• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Well, European External Action Service itself is (according to wikipedia-article is the exact institution to handle such crisis/hostage cituation.

    Call me synical, but I have to question why an employee of EU diplomatic corp is spending his holiday on middle east. I don’t it’s unreasonable to assume that EU does some security related intelligence operations in middle east, so to me their employee spending a holiday in Iran sounds like a coded speech for “their work doesn’t fall under diplomatic protection”.

    Still, under normal diplomatic relations this still wouldn’t translate to jailing someone for over a year. I don’t believe whatever he was involved in is immoral enough to warrant such.


  • ‘Bikeshed issue’ refers to the effect of having a discussion where everyone can easily form an opinion on. Such as choosing a paint colour for a bikeshed that needs to be painted.

    I do think this standard, if successful, would trickle down to users outside enterprise settings. Similarly to how Red Hat was/is the force behind Gnome, Wayland, (if I recall correctly) pipewire, and many now ‘universal’ parts of modern linux user-space.

    It’s very clear this project aims to be that force in enterprise linux. And if successful, they would determine the direction of development.

    And simply put: most people prefer stuff actively developed by a full-time team of software engineers. Some of us don’t, but usually those need to adapt to the new standard, or miss out on software developed assuming such ‘standard’ userspace.

    This is why I think it truly is a bikeshed issue. Everyones bike will eventually be in the shed, if the shed gets painted.

    I personally am carefully optimistic, as long as the community (you and me, not just our bosses) care enough to contribute. And the organisation makes it easy and accessible.

    Of course having meaningful community participation is only the first step. The community can make bad decisions or incoherent decisions, that’s part of having meaningful power.

    Lastly I think the organisation knows the reputation of the companies founding it is, on average, not great. So I expect them to truly make their best to engage the community meaningfully and in good faith. Without it, I don’t think they will convince even rocky linux to switch, let alone achieve meaningful compatibility standard of any kind.



  • The ‘tiling’ in tiling window-managers is only half-truth. It distinguishes them from stacking window-mamagers, which would be equal to only looking at one thing at the time.

    They all can also do stacking and tabbing, the term means they can do tiling as well. Most users some form of stacking even more than tiling in itself.

    Most also can do floating windows, usually on per-app basis. This is achieving what most fully fledged desktop users do: have one fullscreen window per workspace, and have small things like pacucontrol as small floating window.

    In no way are you limited to tiling. If you were, tiling window managers wouldn’t be very popular. They’d be like stacking window managers are today.

    My most often use half-and-half layout: browser and emacs, emacs and console, emacs and emacs, and so on. If I want to have two consoles and emacs, I instead of tiling, make a stack for the two consoles. This way I always have emacs showing, and switch between the consoles, no matter how many there are. This is kind of like a “sub-workspace”.

    The main advantage is ease of configuration, assuming familiarity with config-files. That enables quick, keyboard based navigation, in a very personal and fine-tuned manner. Modern tiling window-managers can also be configured on trackpad or touchscreen gestures, and work intuitively with mouse pointer. So while many users do specifically keyboard centric configuration, the key point in my opinion is that you as a user need, and get to, choose.






  • I started using Fedora after RH killed CentOS, mainly for this reason. However now I feel bit differently about all of this.

    At the end of the day, it’s clear RH is not doing this out of good of their heart. They are looking for mutually beneficial relationship, yes. But importantly they are also steering the Linux ecosystem towards that mutually beneficial direction.

    And I no longer feel like I can support that. I don’t trust Red Hat as a company to keep innovating and improving the ecosystem in such way it is truly mutually beneficial in long term. I expect that they are mainly interested in directions that benefit RHEL, and allow RHEL to maintain commercially viable, private codebase.

    I think that without pushback, they will make desktop linux like so many other Open Source projects: in practice the commercial product is the only really working and well-rounded implementation, because developing alternatives is very complex and requires so much developer time.

    So I’d much prefer sending my bug reports to some other community with some other domain. And I’d like to contribute towards pushing the mutually beneficial relationship to a direction where RHEL is just another distribution, and Gnome just another DE. I don’t want a future where it makes sense to say a user is missing Gnome-functionality or RHEL-features, when discussing software that has no reason to be exclusive to either.

    If RH is the primary developer of Fedora, and Fedora is the exclusive testbed for desktop-linux, I feel like that’s likely to happen.





  • I don’t know how BSD works, but linux has $XDG_ configs in homedir of user for most configuration files.

    You could sidestep any conflicts by just changing your linux-systems $XDG_ -environmental variables to something like ~/.local.linux, ~/.config.linux and so on.

    Ultimately almost any path under $HOME can ba changed with corresponding environmental variable in linux - so you can split directories if necessary.