Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their “standards” are blocked behind paywalls and can’t be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here’s a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

Does this mean we can freely distribute Tintin in Thailand now? Outstanding piece, everyone should read it!

I’m working my way through Valheim. I started last year and then stopped shortly before fighting the second boss and never got around to picking it back up. Now I’m back at it and working through the third biome. I still have a long way to go and hope that I can continue to sink at least 100 more hours into it.

I also got Metro 2033 and Last Light on the Steam winter sale. I started Metro Exodus a few years ago and also stopped pretty early, so I’m hoping that this time I can stick with it through the whole series. I also got Grim Dawn and it doesn’t play great on the Deck, but hopefully I’ll be able to get used to it with a bit of effort.

Outside of those, Wildermyth and Brotato are my main chillout games and I’m pretty sure they’ll also get 50-100 hours each this year.

Looks like there’s been plenty of recent updates to me: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commits/master/

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the stupid animations. They also happen when moving a window to another virtual desktop, or when you minimize it. Complete waste of time and they just cause me to forget what I was trying to do or why.

Also, on the topic of minimizing windows, I also hate the dock concept where all the windows are grouped together. I like having a taskbar with a full list of windows so I can see how many are open. If I see too many that are open, I start closing the old ones that I don’t need anymore, which helps me stay organized. This is much harder to do with a dock instead. But once again, it’s just a matter of preference!

Once, when I started a new job, I had to use an Apple laptop until my Linux laptop came. While the Apple laptop was better than I expected, it was still one of the most annoying weeks of my life. The most unbearable part was the keyboard. I could never tell which hotkeys used ctrl and what used alt, and it just wasn’t worth the effort of remembering the differences or remapping them.

But besides that, after using Linux for 15 years, the very basic levels of configurability that the Apple window manager provides just made it look like a child’s toy compared to Linux. In Linux, there are so many different window managers that it becomes very easy to customize an environment that works perfectly for you. With Apple, you just get what you’re given and if it’s bad or doesn’t work well for your habits, then tough luck, you’re stuck with it anyway. So in that respect, Apple computers don’t work at all - you work for the computer, whereas it should be the other way around.

But at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is the fact that people just like what they’re used to, and it sucks to change. What’s best is a matter of preference; none is better objectively better than the other.

Except Windows. Fuck Windows.

Sorry to hear about the network manager issues! I could be wrong on this, but I think Gnome is not the best supported DE in void - possibly because of how heavily tied it is to systemd. I wish I could help, but I still configure my wifi using wpa_supplicant.conf. Maybe dbus wasn’t setup properly?

Regarding audio, the pipewire documentation for Void is pretty good. It’s pretty thematic of the whole Void linux experience: you have to read the handbook and follow its steps closely, but it’s very well written and easy to understand. It can definitely be time-consuming as well though.

Void is definitely all the things you mentioned. I installed it on a few machines, the first in early 2020 and it has never given me an issue. Extremely stable and boring. I’m impressed that it has so many packages in its repository, but that’s a testament to how well xbps is written. But there are a few things missing since it’s fair from the mainstream, including packagekit. I had never heard of it before you mentioned it - I found a fork on github to support it, but it doesn’t look very well maintained.

As one of the dozens of Void Linux users, I too find this very offensive!

(But hey, at least we’re getting some attention, which is nice…)

Yes, the install process is difficult to perform. But once you do it, you’ll feel like a wizard. You learn so much from the process if you do a manual chroot install. It helps you understand how the installation process for other distros like Debian works. If you have some free time, I would recommend trying it in a virtual machine.

The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.

Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.

You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.

Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

The comic states that Firefox is a crown jewel of open source, not the crown jewel.

That said, I agree that if I had to pick only one, it would definitely be Linux over Firefox.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.