• 4 Posts
  • 89 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.




  • I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

    “Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

    I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

    Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.





  • So the Nippon Ham company is starting with sausages with bones, and working their way up to the perfectly round cylinder of roasted meat with a large straight bone through the centre that anime and video games have teased us with for decades.

    Gotta start somewhere.



  • GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.

    But now it’s one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can’t break the world for no reason.


  • I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

    Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won’t theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

    I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it’s become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)



  • I do like that there’s a reasonably comprehensive website with docs covering a lot of common pain points, which is more manageable than fighting with searching through a galaxy of wikis of varying degrees of currentness and relevance.

    Reminds me of the celebrated docs of BSD systems.

    There’s also a case that going a bit away from “easy Windows replacement” is useful because even trivial users need to get some bearings shifted to avoid floundering when they reach something not-quite-Windowsesque. (I. e. dealing with updates and software distribution is an important lesson that isn’t obvious if they hide everything in an ersatz App Store)

    Of course, my first proper Linux setup was Slackware with a 2.0.30 kernel. I wanted the Unix-like Experience.