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HaraldvonBlauzahn

@ HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

Posts
27
Comments
198
Joined
8 mo. ago

  • Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away

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  • I do not really see that.

    The article is short, and myself I like to write longer, more detailed texts. But few people nowadays have the patience to read ten, five, or three pages of text.

    Also, I am becoming wary about the trolling / disinformation tactic to qualify something as AI that you do not like. If a piece of text is wrong, it will have logic failures that you can address and point to.

    And said that, burn-out is a real problem, I can confirm that. Not only in FOSS software but in other fields of software development, too - but the article also cites real factors which make it worse for open source development. And it is not only a threath for the mental health of individuals, but also for the community.

    And the aspect of entitlement of some users is true, too.

  • Handled a ThinkPad today. What distro should I go with? Ubuntu? Arch?

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  • I swear by mulinux with Emacs as textual WM.

  • Has bad branding ever turned you off from software, FOSS or not?

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  • I know gimp, git, borg, and mutt, but not the others :)

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    A Practical Guide to Transitioning to Memory-Safe Languages - Turning off the spigot of vulnerabilities: a new strategy for memory safety

    queue.acm.org /detail.cfm

  • Is the FOSS world in danger of a corporate takeover, thanks to pushover licenses?

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  • That's good point.

    Another thing that is dangerous are CLAs or "contributor license agreements", like Google uses. Technically, it is GPL, but Google might demand to hold all the copyright, so as the copyright holder it can change the license at a whim.

  • Why go through the trouble to use Arch?

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  • It works well for me.

    Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME's PaperWM extension just to give it a try.

    You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME's fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.

    But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.

    But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.

  • What you do with your windows button on your keyboard?

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  • Oh, it's not that bad. I use UK international with AltGr to type English, program code, and German. I don't use the Compose key so often. Just for some extra symbols like Greek alpha or ° C.

  • What you do with your windows button on your keyboard?

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  • I use "PrintScreen" for that ....

  • What you do with your windows button on your keyboard?

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  • I use it as the prefix key for my tiling window manager (stumpwm), and have mapped it to the "Super" X11 modifier for Emacs.

    (Also, I have mapped CapsLock to the Hyper modifier, which I mostly use for user-defined commands. Not as powerful as the original space cadet keyboard, but not bad!).

    BTW, one thing that is great about StumpWM is that you can define commands to script actions on GUI applications. For Example, if you are in a Firefox window, you can script Ctrl-t-B (or perhaps Hyper-B) to go to the adress bar, copy the URL, then call xsel to append the content of the buffer to a file which is called ~/bookmarks.txt, and finally open your preferred editor to add a comment.

  • Chat Control 2.0 has passed the first round of approval

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  • Just an example: Of course you can use a private email service. You don't need to give a copy of all your communications to Google Mail or outlook. Or medical data.

    But what helps that, if 97% of the people you communicate with (including your doctor) use outlook or gmail, and all messages you write them are kindly stored there "for them"?

  • Chat Control 2.0 has passed the first round of approval

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  • For the moment, that would not be enforceable in respect to people with technical knowledge. Enforcing it would require authoritarian control and even China's Great Firewall has way to circumvent it.

    On the other hand, this is already far more difficult than you might think. You could not install such an app from a server authenticated with TLS because the TLS keys might be subverted - the certification chain has national institutions as the top certificate authorities. You would also not be able to install such an app on an Android phone because Google has decided it needs developer attestation to install apps in a way accesible to end users. You can run Linux now but if all that is taken seriously, your options to run Linux might become limited. E.g. you already can't run many banking apps on phones with user-controlled OS software. Railway apps like the German one already don't work. In future, you might not even be able to use a municipial library's or bookstore's website this way.

    But more to the point, the real application case for this kind of civil rights is not some nerd kids which want to play DnD or minecraft on their own server or test their self-written IRC service. The real application case is what we see in the US, people being dragged out of their house and disappearing just because of their ancestry, how they look, being poor or the area they live in. They don't have time to compile software or configure port-knocking protocols.

    Somebody has called these systems of "democratic" mass surveillance uncovered by Snowden "Turnkey Dictatorship" . I for sure wish they would have been wrong.

  • Chat Control 2.0 has passed the first round of approval

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  • Why is this specifically relevant to Linux users?

