Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Fedora 23 Workstation with the Gnome desktop is a very reasonable release. I am surprised first and foremost by the advancement in the Gnome framework. It's usable, and there's no reason to hate it anymore. This shows how objective and cool I am, and that my past resistance was all legit techno babble. When credits are due, I'm a bloody bank.

Indeed, self praise aside, Gnome has reached a point where it can be used. 'Tis a paradox, because it was perfect before being ruined, and now it's approaching the same level of usability it had years ago. But if we put the background story aside, yes, it's okay, and it makes sense on top of Fedora. The distro itself also works well. It's stable, robust, the hardware support is really good, all my peripherals were properly initialized, all the network protocols ate their bits and bytes without hiccups, and with some extra pimpage, you have a pleasant, friendly system that can serve entertainment as well as state-of-the-art functionality.

NetBSD 7.99.25 (CUBIETRUCK) #28: Thu Dec 24 09:53:18 EST 2015
        root@claymore:/home/build/obj_earm/sys/arch/evbarm/compile/CUBIETRUCK
total memory = 2048 MB
avail memory = 2022 MB
sysctl_createv: sysctl_create(machine_arch) returned 17
timecounter: Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0 core 0: 960 MHz Cortex-A7 r0p4 (Cortex V7A core)
cpu0: DC enabled IC enabled WB disabled EABT branch prediction enabled
cpu0: 32KB/32B 2-way L1 VIPT Instruction cache
cpu0: 32KB/64B 4-way write-back-locking-C L1 PIPT Data cache
cpu0: 256KB/64B 8-way write-through L2 PIPT Unified cache
vfp0 at cpu0: NEON MPE (VFP 3.0+), rounding, NaN propagation, denormals
cpu1 at mainbus0 core 1
armperiph0 at mainbus0
armgic0 at armperiph0: Generic Interrupt Controller, 160 sources (151 valid)
armgic0: 32 Priorities, 128 SPIs, 7 PPIs, 16 SGIs
...

Dedoimedo says GNOME 3 might finally be approaching usability again.

What do you use it for? :p

"Is Wayland ready?" isn't the right question.

$ git pull
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

$ ssh -vT git@github.com
OpenSSH_7.1p2 Debian-2, OpenSSL 1.0.2f  28 Jan 2016
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: Applying options for *
debug1: Connecting to github.com [192.30.252.130] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
[…]
debug1: Skipping ssh-dss key /home/frans/.ssh/id_dsa for not in PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes
[…]
debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
Permission denied (publickey).

ssh-keygen -f id_rsa -p

Lynoure suggested this simple one-liner which helps immensely, to a point that I have turned it into a habit:

Code: [Select]

pkill -STOP chromium

When I want to use the browser again:

Code: [Select]

pkill -CONT chromium

I wish web browsers would stop running anything when unfocused, unless asked otherwise on a site by site basis.

Iceweasel is dead. So it goes.

https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3622

Palemoon also seems to be ailing. For half a year I haven't had Firefox installed. Am I really forced to return to it?

"So maybe something like a Linux emulator?"  Now you're getting warmer!  A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls.  Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows.  Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux".  (No, it's not open source at this time.)

Oh, and it's totally shit hot!  The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance.

So, coming back to the title for this entry. The most obvious failure of the commons is where a basically malicious actor consumes while giving nothing back, but if an actor with good intentions ends up consuming more than they contribute that may still be a problem. An upstream author releases a piece of software under a free license. Debian distributes this to users. Debian's policies result in the upstream author having to do more work. What does the upstream author get out of this exchange? In an ideal world, plenty. The author's software is made available to more people. A larger set of developers is willing to work on making improvements to the software. In a less ideal world, rather less. The author has to deal with bug mail about already fixed bugs. The author's reputation may be harmed by user exposure to said fixed bugs. The author may get less in the way of useful bug fixes or features because people are running old versions rather than fixing new ones. If the balance tips towards the latter, the author's decision to release their software under a free license has made their life more difficult.

Most discussions about Debian's policies entirely ignore the latter scenario, focusing more on the fact that the author chose to release their software under a free license to begin with. If the author is unwilling to handle the consequences of that, goes the argument, why did they do it in the first place? The unfortunate logical conclusion to that argument is that the author realises that they made a huge mistake and never does so again, and woo uh oops.

Locking down versions brings stability to the user experience: on a system-wide scale, known and static issues are better than unknown and ever-changing issues, obviously.

Which is why, when I don't have the time or desire to tinker with my computer, I pretty much prefer Debian/stable or Ubuntu LTS over anything else (including more recent versions of Windows).