Hi! Great post, good research with sources, great initiative, thank you. 🙏

If you need to provide tools that cross security boundaries then […] a small web app is better [than sudo].

A web app? Effin really!!? 🤨

Note: this comment is long, because it is important and the idea that “systemd is always better, no matter the situation” is absolutely dangerous for the entire FOSS ecosystem: both diversity and rationality are essential.

Systemd can get more efficient than running hundreds of poorly integrated scripts

In theory yes. In practice, systemd is a huge monolithic single-point-of-failure system, with several bottlenecks and reinventing-the-wheel galore. And openrc is a far cry from “hundreds of poorly integrated scripts”.

I think it is crucial we stop having dogmatic “arguments” with argumentum ad populum or arguments of authority, or we will end up recreating a Microsoft-like environment in free software.

Let’s stop trying to shoehorn popular solutions into ill suited use cases, just because they are used elsewhere with different limitations.

Systemd might make sense for most people on desktop targets (CPUs with several cores, and several GB of RAM), because convenience and comfort (which systemd excels at, let’s be honest) but as we approach “embedded” targets, simpler and smaller is always better.

And no matter how much optimisation you cram into the bigger software, it will just not perform like the simpler software, especially with limited resources.

Now, I take OpenRC as an example here, because it is AFAIR the default in devuan, but it also supports runit, sinit, s6 and shepherd.

And using s6, you just can’t say “systemd is flat out better in all cases”, that would be simply stupid.

Devuan + xfce.

Honestly, if the makefile is well written, I will take that any day. Good makefiles are 😙👌.

They are extremely rare, tho…

I guess the solution would be a declarative language that compiles to makefiles. So that people don’t have to know the nitty gritty of writing good makefiles, and can just maintain a file of their dependencies and settings…

Dans ce cas, le monde devrait être “flashy-vert”. Parce que les français sont partooouut. Partouuuuuuuut, vous dis-je!!!

Mon très cher « La manœuvre Picard », bien que je partage absolument votre avis ; je me dois, à mon plus amer regret, de vous informer que vous avez irrémédiablement et royalement fucked up votre carte.

You’re not on reddit no more, bud

My mom’s chromebook runs Debian.

Umbrella corp. That has to be satire. Right? Right??

All bombings, the court ruled, were ordered by Islamist warlords Ibn Al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif, who have been killed. Five other suspects have been killed and six have been convicted by Russian courts on terrorism-related charges.

Now waiting to see who putin will decide to make an “Islamist warlord” instead of having a balcony, windows, or tea accident.

Update: according to the last news I read, putin decided to make the Ukrainians “Islamist warlords”. Does not matter if it is at all believable or not now, does it? 🤡

If they are shocked by this, wait until they understand what meta does with their PII and behavioural information… I’m sure they will understand any day now. Any day…

Have fun with the initramfs.

The ARM architecture does apparently (I’m no expert) have some inherent power-efficiency advantages over x86

Well, the R from ARM means RISC, and x86 (so, by extension, x86_64) is a CISC architecture, so they are not even in the same “family” of designs.

Originally, CISC architectures were more popular, because it meant less instructions to write, read, store, etc. Which is beneficial when hardware is limited and developers write in assembly directly.

Over time, the need for assembly programming faltered, and in the 90s, the debate for CISC vs RISC resurfaced. Most developers then wrote code in C and C++, and the underlaying architecture was losing relevance. It is also worth noting that due to a higher number of instructions, the machine code is more granular, and as a result, RISC code can inherently be further optimised. It also means that the processor design is simpler than for CISC architectures, which in turn leaves more room for innovation.

So, all else being equal, you’d expect Qualcomm to have an advantage in laptops with this chip, but all else isn’t equal because the software isn’t there yet, and no one in the PC market is quite in a position to kickstart the software development like Apple is with Macs.

Now, a key consideration here is that the x86 architecture has been dominating the personal computer market for close to half a century at this point, meaning that a lot of the hardware and software is accommodating (wrt functionality, optimisation, etc) for it specifically.

Therefore, RISC architectures find themselves at a disadvantage: the choice in Operating Systems is limited, firmware and drivers are missing, etc. Additionally, switching to RISC means breaking legacy support, or going through emulation (like the Apple M3 does).

However, in our modern ecosystem, the potential gain from switching to a RISC architecture is considerable (storage is cheaper than ever, RAM is cheap and fast, and seldom anyone is writing assembly anymore. Plus, those who do might enjoy the higher degree of control the additional granularity affords them, without having to do everything by hand, given the degree of assistance modern IDEs offer), and it will gradually become a necessity for every vendor.

For now however, the most popular computer Operating System worldwide has poor performance on ARM, and no support for other RISC architectures (such as RISC-V) that I know of.

The challenge here is in breaking a decades long dominance that originated from a monopoly: if you have paid attention to what Apple has been doing, they initially used large parts of FreeBSD to build a new Operating System that could run on their custom processors (Motorola 68k), and then built the rest of their Operating System (Darwin and Aqua) on top of it. This afforded them the possibility to switch to Intel CPUs in 2005, and back to ARM in 2020 with their M series CPUs.

The quality of their software (in large parts derived from the quality of free software and of staggering design work) has allowed them to grow from a virtually negligible share of computer users to the second place behind windows.

Now, other Operating Systems (such as Linux) have the same portability characteristics as FreeBSD, and can feasibly lead to such a viable commercial OS offering with support for several hardware architectures.

“All” that is needed is a consistent operating system, based on whichever kernel fits, to supplement MacOS in the alternative offering to windows.

Most software would be available, and a lot of firmware would too, thanks to ARM being used nearly exclusively in mobile phones, and most mobile phones running a Linux kernel.

Once we have a (or better, a few) Linux or BSD based operating system(s) with commercial support, consistent design, and acceptable UX for “normies”, such CPUs will become a very valid offering.

Yeah, getting old sucks. I’m still 25 in my head, but my body constantly reminds me that I’m over 30, and that it is slowly falling apart like a decrepit abandoned car.

I guess what I was trying to say is: we have crossposting between communities, what prevents us from crossposting between years as well? :)

This repost is so old that it is the very first tab in my browser. For the record, I have [~] tabs open. I have had [~] tabs open from some time in 2023. That’s how old it is.

Yeah, that one hurts actually. Like, they lowered the bar so we would feel proud for anything, no matter how trivial. And yet, the bar was still too high. 😐

redacted

And they must be local rather than remote (cloud).

Also, always prioritise a common format served through filters (for example having all your data in postgres and minio, and serve that on demand as ICS, XML, etc) so that you don’t need to duplicate or lose data due to formats.

Spez could learn a thing or two from russia. That is not how one uses kompromat…