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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

    I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

    • Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

    • The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

    Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.


  • I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

    I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

    I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

    I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

    The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.








  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzpuns
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    4 months ago

    I’ve heard it’s a “pets vs cattle” thing. When you have a small fleet of distinct servers, you name them. When you have a thousand interchangeable boxes, you give them systematic IDs.

    Or you scale up to a franchise with a large enough cast. I wonder if anyone uses One Piece character names for servers?








  • The West seems to define “democracy” in a very specific form: there MUST be multiple competing political parties and power MUST, at least in theory (compare Singapore, Mexico, etc) regularly transfer between them as the result of elections.

    This is something Western states have been able to pull off, but it’s actually sort of peripheral to the theoretical INTENT of democracy-- that the government serves the masses. Good governance is pretty much a by-product of the fear of being voted out of office.

    You can, and often do, have the all-sacred elections and peaceful transfer of power and still have a government which isn’t acting in service of its electorate. Sure, you can pick red corporate stooge or blue corporate stooge, but the Overton window is still a narrow slit that represents no real threat to the rich, and factionalism and winner-take-all elections sabotage any actual forward motion.

    Meanwhile, the single-party state, unencumbered by having to tear itself apart in battles for the throne every four years, can focus on consensus and actual needs. Good governance can come from a sense of civic duty, or even a smartly weaponized corruption (if everyone thrives, my cut of graft grows with it!)