I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.

Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts

I recently started uses dotbot for managing dot files across my systems. It sounds very similar, in terms of the simplicity of the implementation, to yadm. You define a config file in yaml or json and run the “install” script which calls the dotbot utility, passing in your config file. With a simple change to the install script, I’ve been able to create multiple config files, one per environment (work, home, linux, mac, etc.) and I’ve been thinking about how I could automatically sync changes to git whenever I edit a config file. Leaning towards setting up an autocmd in neovim to automatically commit and push changes on save when I have one of the config files open. Just not yet sure how to do this in a way that would only run the sync for the configs and not every json or yaml file on my system. I’ve only ever set up autocmds for specific file extensions but the syntax leads me to believe it’s flexible enough that any arbitrarily specific file name or path could work the same.

This sounds really similar to how I do things but I use Ansible. What are the advantages to something like yadm, that is specifically designed for dot file management, and a generic config management utility like Ansible?

The fact that I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years and don’t know what most of that is seems like an issue…

This is great news! I have always wanted to try Dwarf Fortress but I know myself and I know from past experiences playing ASCII MUDs and rogue-likes that I don’t play them enough to memorize what the different symbols represent and that inevitably causes me to drop the game entirely out of frustration. It seems like a small thing, but having the graphical version of the game on Linux is a huge win to me.

There’s a difference between complaining and providing constructive feedback. This post falls in the former category. If you are a user of a free product and you don’t like how it works, you are entitled to a full, no questions asked, refund. You’re welcome to make suggestions but devs who work hard to provide something at no cost and on their own time owe nobody anything. I’ve seen this play out year after year in the open source community and it’s led to a lot of very good projects shutting down when the developer gets fed up with the demands and behavior of the community of users.

I’m glad to see that. I didn’t follow her on Twitch, but watching that was nice to see.

Damn! I know she was going through some rough stuff in her personal life recently. I fear it’s all connected, though I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

I met Kris a couple of years ago at GopherCon. At the time I was very new to Go and she mentored me early on and was very friendly. She and I worked together during the GopherCon hackathon and produced the early version of a tool that ultimately became Kubicorn.

EDIT: seems like this was a climbing accident. Truly sad to hear. But going out doing what you enjoy… could be worse I suppose.

I run Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air. I have to believe a 2012 Pro would also run it without issue

Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.

Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.

Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?

But if you don’t consent, do they still let you use their services? I’m going to bet that, at best, it’ll be designed to make users think they must consent to use the service.

I love how there’s a whole generation of people who think that we went straight from email to to Slack and Discord. There was a whole, vibrant, ecosystem of XMPP and IRC services before these walled gardens showed up and supplanted open protocols in order to data mine their users.

I’m preaching to the choir in here, obviously, but we’ve been preaching this gospel for years and nobody cared. Not looking so crazy now. Unfortunately, the damage is done. Privacy has lost.

So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.

It’s not necessarily idiocy. Dystopian, yes. And when you consider that the case for it not being idiocy is a government that has created such wealth inequality that people will do this for an extra $50.

The irony of the “compiling software on modern hardware isn’t bad at all” argument for Gentoo is that the same hardware hardly benefits from custom compiled software. There was a time when hardware was slow and performance improvements could be made, but that was also back when it took ages to compile software, so there was a trade off of time taken up front for performance during real time usage.

If you want to learn Linux internals, build a system using Linux From Scratch. If you want a system that’s maintainable and highly customizable, run Arch Linux. IMO, Gentoo no longer really has a niche.

For me the tipping point was when ads started becoming malicious. As long as ads are not static and are being served by unaudited and unregulated third parties, they have no home on my browser. I feel bad about it because I understand that some independent sites legitimately need the revenue but unless they provide information about how they vet their ad providers or they only serve static ads, I’m going to block them.

Part of me wants to believe that this won’t be abused and it’ll actually make the web better. The other part of me knows better.

They could, theoretically, implement this on a way that just changes the pay structure for ad impressions but I think that all that will do is incentivize website owners using Google ads to block or nag “non-compliant” users… but here’s hoping they don’t abuse it I guess because there’s basically nothing we can do to change it once it’s out there. Genies out and all that