We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.

I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.

Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.

Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.

Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.

Which is not a desktop.

There’s also that desktop web browsers generally request that their title bar not be shown.

Those have the excuse that they’re basically several windows in one, and the tabs are the title bar-equivalents. Very few apps have that excuse, though.

Side note: KDE’s tabbed windows feature was pretty neat. Too bad it’s gone.

“If you open this device, the contained alien immediately escapes, rendering it inert.” There. Problem solved. Case dismissed.

I don’t see any riots. Seems to me that nobody cares—not even the people being made homeless.

Don’t ask for your employer to meet your time off needs. Tell them that your time off needs are going to be met.

Then you get fired, and in this economy, probably end up homeless.

And you’re running Xfce ≥4.14? Pretty impressive that they kept it lightweight despite switching to GTK3.

That would be useful on a tablet, where right-clicking is impossible.

Now if only Best Buy had a complete selection of computer parts. I miss Fry’s so much.

That thing you’re buying from Amazon? Just go to the manufacturer’s website and buy it directly.

That works if the manufacturer is reputable, but if I want to buy some obscure gadget from a Chinese company whose name looks like the result of somebody mashing their face on a keyboard, no way in hell am I buying it direct.

Or if it’s a no-name thing like a generic charging cable, just buy it from literally any other generic [category] retailer.

Are those guys really any better than Amazon?

Side note: one nice thing about Amazon is I can have items delivered to a locker at a nearby grocery store, instead of having it sent to my apartment building and hoping the courier delivers it to me and not someone else with a vaguely similar name. Couriers keep delivering other people’s packages to me. I even encountered one courier who didn’t speak English and couldn’t read apartment number signs, and had to basically do his job for him. It’s seriously disturbing how bad package delivery is these days. Is there some way to get non-Amazon deliveries sent to some reliable pickup location?

When I was a kid, a college degree was a job ticket, so that’s still seriously alarming.

I’ve heard that there’s a hidden monthly data cap, and you get throttled real hard if you reach it, but now that it’s “unlimited” they aren’t telling you what it is.

The progress on Asahi Linux is a demonstration of the difference I mentioned. People have been working on open-source NVIDIA drivers for ages and still can’t get the GPU out of first gear, whereas the M1 GPU driver is mostly functional after only a couple of years.

1 out of every 6 college graduates not getting a job is a full-blown jobs crisis.

Regardless of the cause of the productivity boost, full time WFH will come at the expense of training young (or new to the field) employees.

Employers these days don’t bother with that any more, so that doesn’t explain it.

It’s not intended to. It’s intended to make the CEO happy.

Small convenience? A lot of goods these days can only be bought online, and buying them from a no-name website is a great way to get your card number stolen. Using Amazon is basically mandatory.

That’s what I want to see. Real choice in smartphones.

Lousy criminals. NVIDIA, I mean. If I wrote code like that, I’d be dragged in front of a judge and made to answer for breaking the DMCA. But if you’re a big, rich company, the government won’t touch you.

Apple’s GPU at least isn’t maliciously designed to be difficult to write open-source drivers for. It’s up to the community to figure out how it works and write a driver, but Apple isn’t actively trying to stop them like NVIDIA is.

Those “haughty” “elitists” wrote your operating system and gave it to you for free. Have some gratitude, and direct your complaints to the uncooperative scoundrels in charge of NVIDIA who created this whole problem.

You won’t be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.

Must be. Once I started having problems with NVIDIA on Linux, I swore off all NVIDIA products and never looked back. Zero tolerance for that nonsense.

I’m afraid that’s not true. Attempting to use an NVIDIA GPU will cause problems. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, kinda-sorta, but not really, and the web is filled with people complaining about said problems.

Mouse? Sure. Those are standardized and interchangeable. 99.999% chance of success.

Graphics card? Wi-Fi interface? Now you’ve got problems.

You could have said the same for factories in the 18th century.

Everyone who died as a result of their introduction probably would say the same, yes. If corpses could speak, anyway.

Even my laptop has a large-ish display (17 inch). Really not a fan of small displays. Sure, large laptops are heavy, but I could use the exercise. 😄

That’s the neat thing. It’s so customizable, you can turn it into another desktop environment.

Since the kebab menu is inside the location/search box, I’m guessing it contains search-related options.

Not a fan of slicing up the title bar like that, to be honest. Yeah, it saves some space, but I’m on a desktop with plenty of screen space, so that really isn’t a priority, and being able to easily move windows around is a priority.

Also, what the hell is wrong with old-fashioned menus? This isn’t a phone. GNOME doesn’t even run on phones.

And many cities had mayors pushing for a return to office because the downtowns were threatened.

…with affordable housing. The horror!

[meme with the sweating guy in front of two buttons]

The same is true of Linux itself.

Anyway, I’m not sure I see how a non-gigantic, slow-moving, pretty-much-finished open-source project like systemd can become broken or compromised in a way that forking it cannot solve. This isn’t Chromium we’re talking about, where it takes an army of world-class developers just to keep it from falling so far behind as to be basically unusable. If systemd were to stop being developed in any way other than security and critical bug fixes, it would still remain useful for many years.

Use systemctl --failed to see which services didn’t come up, systemctl status SERVICENAMEHERE to see some status info about a service, and journalctl -b -u SERVICENAMEHERE to see all log messages generated by a service since last reboot.

If a collection of programs that each do a specific thing runs counter to the Unix philosophy, then Unix runs counter to the Unix philosophy.

None. The opposition to systemd is highly irrational.

Read/write operations can happen in the background at any moment as long as the drive is mounted, so that’s not terribly comforting.

Anyway, Windows has always avoided deferring writes on removable media, for as long as it’s been capable of deferring writes at all. That’s not new in Windows 10.

Linux has a mount option, sync, to do the same thing. Dunno if any desktop environments actually use it, but they could. Besides being slower, though, it has the downside of causing more write operations (since they can’t be batched together into fewer, larger writes), so flash drives will wear out faster. I imagine Windows’ behavior has the same problem, although with Windows users accustomed to pulling out their drives without unmounting, I suppose that’s the lesser of two evils.

NVIDIA’s contempt for the Linux community is legendary. Definitely not a skill issue.

386BSD was a thing back then too, but there was the AT&T lawsuit that scared everyone away. That gave Linux an opportunity.