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Topic: General Unix/Linux Thread (Read 119941 times)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #400
Microsoft, Red Hat, etc. all use Linux for their massive cloud infrastructure. The fact that Red Hat also makes some desktop stuff is probably more like a bonus or even an unwanted distraction.

My hunch seems to have been correct, CNN calls it a "cloud computing firm":

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/28/tech/ibm-red-hat/index.html

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #401
Two Linux-related letdowns today.

First. There is a regression in systemd that prevents me from getting to the internet. I can connect to both wifi and LAN without error messages. I can ping to numeric addresses, but not to alphabetic addresses. And I cannot ping to the (numeric) DNS addresses in resolv.conf. The way systemd works, there is no way to manually do things with resolv.conf. According to the following thread, there ued to be things to be done, but this thread does not apply anymore, just one year later, thanks to systemd takeover of the dns resolve function https://forum.manjaro.org/t/setting-a-dns-or-nameserver/46186/9

Edit: I got this issue resolved today. It turns out somehow my resolv.conf had turned immutable. I guess it happened half a year back (that's the date on the file when it was last touched) when I lifted the harddrive from one laptop to another and it Just Worked®
Still a systemd problem, I guess. It did something when I lifted the harddrive /edit

For a while I used openrc, when a dude at Manjaro forums promoted it and created easy packages for it. It's a nice understandable init system that did its work well. When it does its work and is understandable too, it provides a sense of security that if something goes wrong, it can be fixed. Not so with systemd. Unfortunately Manjaro decisively sided with systemd - as did Arch - and the openrc promoter withdrew to create his own distro, Artix.

Second. With great excitement I thought I'd familiarise myself with the self-documentation feature in Emacs. It turns out self-documentation does not mean auto-magically generating documentation as you go on coding features of a programme. It only means help pages for Emacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SelfDocumentation

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #402
What's this about? Gnome app developers ranting against theming?
GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable.

Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended.

App Icons are the identity of an app. Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand.

Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are not very useful if they look nothing like the real app does once you install it.

[...]

Though we could disable theming directly in our apps, we do not want to resort to this. We believe that a technical solution would likely not be effective, because this is not a technical problem.

The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion.

[...]

© Do Not Theme, 2019
On the one hand there is what the app *does* and on the other there is what the app *looks like.* What's the reason that these two should be inscrutably fused? Theming is things like enlarging the fonts, adding/changing contrast to tints in the interface, and when you can do it a little, then why not a whole lot for fun or for special needs? Why should one not be able to e.g. enlarge fonts in your app?

I understand the app developers' frustration a little bit, because my experience with Gnome is that theming is one of those things that makes Gnome unusable. But I vehemently disagree that theming is the evil. The evil is Gnome's incompetence at theming.

I have heard that GTK does not have an API for theming, every distro modifies the Adwaita theme (and ships the modification and occasionally fails to include the default) and that's plain stupid. Theming is important to have in a desktop environment and therefore there should be a DE-community policy about it. The solution should be easy: Adwaita must be there to fall back to, and there must be a procedure by which things fall back to it, duh. To disable themes would take away much of the appeal of Linux, just like Gnome's incompetence at theming has, in my case, caused me to never use it.

Mint and Manjaro have done a wonderful job at theming. They have worked very hard to achieve this. But theming is just about the looks. It should not be too hard.

For app developers, it should also not be too hard to educate yourselves to write the interface so that it is themable. Themes do not break your apps. Apps get broken by your inability to foresee that the interface could be themed differently. Every app *must* be themable, otherwise it is written by an incompetent developer! Unthemable apps are a nightmare for the user. I see this at my work every day when I need to open an app that is made exactly for a FullHD resolution screen, no more, no less; an app whose window is unresizable; an app that lacks the DE borders and titlebar; etc. (Luckily at my work there is MS Win, so it is not directly about Gnome app developers.)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #403
Quote
Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are not very useful if they look nothing like the real app does once you install it.
What a flatout bizarre statement. Sure, if they looked nothing like the real app I suppose they wouldn't be very helpful, but we're just talking about some fonts & colors & maybe icons here. The difference is actually much bigger due to the fact that I seldom see a window in a size in which I'd use it than due to what window decorations or colors are shown.

The evil is Gnome's incompetence at theming.
I think it's because they want to exude some kind of Gnome "brand".


Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #405
ranger is an interesting alternative to mc.

http://ranger.github.io/
And nnn is said to be an interesting alternative to ranger.

