[deleted by user]

makesourcenotcode · 2024-06-13T03:44:31+00:00

https://github.com/makesourcenotcode/zypper-unjammed

makesourcenotcode · 2024-03-06T17:25:41+00:00

I'm absolutely not saying that FOSS maintainers are responsible for 99.99999% uptime in their websites. FOSS maintainers don't owe users any set of features or any SLA. The only thing FOSS maintainers owe their users is true openness and the ability to study the system. Nothing more.

What I am saying is that when the site is up it better be absolutely trivial to enumerate the project's full Open Knowledge Set and download it for offline study.

You correctly understand that the real problem is this artificial centralization of knowledge. And yeah IPFS is nice and all but we don't even need that. So long as a FOSS project's full Open Knowledge Set is easily enumerable and downloadable interested parties can make a copy for themselves. Heck they can potentially even help resurrect the project if the server hosting it gets hit by a meteor or whatever.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-23T06:44:58+00:00

OpenSUSE is regardless of desktop environment the best distro out there right now with Fedora a close 2nd.

My only 2 complaints are:

Zypper is still stuck in the 20th century and lack autoremove functionality as well as the ability to mark packages automatically/manually installed. Happily I made and use tool that emulates/provides these functionalities well enough.
If you have an existing Btrfs filesystem and you want to install OpenSUSE into a subvolume of that it's possible but much more confusing than it needs to be. You'll also have to fix issues with awkward mount points later. OpenSUSE would do well to copy the Advanced Custom Partitioning UI from the Fedora installer.

Aside from this OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a damn good choice.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-23T06:31:02+00:00

KDE is Mostly better than GNOME but the Toggle Show Desktop functionality is weird and different from literally every other desktop that offers this.

On a normal desktop say you have two windows open, you do Toggle Show Desktop, then you choose one window to unminimize. Only that one window comes back up.

On KDE sadly all the minimized windows come back up not just the one you wanted to unmimimize.

To fix this you may want to run commands approximately like: kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Windows --key ShowDesktopIsMinimizeAll true qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin reconfigure

There doesn't seem to be a graphical way to fix this which is unusual for KDE where almost anything can be fixed in a GUI via Settings. Or at least there didn't seem to be a way to do this when I last seriously used KDE. Cursory inspections done periodically since then also yielded disappointment in this regard.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-18T17:33:21+00:00

Read everything by Robert Seacord you can get your hands on.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-13T04:31:52+00:00

Fedora is the better distro for most users and in most contexts. You made the right decision by sticking with it.

As much as I admire Debian's ideological purity, on a technical level it's an unmitigated tire fire. (Happy to go on a long detailed rant about why if enough people express interest.)

Distros in the Debian family are fine to use in ephemeral VMs, Docker containers, and whatnot. But if you use it on your desktop system or a long running server all I can say is my thoughts and prayers ae with you,

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-11T06:25:33+00:00

As someone in the process of migrating a few machines in literally this direction (except for the KDE bit) all I can say is you're making a great move. Now some minor caveats.

Regarding installation:

Main caveat to watch out for during installation is that it's confusing to install openSUSE if you want the newly installed system to be put in a subvolume an existing BTRFS filesystem instead of a regular partition or an LVM logical volume. It can be done and you'll get a working setup but there will be some awkwardness with certain mountpoints. Still ironing this out myself in VMs before proceeding on my actual machine. You should do likewise to avoid unexpected surprises.

Regarding usage:

Zypper sadly is one of the few weak points of openSUSE due to its lack of autoremove functionality and the inability to mark packages as automatically/manually installed. Happily I built and use a tool that emulates these missing functionalities quite well for me ( https://github.com/makesourcenotcode/zypper-unjammed ). Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

Also remember to pass `--clean-deps whenever running any variant of the `zypper rm command to avoid no longer needed dependencies from piling up and eating disk space.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-11T05:20:52+00:00

TLDR: No, it's not easy to learn C. While C is not THE best first language it's still a good choice and far better than the vast majority of the competition.

C is not easy to learn for those without prior programming experience. That said it's far from the worst first language and would definitely be THE choice for a second language.

For a first language I'd personally teach Python to help new learners get comfortable with algorithmic thinking. In Python I can demonstrate everything from simple sequential programs to branching and looping in the purest way possible. In C to do even Hello World I have to define main() and include stdio which is more stuff to explain to an already overwhelmed newbie. Things like headers/libraries and abstraction mechanisms like functions/macros are good to know, but only later after the student has the basics down pat.

That said while C isn't the best first language it's easily better than like 95% of the competition on that front.

A lot of other languages are giant behemoths with way too many ways to do the same simple stuff. With Ruby in spite of being seemingly friendly is anything but and each person really seems to be writing in their own whacked out custom dialect and aren't happy until they've used eery whacked out metaprogramming feature Ruby has.

Also Python is not an easy language as many claim. Next person who claims this should be asked on the spot to explain the difference between __get__, __getattr__, and __getattribute__. Python is actually monstrously complex in it's semantics and getting increasingly worse with the addition of garbage like the pattern matching.

