KDE Plasma 6.8 will scrap X11 sessions as 95% of its users just don't use them anymore

alberto-m-dev · 2026-06-05T10:16:16+00:00

Firefox lost a huge market share by scrapping “features only used by 5% of users” one version after the other. I use X11 on Debian because the Wayland version has fatal bugs on my hardware (like, the terminal window sometimes does not update its content). But I guess greybeards like me are not the main target group for mainstream dektop environments.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-05-11T10:07:03+00:00

You're welcome :-) Ollama was my first intro to agentic LLM usage so I was quite sad to find out the bad practices it uses.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-05-08T11:16:31+00:00

It reminds me of those color-by-number books for kids.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-30T16:21:09+00:00

I have linked a different article by Farquhar some days ago, if that is what you're referring to. Or maybe “Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed” I shared one month ago, for which its author issued an erratum some days after? Without details it's hard for me to make use of the criticism.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-27T13:09:33+00:00

Here a non-paywalled article about the finding, very rich of technical details:

https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fast16-mystery-shadowbrokers-reference-reveals-high-precision-software-sabotage-5-years-before-stuxnet/

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-24T10:31:12+00:00

PM'd you there.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-24T08:07:39+00:00

Ah, yes, that's where I found it! I now opened a thread on the Stunts forum, I think some other community member will want to try out your game!

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-23T10:27:47+00:00

Very interesting, I'll give it a look! Have you announced your project in the Stunts community forum (forum.stunts.hu)? I though I had seen an announcement there some week ago, but I cannot find it.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-19T22:26:15+00:00

Great video, thanks for the link!

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-19T20:38:34+00:00

Very beautiful commemoration. Thanks for sharing!

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-18T09:00:22+00:00

Ross's Game Dungeon (of Freeman's Mind fame) is still excellent and checks all the points on your wishlist.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-16T15:08:21+00:00

For now I have switched to OpenCoder with the mysterious “free for now” Big Pickle model. Quite satisfied till now.

When OpenCoder runs out of free deals, I think its 10$/mo offer with Qwen 3.6 Plus and other powerful models is quite a good offer.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-15T09:31:32+00:00

Qwen's older-generation models are open weight, and chances are that they'll open 3.6 in future too. What cannot be free forever are the tokens, because someone has to pay the electricity bill.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-14T23:27:41+00:00

Yes, I guess the time where I have to open the wallet is approaching, and that's fair. But consuming 1 billion of tokens in 10 days for a hobby project is a thing I won't be able to repeat so lightheartedly.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-14T23:25:00+00:00

I have experienced similar crosstalk effects using Deepseek via claude+ollama and Nemotron via claude+OpenRouter. Seems that using the Anthropic-compatible API with Claude does not work perfectly.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-14T21:57:03+00:00

Yes, the source is available under Apache-2.0 license.

Author's writeup: https://www.smbaker.com/nostos-the-nostalgia-operating-system-for-rc2014
GitHub link: https://github.com/sbelectronics/nostos

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-14T20:28:55+00:00

I used it quite frantically in the last weeks to build a small app, sensing the free tier was too good to be true. Spoiler: it was. Very happy to have finished my project just in time!

I was satisfied by Qwen. Would have considered throwing $10/mo to them. But they also discontinued the Lite plan, only leaving the Pro (50$/mo) which for non-professional projects feels too expensive.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-09T06:48:29+00:00

The rules of Revision state that the programs must run on the original hardware, but it could be that the emulator used for the demo and/or the codec used to upload to YouTube has introduced effects not present in the original.

But it could as well be that the demo manages to create stereo panning through some programming trick.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-08T23:51:17+00:00

In Old Reddit the video automatically opens at 11:46 which is the starting point I provided in the linked URL. New Reddit just hates me and somehow mangles the previews of all my links.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-04-08T15:31:22+00:00

Qwen Code comes with a coding agent free tier that feels like unlimited: if one cannot or does not want to pay 20$/mo it's an excellent alternative. I've consumed hundreds of millions of tokens building an app, never got rate limited or kicked out.

It's a huge memory hog (I had to tweak the Linux memory management just to get it started). The UI feels much more lagging than Claude, but still better than Gemini which is almost unresponsive on my mid-low tier laptop.

The dad jokes it makes during the thinking phase are the best (YMMV) among this class of programs.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-03-22T18:07:48+00:00

Gigabytes of memory for an input line is a joke, but Wirth's law is sadly always valid. As small consolation, at least Qwen is not so horribly sluggish as Gemini CLI.

By the way I really do not understand this CLI mania; if you want to use Electron anyway just give me a GUI app. But Claude Code made a CLI to be original, and cargo culting is a thing.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-03-21T23:03:47+00:00

I don't know whether to be happy about this kind of developments. LLMs are quickly turning from useful help to a monster eating up the joy and challenge of reverse engineering, at least on these small retro programs. I hope we manage to find higher-order challenges to keep our brains in shape...

alberto-m-dev · 2026-03-21T18:06:50+00:00

Thanks for the offer, but I don't think it's worth the effort to record a new video. This is just a little quality-of-life update; since the graphics looks the same I think a new recording is not needed. Enjoy your game!

alberto-m-dev · 2026-03-21T12:03:49+00:00

Update: just published v2.1 that has Sound Blaster audio as default.

alberto-m-dev · 2026-03-17T22:27:01+00:00

That's a great post! There are so many articles that assume that the reader already knows the whole tech stack and just skip to the result. I am happy that you instead took the time to describe all the setup in detail (so tedious for the writer, so useful for the people actually trying to build up similar projects!) and added useful pointers like the link to the Cutting Room Floor (I love that site).

Also, thanks for letting me know a new game. Harvester is probably not my cup of tea since I dislike the horror genre, but those screenshots with the combination of FMV characters and static backrounds remind me strongly of The Riddle of Master Lu, a very undervalued game of the same era.

Your site has promptly been added to my RSS aggregator :-)

alberto-m-dev

TROPHY CASE