.

I always set Nautilus to use one-click behavior, but it doesn’t have handles like Dolphin does. And Dolphin has a built-in terminal. And other niceties. I like Nautilus too. I think both desktops have some good ideas and I like to bring some KDE ideas over to GNOME and vice versa.

But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that GNOME is much better designed than macOS.

I like them both. GNOME’s desktop metaphor is nicer but it can be replicated on Plasma with a few shortcuts. Plasma has a few niceties not present in GNOME. GNOME is prettier. Dolphin is a better file manager than Nautilus. GNOME programs don’t have a way of rebinding keyboard shortcuts.

It just depends on what I consider more important at the time.

Does Unity support Wayland?

Nope. However, UnityX, a prototype desktop environment (which will be available as a variant of Unity once ready), will include Wayland support.

I realize the name was likely chosen for completely unrelated reasons, but I can’t stop laughing about UnityX being the only variant of Unity with Wayland support.

No idea. It was the first time I ever used Linux. Ubuntu just booted into GRUB rescue mode after a month, and the only thing I can remember doing is installing another desktop environment. On Arch, I’ve had KDE and GNOME installed side-by-side for years now.

Installed KDE and GNOME at the same time. Ubuntu did not like that.

That’s also my preference, but very few games are free software. And most of the games I want to play are encumbered with DRM or cost ten times as much to get DRM-free. Of course, I buy them DRM-free because the DRM doesn’t work with Wine, but if it worked with Cedega…well, I might re-evaluate.

The purpose of the GPL isn’t to force companies to pay up to get out of copy left.

That’s why it was created, but in practice, many companies make money by selling exceptions. See Cal.com and CKEditor5, for instance. I didn’t mention this at all in my comment, though, so I’m not quite sure which part you’re responding to. By “level playing field”, I meant that everyone can improve Sourcehut and sell a service with more features, but they need to release those new features under the same license, meaning they will make it back to Sourcehut proper. Selling exceptions isn’t the only way to make money from free software.

The GPL is a better choice if you want to make money from the software. With a pushover license, your competitors can extend the program and profit from it in a way you can’t because they aren’t required to give the changes back. The GPL evens the playing field. Of course, you often see the original company requiring a CLA so they retain copyright over all of the code.

On the other hand, it does enable possibilities that you would be very unlikely to get otherwise. For example, Cedega (formerly WineX) forked Wine when it used a pushover license and brokered deals with game companies to make the DRM compatible with WineX/Cedega. That meant you could play these games on Linux-based OSes with Cedega, but not Wine. I really wonder if it would have been possible to make Wine compatible with some of these DRM schemes otherwise. Consequently, however, Cedega could not incorporate any changes from LGPL’d Wine, as that would have required them to license Cedega under the LGPL, too.

That’s another issue. You can incorporate MIT-licensed software in GPL software, but you can’t incorporate GPL software in MIT-licensed software. So going with the GPL gives you more options. As SerenityOS is building everything from scratch, this isn’t an issue, but you can well see how it could be. The LGPL is far less disruptive to people who want to release their software under a pushover license. It only requires you give back any changes to the LGPL-licensed part, and does not cover other parts of your program. Personally, I really like the LGPL. It levels the playing field while being quite compatible. It’s not perfect either, of course.

It’s a tricky question, and there are no right answers. Ultimately, the decision is up to the developer and I can’t fault any choice, including the decision to use a proprietary license.

Microsoft Exchange. For running an email server. It’s easily the most popular use for Windows servers.

In fairness, it’s so there’s a log of why the machine was shut down. It’s for the sysadmins in charge rather than Microsoft. In practice, most people just choose “Other” as the reason so it’s fairly useless. I have no idea if there’s a way to turn it off, though.