    Well,

    • controlling end-to-end encrypted messages is only possible if either the keys/certificates are not secret (which is possible with TLS), or the software on the end-users device is not controlled any more by the user (but perhaps by law enforcement, or companies). This overturns the basis of any FLOSS software system where trust is based on transparency and user control.
    • age verification will typically done by a form of attestation, a highly problematic concept. Again, this would require to run software on the users device which can't be controlled by him or her, which is deceptively called "trusted computing". (Technically, age verification could be done by other means, but this is not what these proposals aim for).
    • in the world of public-key cryptography, which is what TLS , GnuPG, and most other modern systems are based in, encryption and digital signatures are nothing but two sides of the same coin: Who breaks encryption keys necessarily also breaks signature keys. This means it is not possible any more to sign software such as the Linux kernel, or Email clients, or browser packages. Or even banking apps or bootloaders for smart phones. Which means to give control away to the entities, groups or induviduals controlling these keys. Ironically, this will make computing lot less safe, and also undermine trust in communication networks, because communication where we can't be sure that the communicated symbols are genuine is for humans as worthless as the numbers on fake money. (As a corollary, it is also bad for business: All business is based on some amount of trust. Would you do important business with somebody if the only communication channel you have happens to be a messanger which is a compulsory liar?)

    To sum up, this is a massive transfer of control.

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Chat Control 2.0 has passed the first round of approval

  • Friendly tiling setup for a laptop? (tiling window manager?)

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  • And that's why things like PaperWM or niri might be a good compromise on the spectrum between "powerful but complex" and "simple but limited".

    And how much complexity is good for one depends also on the area of application. I use Rust for programming which is complex for sure, but when I have to scan a document, I use "simple-scan" which does exactly one thing, and very well.

  • Friendly tiling setup for a laptop? (tiling window manager?)

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  • They key is repetition, and this means it can be easier to go "all in" and learn, say, only six or eight keyboard chords from stumpwm than to use Xfce with mouse and i3 and more stuff, because the latter is ultimately more complex and requires more things that need to be memorized.

    There is a learning program called Anki which is great for repeating learned stuff, it was made for language learning but I've used it also for a job where I had to learn like one hundred three-letter acronyms. It can be very helpful but it won't help if one does not use the learned stuff.

  • My thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses

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  • To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn't need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn't be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it.

    I think exactly here is the crucial difference to the GPL and the rights it is concerned about: The GPL is concerned with the rights of the users. The reason for this is that closed-source and non-free software turns into a means of control that affects the sphere and rights of the users. A few examples:

    • email services which scan your private messages for advertising - or controlling you in a police state
    • operating systems which upload most of your data to the vendor's cloud, including passwords
    • applications and whole operating systems which are carefully designed to be very distracting, for example because this allows to use advertising or maximizes time spent with a service
    • printer drivers which only allow to buy expensive ink cartridges made by the printers vendor and waste ink on top of that
    • scanner drivers which stop to work after an OS upgrade, so that you have to buy a new scanner because the company will not give you any software update for the driver
    • printers which print tiny yellow dots on each page to identify stealthly who was printing it
    • web apps that are choke-full with dark patterns that manipulate you into allowing things you don't want.
    • trains that stop working if they are maintained by another company than the one that produced their software
    • digital hearing aids which are locked to the chain that sold it so their owners can't let maintain and repair them elsewhere
    • phone apps that track your location and send it to companies and state organizations

    these problems are what the GPL and copyleft licenses address, and the reason why systems like Linux are much more user-friendly.

    Oh, and in respect to the artists: Yes, many do art because they need to do that. And this is all the time blatantly exploited by companies. And companies try to exploit open source developers in the same way.

  • My thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses

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  • GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source [...]

    I am somewhat tripping here over the word "force".

    Do you want to say that non-commercial software developers should give away the fruits of their work for free, in general?

    But companies not?

    Do they have a kind of right to that? What would that right be based on?

    To make a picture: Let's say we have a farmer who goes to the farmers market and sells his stuff. Does his offer to sell his vegetables violate anyone's rights? Or freedoms? Is there any right to go and take his stuff away without paying?

    Now, let's say the farmer realizes that there are poor people which are starving, and because he is from a culture in which sharing has a very high value and people help each other all the time, he decides that people can take some of his vegetables for free.

