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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.

    It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.



  • I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).



  • I did start with it and use it on a laptop, honestly I think that’s where it shines the most - but I guess the more windows you open the less useful it becomes. I think if there was a way to do the expose-like “view all things at once” (Super key) that worked across all workspaces, I’d be all over them. But as there’s no easy way to live view everything on all workspaces, I just don’t use them.


  • Yes, I love it! Really it’s the MacOS-like “Expose” feature that I find to be essential.

    I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I’d really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it’s great.

    My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it’s really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

    1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
    2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
    3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
    4. Communication - signal, discord, what’s app (ugh), etc.

    The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it’s all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

    On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

    It’s replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they’ve made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

    The things I’d really love added to it are:

    • Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It’s a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
    • Super then Search, I’d like it to filter the windows it’s showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
    • Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
    • Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
      • Super
      • Sp… (auto-populates Spotify)
      • Tab
      • P… (auto-populates Play/Pause)
      • Return
    • Session restoration - it just doesn’t work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don’t. Some go to their correct position/size, some don’t.

  • Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)

    A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).

    But it’s amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn’t really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it’s not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!

    In some ways I think Linux has lost that “wow factor” that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.


  • I don’t think consolidation, compromise, and coming together in one common direction are the hallmarks of open source at all!

    Filesystems, service management/startup, audio output, desktop environment, package formats/management/distribution, programming languages, shell, and so on, and so on - all have many, many options.

    Open source is, if nothing else, fractured… it’s about choice, flexibility, and re-inventing the wheel not because it really needs to be re-invented, but because it’s fun to do so and useful to have something that perfectly fits your requirements.

    We’ve made room for many package formats for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come I’m sure.



  • I chose Ubuntu for my desktop/laptop because I chose Ubuntu for our servers. While we now have the servers setup such that we hardly touch them directly, I’ve found it to be incredibly valuable to be using the same technologies, tools, and processes daily on desktop as I need on our servers.

    It boggles my mind how many organisations I’ve worked for that almost exclusively develop for Linux deployment use Windows as their primary desktop environment. It causes nothing but trouble. We’ve got Windows if we need it, I’m a big proponent of the best tool for the job - and what the company paying wants! - but Linux is our primary desktop environment.



  • vampatori@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.mlGood printers?
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    1 year ago

    We’ve got some Brother laser printers at work and they’ve been great. We get third-party toner from a local company for peanuts too, as well as sending them the old cartridges to reuse/recycle. If I ever need a printer at home, this is the route I’ll go!

    EDIT: Also, checkout company closing auctions (there’s a few around again!) and you can pick-up some decent office stuff including printers for cheap!



  • I think the most interesting thing out of the Red Hat/CentOS/downstream thing was that Red Hat used the absolute classic argument against FOSS - “they’re getting value out of this without contributing back”. The argument that Red Hat themselves spent so long fighting against and building their company around proving that argument wrong.

    I think it shows a shift in mind-set, perhaps born from the IBM purchase, perhaps as they start to feel the squeeze, and that they no longer fully believe in FOSS.

    But it’s early days, only time will tell - certainly there seems to be a fair few shifts going on at the moment though!


  • I think all the flexibility and distributed nature of open source is simultaneously it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to do so much, to tailor it to our specific needs, to remix and share, and to grow communities around common goals. But at the same time, those communities so rarely come together to agree on standards, we reinvent the wheel over and over, and so we can flounder vs big corporations with more clearly defined leadership. Flexibility and options seems to lead to an inability to compromise.

    But also I think open source and standards have become a battleground for Big Tech, with different mega-corps looking to capitalise on their ideas and hinder those of their competitors. Microsoft trying to push TypeScript into the ECMCA Script standard, Google trying to force AMP down our throats, Apple saying fuck-off to web standards/applications, the whole Snaps/Flatpak/Appimage thing, WebAssembley not having access to the DOM, etc.

    I think one of the great things that open source does is that it effectively puts the code in people’s hands and it’s up to them to get value out of that however they can. But so often now it’s these mega-corps that can garner the most value out of them - they can best market their offers, collect the most data to drive the software, bring to bare the most compute power, buy up and kill any threats to their business, and ultimately tip the balance very firmly in their favour.

    Open source software needs contributors, without them it’s nothing - sure you can fork the codebase, but can you fork the team?

    Most people do the work because they love it - it’s not even because they particularly want to use the software they create, it’s the act of creating it that is fun and engaging for them. But I wonder if perhaps we’re starting to cross a threshold where more restrictive licenses could start to gain more popularity - to bring back some semblance of balance between the relationship of community contributors and mega-corps.


  • I used it for about a year and it was good - I had some issues with some bits of my laptop hardware working out of the box, and I sometimes got into an error when doing an update due to mirror synchronization. If you use see an error similar to this, just give it a while before updating again:

    Downloaded data exceeded the expected filesize
    

    In the end I moved away to match my server environment. Initially to Fedora (CentOS server) but then to Ubuntu (I was mid upgrading from C7 to C8 when Red Hat cut the C8 SLA and discontinued it, so I jumped ship). Both Fedora and Ubuntu are really solid and support absolutely every feature of all my hardware out of the box - I’ve come to really appreciate their stability now.


  • It does feel like there’s been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there’s been a real move to have their cake and eat it.

    Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they’re now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don’t want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I’ve done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.

    Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it’s amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.

    But I think it’s time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.