Feel free to email me at hn [AT] clobberella [DOT] com
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- I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
- > BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
- I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.
- > Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.
- I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
- Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
- You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
- I think people should also give Bowler Studio a shot. It has a pretty decent Java-based CAD thing, and it even has built in Clojure support, with physics simulation support and everything. I really like it.
- Forgive some ignorance, but we use Graphite at work, and I don't dislike it or anything, but I haven't really been able to see its appeal over just doing a PR within Github, at least if you exclude the AI stuff.
What do you like about the non-AI parts? I mean it's a little convenient to be able to type `gt submit` in order to create the remote branch and the PR in one step, but it doesn't feel like anything that an alias couldn't do.
- It wouldn't bother me as much if you could still buy media, but as far as I can tell most TV shows don't get Blu-ray releases anymore. The media companies realized that it's more profitable for them to make you pay for the same media forever instead of a lump cost, I guess preferably with you watching corporate brainwashing to buy products.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
- Not the person you're replying to, but it just feels like rent-seeking. Amazon is already a gigantic corporation, pretty much everyone spends lots and lots of money on Amazon, it just felt like a way to try and squeeze more money out of their existing customers.
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
- Yeah, ever since that change happened, I haven't logged into Prime Video. I'm paying money for a product, I shouldn't have to put up with ads too.
I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
- I feel like sometimes the actual act of explaining the joke can actually be funnier than the joke itself. Occasionally when I can explain a super dirty joke with a deadpan and matter-of-fact tone people will laugh more than they would have if they had actually gotten the joke in the first place.
- I'm not a doctor, but in some fairness, I think there has been a lot of progress in chemotherapy and radiation. "Increasing 5-year-survivability by 0.5%" doesn't make a fun sexy headline, but that's still an achievement that required a lot of hard work and enough of those happening still adds up.
I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that seems to indicate that we'll have a radically new and effective form of treatment for cancer only for it to never materialize.
- Forgive a bit of ignorance on this as it might be a dumb question, but now that bcachefs is a kernel module and not part of the kernel directly, is it still realistic for people to run bcachefs as their root filesystem? Do you know anyone doing this?
- I didn't realize that Linux Unplugged was still going; I haven't followed anything in the Jupiter Broadcasting sphere in almost a decade.
I'll queue this up to listen though I'm always afraid because I think Chris has gone pretty deep into conservative politics and that has the tendency of really pissing me off (though he's not as bad as Lunduke).
- I got a couple new toys for birthday/xmas: the GPD MicroPC 2 UMPC and the M5Stack Cardputer.
The MicroPC is great because it makes it super easy to code and hack on something in places where it would be too awkward or annoying to whip out my laptop, and the Cardputer is just a fun little toy because it's so open ended and hackable. I've been writing an app for Cardputer to control my thermostat remotely, and I've had a lot of fun grossly overengineering the needless amount of concurrency I have added through FreeRTOS.
Something oddly satisfying about using a micro PC to program an "even more micro" PC. What a cool time to be alive; I would have killed for this kind of stuff as a teenager!
- That might be the case for some people, but I've been speaking super fast since I was at least nine years old, well before I had ever listened to a podcast (and I'm not sure that the term even existed in ~2000). Not just public speaking, but in general.
I'm kind of unique in my family, the rest of my family speaks at a more or less normal rate, so it could be some neuroligical or spectrum thing specific to me.
- I'm the same way, I speak super fast pretty much all the time, and it can be hard for people to understand me if they're not used to it (and I don't blame them).
What really helped for me (and I realize that this doesn't scale to everyone) was lecturing for two semesters. I had pretty good motivation to slow down when students' grades and futures depended on understanding what I'm saying.
I didn't realize how much this helped until I presented at a conference after I was finished teaching, and I realized about midway through my talk that I was speaking considerably slower than I usually did at these things, because it turns out that public speaking and lecturing aren't actually that different.
I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.
Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.