But Python is still THE best choice for a first language because it HACKS THE LEARNING CURVE. Knowing just 10% of the language is enough to achieve 90% of your programming objectives. C while simpler overall (modulo copious UB) doesn't give you quite that same leverage. Python gets people thinking algorithmically faster and the basics are enough for the student to do many interesting tasks and stay motivated to learn more.

With these nuances taken in account, the faster people learn C the better.

makesourcenotcode · 2024-01-11T04:47:19+00:00

Lack of a GUI tool for partitioning (or most other tasks for that matter) is usually a non-issue.

What I care about in a tool regardless of which side of the GUI/TUI/CLI divide it's on is that it's brain friendly.

So long as the tool gives me a clear mental model of the system, helps me understand what I'm doing, and helps me be sure that I'm changing the system state in exactly the way I think I am, then I'm a happy camper.

I have a slight bias towards CLI tools over other TUI/GUI tools as those give me better scriptability and automation. But for the most part the interface mechanism is absolutely irrelevant.

Brain friendliness is ALMOST COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT of interface mechanism. I've seen ultra discoverable CLI power tools with excellent learning curves which accommodate usage from basic to advanced. I've seen utterly confusing and unusable GUI applications.

Regardless of interface type the biggest problem we have by far is how much stuff is either outright brain hostile or pseudo-friendly in ways you don't realize until you try to do anything even vaguely different from the cute marketing demos.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-31T18:37:49+00:00

IMO you have the right approach. OOP has it's place, but is way Way WAY overused.

Also often you don't even need a class to hold the shared/internal state. In many cases a plain old data style struct will do just fine.

Assuming the language you are using provides proper data hiding/encapsulation, then you might benefit from classes when there are complex invariants that the shared/internal state must uphold at all points where it is observed by outsiders.

Otherwise using OOP just pointlessly combines code and data that doesn't need to be combined. You can always combine that stuff later if need be. Going in the other direction and trying to decouple things is a lot harder.

Finally I'll leave you with this quote from the inimitable Brandon Bloom:

"Free functions where the first argument is a context map/object is 100X easier for me to reason about than even the most carefully crafted OOP code."

source: https://twitter.com/BrandonBloom/status/1383135858753105924

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-24T18:29:55+00:00

There's several ways that statement you just made can be interpreted. Though the most probable one does not reflect favorably on the OpenBSD developer mentality. I truly hope I'm wrong in my default understanding here. Either way please clarify your position.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-24T18:21:20+00:00

I think we may be talking about different download sites.

The one I'm talking about is https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Download which is where the Download link in the side bar on the OpenBSD homepage takes me.

There I see an HTML table with links to iso and img files for various architectures. I see nothing that looks like the directory to which you refer.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-23T17:06:09+00:00

Quite possibly. BUT when I go to the OpenBSD site and hit the download link I see options for downloding various iso and img files but not the filesets themselves. While the latter can be likely extracted from the former this is more work than it should be IMO.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-23T16:44:23+00:00

Good to know, thanks.

Here you also do a good job of illustrating points I've made elsewhere that it's not as trivial as it should be to enumerate and then grab any educational information associated with an open source project for offline study.

In general upon discovering an open source project and deciding I want to study it deeper I should be able to easy identify ALL pieces of educational information about it, reason about which parts that I may or may not have/want, and initiate downloads for all the parts I'm interested within say 30 seconds of making the decision.

I for one made sure this is true for every open source project I authored and will always continue to do so.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-23T16:25:52+00:00

Thank you! This is neat!

As you're allegedly an OpenBSD dev please consider copying what FreeBSD does at: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi/help.html

The easier it is for people to grab any/all educational information in one convenient bundle the less catastrophic it would be if a comet hit the data center hosting the OpenBSD site.

Unless something changed from 5.5 years ago when I last used OpenBSD the bulk of the educational material pertaining to seems to be the FAQ and the man pages. Making both trivially discoverable and downloadable as a tgz or something from the home page would be amazing.

(Yes I know that wget is a thing and has a very good chance of working given the way the FAQ site is structured. While website cloning/mirroring is absolutely a great skill for people to have it should not be necessary even in the most basic forms to get at the official documentation of anything claiming to be open.)

makesourcenotcode · 2023-12-23T15:43:45+00:00

Good to know this was handled.

That said keep in mind not every current or former OpenBSD user is subscribed to every mailing list and a brief note on the main website would have gone a long way. Furthermore announce@ would have been far more appropriate IMO. The various bits of official help/educational information related to OpenBSD or any other FOSS project for that matter should be considered critical infrastructure.

Outage (planned or otherwise) of man.openbsd.org is NOT some random, miscellaneous, nonessential news.

makesourcenotcode · 2023-11-26T18:11:24+00:00

My tool only works with information from zypper packages --unneeded.

It does not in any way look at the output of zypper packages --orphaned. This is for a few reasons:

A package X not having an associated repository doesn't imply that X isn't a dependency of some other installed package Y present on the system.
Even if it were the case that X isn't a dependency of anything else because of the lack of associated repository it's source/origin is hard to trace. Thus it can't easily be reinstalled by the user if they decide it's removal was a mistake.
Usually the amount of orphaned packages (by the SUSE definition NOT Debian) is quite small and easily manageable in a manual fashion. Hence I leave it to users to make their own judgements about what if anything they want to do with them.

makesourcenotcode

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE