chunkyhairball
My favorites:
Mono:
https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
Period. Full stop. A line of nothing but exclamation points. The Iosevka family blows every other mono-width font out of the water with at LEAST one, if not more, of its extremely customizable variations.
F/W:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comfortaa
This almost seems like a good idea… if unicode weren’t already shaky enough.
UTF-8 is, honestly, pretty amazing. It lets you do things like compose latin-character text, and then interpose words like 𰻞.
That’s ‘biáng’, which is, to my understanding, a kind of Chinese noodle dish. It’s apparently the most complex Chinese character, comprising more than 50 strokes. (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+30EDE).
In hex it’s encoded as: 0xF0 0xB0 0xBB 0x9E
So, yeah, only 8 bytes to describe a character that looks like white noise to me unless I zoom WAY in on it! (My vision’s getting pretty bad, tbh. I need it to be about the size it shows up on compart.com to make out the individual radical characters.)
If you were to count strokes on ‘biáng’, you end up with 5 bytes to encode 11 pen strokes or 2.2 strokes per byte. At 8 bytes to 57 pen strokes, the information density goes up to 7.125 strokes per byte.
So in Latin characters provided by UTF-8, you end up with very similar storage requirements. To encode the much more complex character, you get more than 3 times the information density.
I am offended by snaps. I feel they’re a disingenuous attempt to control the FOSS ecosystem.
I am OFFENDED by content blocking and policing. It’s a very blatant attempt to keep kids from getting important healthcare information. It ends up spreading disease and creating miserable people.
I, personally, think that many rabbis would be offended at making a symbol the focus of your worship, and that a certain rabbi in particular would be perhaps more than offended if you made the particular gibbet they nailed him to the focus of your worship.
This. My spouse is working on an online business and needed a laptop to carry around to do inventory with. I happen to have an old Asus 32-bit Celeron netbook collecting dust, so I gave it a bit of a wipedown, installed the latest version of Debian with XFCE on it, and let them install what they needed from there.
So if you get a 64-bit machine AT ALL, it will absolutely run the latest versions of Linux.
(Why is this a thing?
Lots of computers in industry are very low-spec. They use less power and have fewer requirements. As long as there are people who use that hardware and/or are willing to port fixes and new kernel features to it, it’ll keep getting updates. You only run into the ‘dropped compatibility’ thing when really no one is using it.)
I’m always nervous when hearing about new filesystems since a certain high profile news incident a several years back.
I really, really, really hope that Kent Overstreet has a really good relationship with any partner or spouse he may or may not have.
There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.
This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It’s all that’s needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.
The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it’s got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn’t necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.
I don’t think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn’t take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.
Where I’d personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that’s in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It’s harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.
In the ‘modern’ Desktop Linux space, I’d like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I’d like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.
The last version of PS I seriously spent time to try to get working on WINE was CS2, which is now ‘EOL’ according to Adobe. It’s quite a few years old at this point, so things may be different with newer versions.
There are technical issues, which may have changed since, like PS’s scratch file handling. Adobe stuff in general tends (tended) to simply ignore the fact that modern operating systems all do swap files or partitions and do all their own virtual memory. WINE just didn’t work well with this approach, and various memory-related errors were common, especially when working with larger files.
The single biggest issue for me actually working with the painting tools was WINE tended to vomit when PS wanted to display any kind of hardware-accelerated cursor on screen, like for most painting brushes. Selection tools tended to be okay, but my experience was that when you wanted a painting brush, WINE would simply not render what PS was trying to do, even for things as simple as the round brush outline.