• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Because non-open ones are not available, even for a price. Unless you buy something bigger than the “standard” itself of course, like a company that is responsible for it or having access to it.

    There is also the process of standardization itself, with committees, working groups, public proposals, …etc involved.

    Anyway, we can’t backtrack on calling ISO standards and their likes “open” on the global level, hence my suggestion to use more precise language (“publicly available and sharable”) when talking about truly open standards.








  • Federation is irrelevant. Matrix is federated, yet most communities and users would lose communication if matrix.org got offline.

    With, transport-only distributablity, which i think is what radicale offers, availability would depend on the peers. That means probably less availability than a big service host.

    Distributed transport and storage would fix this. a la something like Tahoe-LAFS or (old) Freenet/Hyphanet. And no, IPFS is not an option because it’s generally a meme, and is pull-based, and have availability/longevity problems with metadata alone. iroh claims to be less of a meme, but I don’t know if they fixed any of the big design (or rather lack of design) problems.

    At the end of the day, people can live with GitHub/GitLab/… going down for a few minutes every other week, or 1-2 hours every other month, as the benefits outweigh the occasional inconvenience by a big margin.

    And git itself is distributed anyway. So it’s not like anyone was cut from committing work locally or pushing commits to a mirror.

    I guess waiting on CI runs would be the most relevant inconvenience. But that’s not a distributable part of any service/implementation that exists, or can exist without being quickly gravely abused.



  • Ask yourself:

    • Where do these stats come from?
    • What do they actually measure?
    • How can the total number of all Desktop Linux users or devices be known to anyone?


    The fact of the matter is, none of these stats actually measure the number of users. Most of them are just totally flawed guestimates based on what is often limited web analytics data collected by them.

    In fact, not even the developers of a single distribution can guess the number of people/devices using/running that specific distribution. A distribution like Debian for example has mirrors, and mirrors to some mirrors, and maybe even mirrors to some mirrors to some mirrors. So if Debian developers can’t possibly know the number of Debian users, do you think OP’s site knows the total number of Desktop Linux users?

    And let’s not get into the fact that the limited data they collect itself is not even reliable. View desktop site on your Android phone’s browser. Congratulations! Now you’re a desktop Linux user. No special user-agent spoofing add-on needed. You’re even running X11. Good choice not following the Wayland fad too soon.





  • I appreciate the attempt at comedy. But I have no problem with Alpine (other than the snail oldmalloc performance). I even contributed a port fix or two.

    The more interesting part that should have been read from my comment was that Chimera DOES NOT use GCC. Not to mention that it ships non-GNU coreutils that are usable by desktop users. While Alpine has it’s GNU coreutils package overriding busybox because that’s what most users would want. So that’s another GNU component any non-meme non-turbo-minimalist desktop user would be using on Alpine.






  • The freeze-the-world “stable distro” concept is an outdated meme, especially when it comes to desktop usage.

    In server usage, at least there is the idea of not breaking things by avoiding major version upgrades of used services/daemons. But even then, freezing the used services alone, while letting other system components have what may amount to thousands of fixes for some of them (and yes, a few bugs), is probably better, at least conceptually. But it’s admittedly not a well supported setup, unless you’re willing to basically maintain a distro yourself.

    And no, the “stable” distro maintainer is not going to magically backport all the “important” changes, unless backport means applying an almost full diff from a later version of the source package.

    (I actually mention this because I remember Debian doing this a long time ago with what I think was ffmpeg. lol.)

    Many desktop users know this.
    Upstream developers definitely know this, and occasionally write about it even.

    (I was a Debian user many moons ago. That was before systemd came to existence, or PulseAudio became default in any distro. Went from stable to testing to sid. Testing was the worst, even stability wise. Sid was the best for desktop usage. Then a sid freeze came because a stable release cycle was near. Went to a rolling-release distro and never looked back.)


  • What’s needed is renewed ethos, not just fresh blood.

    What’s needed is people who actually like the projects, on the technical level, and use them daily. Not people who are just trying to maintain an open-source “portfolio” they can showcase in pursuit of landing big corpo job.

    A “portfolio” which also needs to, in their mind, project certain culture war prioritizations and positionings that are fully inline with the ones corpos are projecting.

    It will be interesting to see how much of the facade of morality will remain if these corpo projections change, or when the corpo priorities and positionings, by design, don’t care, at best, about little unimportant stuff like American-uniparty-assisted genocide! We got to see murmurs of that in the last few months.

    Will the facade be exposed, or will it simply change face? What if a job was on the line?

    I’m reminded of a certain person with the initials S.K, who was a Rust official, and a pretend Windows-user in hopes of landing a Microsoft job (he pretty much said as much). He was also a big culture-war-style moral posturer. And a post-open-source world hypothesiser.

    Was it weird for such a supposed moral “progressive” to be a big nu-Microsoft admirer? and one who used his position to push for the idea that anyone who maintained a classical open-source/free-software position towards Microsoft is a fanatic? No, it wasn’t. He was one of many after all.

    All these things go hand in hand. And if you think this is a derailing comment that went way off the rails, then I hope you maintain the same position about the effects of all this on the open-source and free-software world itself.