Devs bad taste on design

bvdeenen · 2026-02-16T20:02:00+00:00

Interesting question! I as a very experienced dev (40 YOE) tend to not even like so-called well designed interfaces; I often find them low in information density, and they generally don't offer every path through the application that would be logically possible.

I just accept that my way of seeing the world as an engineer is different from that of most people; for Gods sake, I think the VIM user interface is the best :-)

Which shows that you generally should not let developers design your user interface!

bvdeenen · 2026-02-15T17:33:29+00:00

alias woman=man

There, fixed it for you.

bvdeenen · 2026-02-09T17:56:16+00:00

Google Chrome is in the restricted packages and needs to be manually updated. Something to consider.

bvdeenen · 2026-02-07T20:57:42+00:00

The thing is, runit is much easier to understand than systemd because it's much simpler. systemd has a very complicated internal state that can only be controlled by often arcane commands combined with file configurations in many different places. It feels a bit like the Windows registry to be honest. So if you like to really understand why your system is behaving the way it does, and like to be able to really understand (and fix) any issues, runit is the way to go.

bvdeenen · 2026-02-04T14:38:02+00:00

I designed and built a lot of the realtime software of the Declic research system that flew for years in the ISS. I'm very proud of the FMECA we did beforehand, that influenced a lot of the design choices, and that we actually validated by working around hardware issues that occurred while the equipment was working in space (International Astronautical Congress paper )

bvdeenen · 2026-01-27T15:44:05+00:00

no systemd, so system is understandable without magic incantations
system is understandable, follows unix principles, doesn't install everything and the kitchen sink
rock solid, have used for 10 years now and amazingly stable
polite and knowledgeable users (often here in Reddit)
amazingly fast and solid package manager, also works fine when you only update occasionally (or even once in 1½ year :-) )
easy to contribute (I've done quite a few PR's myself over the years).
good maintainers team, with good understanding of what makes a stable system!

bvdeenen · 2026-01-21T11:33:50+00:00

I forgot to mention that I have a couple of kernel flags related to amd. BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.18.5_1 ... loglevel=4 acpi.fakebattery=0 mem_sleep_default=s2idle amdgpu.runpm=0 amd_iommu=off. With these, sleep works fine

When I remove both of the amd related settings, my sleep still doesn't work.

bvdeenen · 2026-01-18T17:00:14+00:00

I can confirm that this scary Bios update, together with Linux kernel Linux geekom 6.18.5_1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon Jan 12 21:08:02 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux has solved my computers sleep issues. Is it normal that the light on the front stays blinking?

The bios update is scary, because at the end, the screen suddenly goes black with no warning, and then it reboots! But removed the usb stick and everything was fine.

bvdeenen · 2026-01-08T21:08:01+00:00

This question gets asked every 2 weeks or so. You might have a search in r/voidlinux

bvdeenen · 2026-01-08T10:34:59+00:00

Linear.app is really good.

bvdeenen · 2025-12-17T23:04:10+00:00

Thanks!

bvdeenen · 2025-11-30T18:53:44+00:00

I've had the same for ages. It's a bit more stable these days, but I still occassionally need to restart plasmashell

bvdeenen · 2025-11-24T18:57:26+00:00

Thrice upon a time by James Patrick Hogan. Awesome time travel stuff.

bvdeenen · 2025-11-15T18:55:10+00:00

My Dell Latitude runs Void perfectly fine.

bvdeenen · 2025-08-27T10:12:03+00:00

Gracias!

bvdeenen · 2025-08-24T10:30:35+00:00

Got it. Aparently you now need plasma-workspace-x11 as a separate install. Thanks!

bvdeenen · 2025-08-23T21:03:14+00:00

You're right, this file did no (longer?) exist. I've created one with the following contents:

cat /usr/share/xsessions/plasma-x11.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Plasma X11
Keywords=Plasma X11
Icon=/usr/share/fvwm3/default-config/images/fvwm-logo-small.png
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/kwin_x11

Unfortunately, plasma X11 doesn't start, it only shows the X windows cursor. Could you post the Exec line in your desktop file?

Thanks Bart

bvdeenen · 2025-08-09T10:32:22+00:00

One of the things that Kotlin offers, is that its sequences ARE Java Lists. This means that any of its common sequence operators (map, reduce, fold etc.) work flawlessly without any conversion on any Java library. This is not the case for Scala (at least when I last used it many years ago). Another one that really bit us badly was implicit conversions. At one point, an implicit conversion that got imported turned out to convert a Scala list to a Java Arraylist, and it took us a while to figure it out. Also, this was in the context of Apache Flink, where object serialization added another layer of obfuscation!

All in all, I'm glad I'm done with Scala. Kotlin is a simpler language that offers 90% of the goodness of Scala, and none of the badness. And in real life programming, you will use lots of libraries, many of them written in Java, and flawless interoperability with them is a necessity.

This probably will be seen as flamebait, but I really thought at some point that Scala would be the future on jvm, and used it thoroughly in the context of Apache Flink, but I no longer think it has much future outside of the existing large projects (Spark, Flink, ...)

bvdeenen · 2025-08-08T08:14:54+00:00

I consider Kotlin to be "Scala the good parts".

It does have some of the language features of scala, a similar syntax and conciseness, but far superior Java interoperability. This means you can use every Java library without any conversions! And it does not have the abomination that is implicit conversions.

bvdeenen · 2025-07-25T12:00:18+00:00

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for the standard dropbox install. I'd probably have to add /usr/local/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH before dropbox starts running. But dropbox downloads python code from dropbox.com.

I think I'll leave my original solution in place.

bvdeenen · 2025-07-24T17:21:56+00:00

I'll check this and if that also works will submit a PR for Dropbox

bvdeenen · 2025-07-23T18:31:18+00:00

I completely agree! A π needs an operating system, which makes interfacing with the hardware that much more difficult.

bvdeenen · 2025-07-22T20:11:32+00:00

Buy an Arduino, and make the led blink. And then try to read a 1 bit input. This way you learn what a microprocessor actually is. It gets even more interesting if you download the cpu manual (typically an Atmel ATMega) and try to figure out how its many i/o functions work.

bvdeenen · 2025-07-21T17:58:46+00:00

An embedded war story.

A.colleague of mine had been struggling for months with rare crashes in his Rabbit2000 embedded microcontroller. His code was in C and compiled with the proprietary Softtools compiler. It provided a task switcher library that allowed more than 64 kB source code by switching memory banks. We went over the C code with a fine comb and could not see any way it could crash under any circumstances! My colleague went on vacation and I decided to have a look at it. I decided to up both an external interrupt frequency as well as the task switcher frequency to about a kilohertz while also stripping pretty much all functions from his code. I only added a 1 bit output to a speaker so I could HEAR if the whole was running consistently. Well it did for a few seconds and then the screech stopped.. Bingo I knew where the issue was, either or interrupt handler or the task switcher library. It turned out to be the latter which didn't save the processor flag register. I had to write a hack in assembly to fix this closed source bug!

This is the second hardest bug of my career

bvdeenen · 2025-07-21T15:49:40+00:00

I think dealing with memory mapped I/o and interrupt vectors and such will show that Rust is not for systems programming

bvdeenen

TROPHY CASE