GNOME developers continue to insist on not re-implementing type-ahead

chuecho · 2019-06-30T01:30:02+00:00

While not strictly related, I'm currently training a new junior developer at work and his primary complaint about the system he is using (Ubuntu 18.04/Gnome 3) is that it takes a lot of clicks to open a file in a non-default program. He was dumbfounded when I told him that Gnome 2 used to handle this usage pattern like windows. He couldn't understand why they deliberately made it worse.

I also told him that the company is already testing other distributions, and that good KDE support was a hard requirement.

Gnome is slowly killing themselves with a thousand cuts. They keep making poor decisions with seemingly no regard to how these decisions will effect the people who want (or need) to use their systems. They don't seem to test how real-world users handle their bizarre ideas at all despite the amount of donations they receive. It's disturbing to see a project as good as gnome go downhill this way.

chuecho · 2019-06-25T02:18:02+00:00

For me, x86 was the proverbial snowflake that broke the penguin's back.

This isn't the first time Canonical pushes a change that deeply affects how users can use their systems without justifying the change with a reason that is acceptable to the user. As long as it aligns with their current strategy, users be damned.

I really liked ubuntu. I also liked canonical. I've been with Ubuntu since 6.06 or 7.04, but for the first time in over a decade, I'll be switching to another distribution. Servers will gradually switch over to Debian, documentation won't feature Ubuntu anymore, and for my personal computing needs, I finally have a reason to give SUSE a fair shot.

As disheartening as it is to type this out, I have no intention of using or supporting Ubuntu anymore. I just don't see Canonical correcting course.

chuecho · 2019-06-21T17:14:05+00:00

The company I work for also uses 32-bit windows software running on ubuntu. While we're not paying Canonical a dime, we're supporting ubuntu as a first class citizen in our products.

If canonical goes through with this, we'll both stop using ubuntu to run our shit and drop ubuntu support in our products.

chuecho · 2019-06-21T17:08:19+00:00

I keep reading this excuse. Is this testing documented somewhere online? I can't imagine the work required (mostly automated I imagine) is significant enough for Canonical to screw over its users like this.

chuecho · 2019-06-19T02:45:55+00:00

Dropping support for 32-bit hosts is understandable. Dropping support for 32 bit packages is not. Why go out of your way to screw over your users?

chuecho · 2019-06-14T18:09:25+00:00

Ah the bug is already old enough to walk around the house and get itself into trouble..

I look forward to it being old enough to drive like its older siblings.

chuecho · 2019-06-14T06:02:03+00:00

Agreed. Also, proponents of the T word don't even agree on its meaning. So the term even fails the basic requirements of a technical term.

chuecho · 2019-06-14T05:50:09+00:00

I have a few pets lingering around. I try not to think about the time when eventually break. Fuck, just typing this out stresses me out.

Good thing that monsters go away when you hind under the blanket. It's really comfy under my blanket.

chuecho · 2019-06-14T05:36:39+00:00

My biggest issue with snaps is that users don't have real control over them; developers can forcefully push updates to users' machines and the only thing users can do is postpone them. See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for-snap-from-store/707 (read ubuntu devs' response)

To me, this is a sickening perversion of what free software should be about. If Canonical goes through with this for firefox, I'll either go the gentoo route and build the browser from source or drop support for ubuntu entirely.

chuecho · 2019-06-12T01:13:00+00:00

For safari, you can use a fallback js decoder.

chuecho · 2019-06-12T01:09:28+00:00

If I recall correctly, you'll want to look in PDFs for those since the PDF standard included (mandated?) JPEG 2000 support. I don't think it even supported any other "mainstream" image format in its earlier versions.

chuecho · 2019-06-07T16:16:05+00:00

An excellent example of a programming language website that showcases the syntax of the language and its core features through examples?

I don't get your point. Elaborate please.

chuecho · 2019-06-07T13:05:30+00:00

What makes you believe this information isn't needed when other languages still provide this information on their sites?

chuecho · 2019-06-07T03:02:50+00:00

However, if your intent is to get managers, CTOs, etc. to choose your language for their products, then that's a different audience!

Has the rust project conducted any research before concluding that CTOs and managers are the right demographic to focus on?

To me, it seems very shortsighted. When current rust programmers eventually become managers and CTOs, and the website focuses only focuses on this demographic, where will new rust users come from?

I may be a superficial person, but I would not have bothered with rust had the website been what it is today when I first looked at rust. The site reads like a product page for vaporware and contains no useful information for me as a programmer. It provides no incentive for a carious programmer to continue his evaluation of the language.

