blobjim [he/him]

This is like the weirdest inter-national hostility in the world to me. As far as I know, there is absolutely no reason for Japan to have a hostile stance towards Russia other than because Japan is a US vassal, and that the Japanese Empire got its butt kicked by the Red Army (but that seems like it wouldn’t that much of an effect in 2026, even if the Japanese govt still clings to that kind of stuff).

Nobody is forking systemd, especially over something like this. People have no idea how much work it is to maintain software like this.

This change is mostly in the userdb code which is a sub-component of systemd that stores user records. It isn’t in the PID1 process. But I could see an argument for having it be part of the desktop environment in GNOME or something like that instead.

It’s wild that Raúl Castro is still involved at that level. He was there on the Granma in 1956. Bless him.

Non-US-aligned countries ought to stop even participating in UN votes. Some departments of the UN are still useful, the ones that do actual on-the-ground work funded by a budget. But the whole debate and voting part of it is often just an annoying way for the US and its pets to brow-beat countries in the smarmiest way.

Windows does plenty of things better. Like having a stable device driver API, so you can install third-party drivers really easily. And there’s only one Windows compared to many Linux distros, so there’s no need to compile software specifically for many separate Linux distros. Not as much of an issue with things like Flatpak. Windows also uses software library APIs for most operating system features, compared to the patchwork of file descriptors and file systems and sockets and all the other nonsense that makes up the interfaces used by Linux applications. The documentation is also in one place for Windows (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/). WIth Linux, you have to do research just to figure out what APIs are available. If Linux had as uniform of an API as Windows does, there would be even more software for it. The main reason there is more Linux software these days is because Linux is open source.

It’s built on top of Devuan which is a fork of Debian which uses Linux.

Apparently Devuan is “Debian without systemd”. 🤡🤡🤡

I would stay away! systemd provides so many well-designed APIs that are helpful for server management.

Also most projects that promote not using systemd are weird ideologues at this point.

It says “coming soon”, which I guess probably means it’s a somewhat second-class feature.

Seems pretty neat. Hopefully it’s somewhat simple to compile and set up. It’s kind of weird that livekit is VC funded though. Not necessarily the best, since they might have to relicense it to make investors happy at some point.

Look at their list of investors: https://livekit.io/about

The programmability aspect of LiveKit is cool, not that it matters much since this “meet” app is just something built on top of livekit.

Sucks that they have to do this but whatever it takes to avoid US attacks. Unfortunately there’s no magical defense system that can stop the US from destroying their infrastructure and killing people.

I wonder if Chinese companies will also be brought in, or if the US has told them no.

It’s just so evil that this is basically the US saying “No, you are not allowed to develop your own resource extraction.”

Hopefully it will include focusing on getting things like inputfd (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/110) added to the spec, and not just stuff that would be useful to Valve/Steam (so they can sell more games on their own Linux systems).

DRI_PRIME is an environment variable. DRI_PRIME=1 gimp is a bash syntax for setting an environment variable for a specific command execution, Whisker probably doesn’t use shell commands, it’s expecting an executable. So it’s trying to look up a file named DRI_PRIME=1 in your PATH.

You’re going to need to figure out if whisker has a way to set env vars for a command (I don’t use it so not sure what it shows when you click the “Help” button). If not, you’ll need to create an executable script file which executes your command with the environment variable set like you’re attempting to do (DRI_PRIME=1 gimp), and then point whisker at your script.

I did an update or something and it corrupted the bootloading for Fedora Silverblue. Had to just reinstall everything. Also was a time when the update url or something was broken and I couldn’t update. That remains the biggest issue. But it might not be an issue for a professionally maintained distro like Ubuntu that has a company backing it. I feel like it’s safe to recommend Ubuntu but not any other distros.

And it’s definitely true that the average user has more control on Windows. You can download installers and random zip files with executables and they’ll just work. Linux has such a messed up model for executables and libraries that they usually have to be recompiled for every Linux distro unless you use flatpak.

But I think it’s mostly the learning curve of getting used to how linux desktops work and their idiosyncrasies that makes it hard for people. And tons of bad advice online telling you to run commands.

Linux actually has lots of GUI apps that can help fix issues and do things in Linux but people keep offering outdated advice about using command line tools and editing brittle config files.

And some things are distro-specific.

ONE STRUGGLE

Apple is such a frustrating company lol. In Seattle we still don’t have tap-to-pay for public transit with iPhones because Apple keeps so much control over what the NFC transceiver on their devices can be used for. You can tap-to-pay with Android devices. So I’m stuck still using my physical card.

Thanks for the history!

Apple developed CUPS https://www.cups.org/

The project’s aim is to create an Android-compatible OS. I like the Linux-on-phone approach of postmarketOS better but whatever they end up working on should end up benefitting both projects since they’ll probably just be contributing driver code like postmarketOS. It’s weird that they don’t even mention postmarketOS in the announcement.

Seems like they’re mainly doing it because he has Russian citizenship??? Right-wingers are so bloodthirsty lol.

Pretty cool but the statement saying

The world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, has ruled that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza

is still pathetic. Won’t even call it genocide, and they still have to appeal to some stupid international institution.