I have been keeping an eye on and tried them all. In my opinion, mc does just about the right amount of things in the right way, such as multi-rename, multi-copy, and other multi-select operations. Those alternatives can do all of it too, but I find the dual-pane interface cozier particularly for multi-copying of files. And I am not so comfortable with so many automatic viewers as are present in those alternatives.

In reality, my file operations are so low-key that I mostly still do ls.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #406
ranger is an interesting alternative to mc.
I discovered that ranger has a live-update feature like graphical file managers.

The situation: I had to download many files that in order one by one, naming them in sequence. To keep track of my downloads at any time, I always had to see the bottom file in the directory.

Even better than graphical managers, ranger works like this:
1. Open the directory in ranger
2. Scroll to the bottom
3. In the browser (or whatever you are downloading with), keep downloading files named so that they are added as last in the directory
4. ranger live-updates the file list (and displays the bottom file even when the list is longer than the screen)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #407
An interesting finding. :)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #408
It's also a very lucky finding, because nobody expects terminal-based apps to have any automaticity. I was trying different file managers to see which one allows me to see the newest bottom file with least effort on my own part and it turned out that ranger understood what i wanted without me having to do anything. In contrast, mc and nnn act like ls - they move only when you directly tell them to.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #409
At the same time, there are also advantages to keeping things more or less in place. In that sense adding items to the middle of the list will result in a location shift as a necessary evil, but an addition to the top or bottom outside of view will only result in a growing scrollbar.

In mc, I suppose no one is terribly interested in auto-refresh:
https://midnight-commander.org/ticket/1756

Since I mainly use Thunar and Dolphin I didn't realize mc didn't auto-update.

It's also a very lucky finding, because nobody expects terminal-based apps to have any automaticity.
I don't know; MS-DOS apps were quite advanced by the early '90s so there isn't really much of anything I wouldn't expect them to do in an even more advanced Linux environment with tremendous processing power and memory readily available. They did all the things their Windows counterparts did (MDI, etc.) except that you couldn't switch between apps as easily. Although afaik neither "GUI" nor "console" apps auto-refreshed directories at the time. But perhaps they did on Unix.

 

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #410
I've been using Qalculate as my preferred calculator for a while now, but I recently discovered Speedcrunch as an interesting alternative. (I don't like most calculators.) But Qalculate has more useful built-in conversion stuff, like currency, temperature, and distance. Speedcrunch is more plainly math/physics.

Manjaro goes corp

Reply #411
The two main changes are:
  • To transfer donation funds to a non-profit “fiscal host 166” which will then accept and administer donations on the project’s behalf. This secures the donations and makes their use transparent.
  • A new established company, Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, to enable full-time employment of maintainers and exploration of future commercial opportunities.

This new structure should enable Manjaro to reach the next level, for example:
  • enable developers to commit full time to Manjaro and its related projects;
  • interact with other developers in sprints and events around Linux;
  • protect the independence of Manjaro as a community-driven project, as well as protect its brand;
  • provide faster security updates and a more efficient reaction to the needs of users;
  • provide the means to act as a company on a professional level.
Not sure how to take this. On the one hand I understand that when you do partnerships, such as when providing own-branded hardware, you need a legal entity. On the other hand, when FF went corp, things went irreversibly evil and stupid.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #412
The usual way I try to install Linuxes these days is to dd them to a USB stick and then try to boot the stick on the computer or laptop. However, many distros or opsyses do not boot this way. For example Slackware and FreeBSD consistently fail. At the same time, I cannot find any information on what their way of getting to boot up or getting installed is. Why does the regular Debian not boot up while LMDE (Linux Mint Debian edition) has no problem? How do you install Haiku or Dos?

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #413
You could try out FreeBSD with FuryBSD. I'm going to do the same the next days.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #414
If they aren't capable of booting from USB then they probably only boot from CD/DVD by default. I thought hybrid USB/CD images were easy to make these days though.

There are various tools you could use to get around that, like Rufus on Windows, probably also UNetbootin[1] and balenaEtcher on Linux.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #415
Thanks for the suggestions. I have to correct myself a bit: I actually stumbled upon a recent FreeBSD ISO that happens to boot fine on the Thinkpad X60 I bought for 15 euros.