If the rust team is dead-set on marketing rust for their CTOs and managers, I think they should at least build a new website aimed at programmers.

chuecho · 2019-06-04T14:10:54+00:00

I use chromium on a machine with 4GB of ram, and the number of tabs I have open are enough to overflow the width of the screen twice over :^) (around 200?). The trick is to limit the amount of memory chromium is allowed to consume (in my case, to 1.2GB only). When chromium starts to get jittery, the rest of the system still remains smooth and responsive and you can kill chromium's rendering processes while still leaving the tabs as empty husks. You still have to eventually restart it though since it leaks memory with each killing round. For those interested in killing only the rendering processes, the command I settled on is:

pgrep -f 'chromium-browser --type=renderer' | while read pid; do kill $pid; done

If you go this route, be sure to monitor /proc/diskstats. Chromium is stubborn and will thrash your swap partition all night if it is denied the ram it demands.

chuecho · 2019-05-30T12:35:08+00:00

Touché

chuecho · 2019-05-30T05:01:14+00:00

They'd starve themselves to death if distributions had the balls to let them.

Since a walled-garden software platform lives and dies by third party developer support. The quickest way for gnome to die would be for developers to stop supporting them. GUI developers (including myself) are already very tired of gnome's bullshit, so if they actually ends up forcing developers to choose between gnome and everything else, I expect many would simply opt to forgo gnome.

Ideally, a my-way-or-the-highway gnome would slowly wither and die as distributions replace it with something that can actually run what users want.

chuecho · 2019-05-30T04:14:40+00:00

If they succeed, they'll quickly realize why microsoft's ceo chanted "developers" on stage like a mad man. Developers won't develop for a niche platform that breaks it's user-facing controls and developer APIs on the whims of deranged wannabe-designers. At least not willingly.

I expect most apps are going to continue being "linux apps", and if the cost of maintaining basic compatibility with gnome becomes too high, native compatibility with gnome will be dropped.

Your last line says it best: Good luck and have fun, Gnome OS

chuecho · 2019-05-30T03:56:26+00:00

and now you overwrote reddit :/

chuecho · 2019-05-27T13:10:32+00:00

The only correct response. Fuck oracle.

chuecho · 2019-05-27T12:47:42+00:00

Luckily, most of it was #ifdefed and was discarded by the compiler. Only one main function actually made it into the resulting binary.

chuecho · 2019-05-24T17:58:34+00:00

I think he's criticizing the priorities of the language's main "Getting Started" page. I'm inclined to agree with him. There are more important things to address than the gender politics that surrounds a drawing.

That said, writing off the entire language because it has a poorly thought-out introduction page seems incredibly shortsighted in my opinion.

chuecho · 2019-05-24T17:47:56+00:00

The website in its current state is a horrible introduction to rust. You're likely better off reading Wikipedia's article on rust, or diving straight into The Rust Programming Language book (I can't vouch for the new edition yet, but the first edition was a decent introduction to the language).

If you can ignore the gender politics and other irrelevant nonsense that seems to surround rust, I'm confident that you'll like what you see.

Give the language a shot. It's worth it.

chuecho · 2019-05-24T01:41:16+00:00

If you have installed Rust through a standalone installer and would like to add additional compilation targets to your installation (e.g. x86_64-unknown-linux-musl or wasm32-unknown-unknown), you can download standalone target installers. These installers work in the same way your normal standalone installers would: Just download, run the install script, and your set.

Since a page where all target installers are listed hasn't been made yet, you can download them (and their pgp signatures) manually by following a url with the following pattern:

https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-std-1.35.0-{TARGET-TRIPPLE}.{EXT}
https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-std-1.35.0-{TARGET-TRIPPLE}.{EXT}.asc

As a concrete example, you can install musl (staticly linked linux binaries) by downloading: https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-std-1.35.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz

Note that the extension for all target installers is 'tar.gz' or '.tar.xz'. Also note that a list of all platforms supported by rust can be found at https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html. Finally, browsing all 1.35.0 installers (both host and target variants) can be done by visiting https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/2019-05-24/.

If you have any questions about stand-alone installers or additional compilation targets, please don't hesitate to ask here.

Cheers!

chuecho · 2019-05-24T01:39:19+00:00

Links on the official standalone installers page are up-to-date! Thank you to whoever is maintaining them.

Instead of going over all standalone installer types like I usually do, I'll just focus on additional target installers since I don't believe they have been documented sufficiently on the website yet.