    And then he observes that there are companies which take all his free stuff and sell it again to poor people. And he thinks "wait a minute", and writes a contract stipulating that anyone who takes his free stuff, agrees to not sell it to other persons, but to only give it for free, too. Anyone who takes his free stuff must sign that contract first.

    Does existence of this contract make others unfree? Or forces them to do something ? In exactly the same sense in which you were using the word "force" above?

    And still, we are only scratching the surface of the issue, since the GPL is not at all about the rights of software authors - it is a contract which uses these rights - but actually it is about the rights of the software users.

  • My thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses

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  • but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.

    But companies almost never do contribute? They just want stuff for free. At least that's my experience in industrial automation / real-time systems.

    Also, if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux. But in reality, it is the opposite.

  • Distro Recommendation Discussion (Not a 'What Distro Should I Use?' Post)

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  • I also think that Arch works much better than its reputation. It is true that sometimes, manual changes to packages or configuration are needed. But this is sometimes also the case if you upgrade a Debian installation, or pull a new version of GNOME (I had GNOME break completely when upgrading from buster to bookworm).

    What is probably more important is whether the user can live with many small but more frequent changes, or bigger changes and reinstallations every two or three years. I think that a pure and plain desktop installation might need almost no maintenance.

    Also, running a system for years without re-installing requires a good amount of hygiene and discipline when configuring and adding packages from source and such. But this does not matter that much for a standard user.

  • Distro Recommendation Discussion (Not a 'What Distro Should I Use?' Post)

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  • Isn't constantly asking for "the best" distro, and constantly asking or stirring contentious topics a kind of spamming or trolling? Especially since anything relevant to that has probably been said and written about at least fifty times? And especially since most of these posts do not make any effort to describe what is so special about their request that the answer can't be looked up by using the f******** search function?

  • Friendly tiling setup for a laptop? (tiling window manager?)

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  • It is like vim or Emacs that one forgets or tends to forget key bindings and features that one does not use quite frequently. This has nothing to do with intelligence. It is just that the brain forgets stuff it doesn't see as relevant (and different brains work differently, here).

  • Autism @lemmy.world
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Do you think Rami Kaminski's idea of an "otroverted" social personality style is correlated?

  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Akkudoktor Energy Management / Optimization System: Optimized Control of Home Energy Systems

    akkudoktor-eos.readthedocs.io /en/latest/akkudoktoreos/introduction.html
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    evcc - Solar Charging ☀️🚘 - Connects Your EV Charger With Your PV System

    evcc.io /en/
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Community Survey On Jolla's Next Smartphone Hardware

    forum.sailfishos.org /t/next-gen-jolla-phone/23882
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Inside the Volkswagen emissions cheating. Or: How proprietary software becomes malware that kills thousands of people through pollution

    lwn.net /Articles/670488/
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Kroah-Hartman explains Cyber Resilience Act for open source

    www.theregister.com /2025/09/30/cyber_reiliance_act_opinion_column/
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Kroah-Hartman explains Cyber Resilience Act for open source

    www.theregister.com /2025/09/30/cyber_reiliance_act_opinion_column/
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    multi boot - Hibernating and booting into another System or Distribution: will my filesystems be corrupted?

    superuser.com /questions/39532/hibernating-and-booting-into-another-os-will-my-filesystems-be-corrupted
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Here another helpful solution for people who want to evaluate and compare different Linux distributions: GNOME Boxes, a software to easily create virtual machines

    apps.gnome.org /en-GB/Boxes/
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Really good Guile Scheme crash course

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Distrochooser: Tool to choose a good Linux distribution for your needs

    distrochooser.de
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    If you dual-boot different distributions and want to keep old versions of distros for upgrades, how do you proceed?

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions

    tazj.in /blog/trying-guix
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration

    lwn.net /SubscriberLink/1029767/43b62a7a7408c2a9/
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Introduction - Steve's Tutorial on Jujutsu, an alternative front-end to git

    steveklabnik.github.io /jujutsu-tutorial/introduction/introduction.html
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    RustDesk, probably one of the best TeamViewer Alternatives

    en.m.wikipedia.org /wiki/RustDesk
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Libxml2's “no security embargoes” policy

    lwn.net /SubscriberLink/1025971/73f269ad3695186d/
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

    Project Gemini FAQ

    geminiprotocol.net /docs/faq.gmi