I went along with a stupid memery to work up exactly this machine as my laptop mostly to boot into console. There are two possible paths. Either I put a boring LMDE on it and then start mostly uninstalling and deleting stuff or I put some BSD on it and learn to build and compile things on it until the console can display colours and Japanese and Ethiopic and switch between keyboard layouts (alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek) as a typing machine should. Maybe even mousing is possible in console?

By the way, what is happening to 32-bit Linuxes? Manjaro and Arch dropped official support for 32-bit some weeks ago.

The Linux Foundation Doesn't Use Linux To Create Their Reports

Reply #416
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-2dYfYvJGk[/video]

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #417
It's certainly possible this Linux Foundation is a worthless money-wasting organization, but it's not clear that using Adobe software proves much of anything. Gimp is much worse than Photoshop,[1] Inkscape doesn't quite measure up to Illustrator but it's quite good and arguably better in some ways, and I don't have a sufficiently informed opinion InDesign vs Scribus, which is unfortunately the main point under discussion here, but from people in the know I understand Scribus isn't all that good. Moreover, such design may well have been outsourced.
Not sure where to fit in Krita in this quick overview. Krita is much better than Photoshop at digital painting but it's not intended to be generic like Photoshop.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #418
I'd say the main point here is that the primary goal of the Linux Foundation is to promote Linux. By failing to use Linux-based alternatives for everything it fails at its primary goal. If sufficiently slick presentation design tools do not exist, take it as a challenge to set up a project that would develop those tools, and start using them in order to promote them.

Otherwise the Linux Foundation would be something like Theranos, WeWork, and Wirecard, whose entire value depended on high-profile board members and the charisma (and slippery talk) of the central driving figures.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #419
It sounds like they're about the Linux kernel, mainly in the server sense.

In recent years, the Linux Foundation has expanded its support programs through events, training and certification, and open source projects. Projects hosted at the Linux Foundation include the Linux kernel project, Kubernetes, Automotive Grade Linux, Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Hyperledger, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Xen Project, and many others.

The Linux Foundation has taken its experience and expertise supporting the Linux community to help establish, build, and sustain some of the most critical open source technologies. Its work today extends far beyond Linux, fostering innovation in every layer of the software stack. The Linux Foundation hosts projects spanning enterprise IT, embedded systems, consumer electronics, cloud, networking, and more.

It's interesting that they almost seem to be avoiding the desktop, presumably because businesses aren't very interested in it. Perhaps using InDesign at some point in the process is indicative of that, but I'm not clear on why focus is a bad thing.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #420
Oh, only about the kernel? Then they are all about things like porting the kernel to Android, maybe gear it to be adaptible to more proprietary solutions. They were rotten from the get-go!

As to businesses not being interested in desktops, it is an acute problem. Office workers are increasingly suffering under new software that pops up childish nonsense like "Rate this call" and "How do you like this app?". This is not only distracting, but absolutely destructive to the work environment. Businesses ignore this trend in software design to their own detriment. When buying software from some biggie, they should demand that such nonsense be removed.

Another problem in the offices is internally developed legacy nonsense. It is nonsense when it only works in one limited environment, such as in Internet Explorer with legacy mode enabled and fails under all other conditions.

Short note on FreeBSD

Reply #421
Some options on FreeBSD console are pretty cool out of the box, but installing UTF-8 fonts (for Cyrillic, Japanese, etc.) and making them to work turned out to be too difficult.

There's also a major structural flaw in FreeBSD that port apps are in conflict with repo packages. Say I spot a nice port app and build it and install it with some specific options that I want. But if that app is also available on the repos, it gets overinstalled upon next update and my options get annihilated. This is not how it should be in my opinion. Or maybe it is somehow an excellent feature that I fail to appreciate. Whoever knows better please explain.

So, on my fabulous 15€ Thinkpad X60 I am now trying out two Debians - Linux Mint Debian Edition and Bunsenlabs with Openbox. We'll see which one wins ultimately or if I find another 32-bit opsys.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #422
That flaw is well known. When I update my system, I need to first deinstall my custom app, and build it again afterwards. There's no easy workaround, unfortunately.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #423
That flaw is well known. When I update my system, I need to first deinstall my custom app, and build it again afterwards. There's no easy workaround, unfortunately.
Does any of the other BSD flavours solve it?

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #424
I don't think so. When updating the base system, all ports (apps) must be rebuilt, and the packages provided are built with just the default settings. You will get your default packages just fine, but you'll have to rebuild your custom app yourself.