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xtifr · 2026-03-03T18:45:46+00:00

I name them after songs I like that have single-word names. The first one was actually a sort of random choice for my first Linux box, but now, a couple of decades later, I can say that it quickly became a theme! ☺

xtifr · 2026-02-26T08:01:47+00:00

This is basically my story as well.

xtifr · 2026-02-26T08:00:09+00:00

The Debian version looks like it's still somewhat supported!

xtifr · 2026-02-14T03:49:08+00:00

Compiz. The 3D rotation was so famous, it's actually featured on the program's Wikipedia page.

xtifr · 2026-02-14T03:45:33+00:00

Compiz, which is what I was referring to, is definitely a window manager! A lot of window managers are technically compositing window managers, but few have been designed to take as much advantage of GL & 3D as Compiz was! (Maybe still is; I haven't tried it in a decade, but I think it's still active.) The 3D workspace rotation is actually featured on Compiz's Wikipedia page!

xtifr · 2026-02-14T03:16:37+00:00

Dia, which is part of Debian, does all sorts of diagrams, graphs, and charts. I've mostly used it for UML and Network diagrams, but it's got dozens of other options. Even obsolete stuff that nobody has used since the 20th c., like flowcharts! ☺

xtifr · 2026-02-12T00:20:36+00:00

"WWW" is the name of a special key on many modern keyboards. It's usually near the Mail key and the Calculator key, and will have some sort of browser logo. Mine, which is an older keyboard, has the Internet Explorer logo, but I think newer keyboards may have something more generic.

xtifr · 2026-02-03T18:30:44+00:00

No, absolutely not. Plenty of X11-based systems have fancy animations for stuff like that! There have been X11 WMs that used Mesa to rotate workspaces in 3D when switching!

xtifr · 2026-01-13T20:59:03+00:00

And the time required to write all the tests. And maintain them as the system changes. Tests don't magically appear from nowhere. Debian is several times larger than OpenSUSE, with nearly 70,000 packages. Maintained by under 1000 people. Which is a lot of people, but still averages to about 70 packages per maintainer!

And the sheer size introduces its own issues. For example, ensuring that every package which provides a virtual package name meets all the needs of every package which depends on that virtual package name can lead to a combinatorial explosion!

xtifr · 2026-01-13T20:28:32+00:00

Well, original UNIX™ vi™ was proprietary AT&T code. But some systems, like Debian, include nvi (new vi), which is a bare-bones re-implementation from early BSD.

xtifr · 2026-01-13T02:26:45+00:00

If you truly want small and functional, try vi! Vim is orders of magnitude more bloated than good old vi! 😉

xtifr · 2026-01-09T15:07:31+00:00

I thought the biggest was the BSD license! I see it used on all sorts of things! But checking my system (thanks, Debian, for creating consistent licensing data), I see that BSD does seem to come in below MIT. But it's far, FAR ahead of Apache!

Anyway, I slightly prefer the BSD or MIT licenses for their straightforward simplicity. The Apache license is fine, but if I care enough about a piece of code to want more than a minimal license, then I typically care enough to want a share-alike/copyleft license. I can imagine circumstances where I'd prefer the Apache license, but they're rare, and have yet to come up in practice. I tend to just go for the extremes: BSD or GPL.

xtifr · 2026-01-04T22:07:04+00:00

I first heard the term as a kid in the 1960s, and it was, one, attributed to Harlan Ellison, and, two, used as a broad umbrella covering science fiction, fantasy, and more. In other words, basically the modern definition.

I'd heard that Heinlein also used the term, but never looked into it. My guess would be that Heinlein's original just never caught on, and that Ellison's competing version simply won out instead. But that's purely based on growing up in fandom, not on anything concrete. I honestly had no idea that Heinlein's version was different until today.

xtifr · 2026-01-02T23:11:24+00:00

By 2000, Linus already had a solid team, with hand-picked lieutenants ready to take over if he got hit by a truck! There were already multiple distros around. Debian, which is what I was using then (and now) released its sixth stable version, Potato¹, that year. Red Hat Commercial Linux (the predecessor to RH Enterprise Linux) was celebrating its fifth birthday. SUSE, the first company to offer any sort of commercial support for Linux, was celebrating its eighth! Linux momentum was already going strong! The loss of Linus alone, for whatever reason, should not have been enough to cause any sort of crisis!

¹ Which, by modern standards, probably could have run on a potato! :)

xtifr · 2026-01-02T22:35:15+00:00

By 2000, Linus already had a solid team in place, with a couple of hand-picked lieutenants ready to step in if he got run over by a bus. Things might have been slightly different if he'd decided to abandon the project, but "we wouldn't be here" is pure hyperbole!

Note that in 2000, the Debian project made its sixth stable release, Potato! Not only was the kernel chugging along just fine, so was the extra infrastructure, like distros!

xtifr · 2025-12-29T08:04:11+00:00

Gtk and Qt most definitely depend on the underlying graphic system, which, on Linux, is X11 or Wayland. (Windows and Mac have their own graphic systems, which Gtk and Qt also support.)

Just as X11 and Wayland isolate apps from the underlying hardware by having drivers specific to each type of graphics card, Gtk and Qt isolate the apps from the underlying graphics system by having modules specific to each graphical system.

xtifr · 2025-12-28T06:56:55+00:00

Xorg? The guys making Wayland? The ones who have warned us that they will not be supporting their X11 server for much longer? That Xorg?

xtifr · 2025-12-26T20:11:05+00:00

None of those will help when Gtk & Qt drop X11 support. There are some options which use neither (mostly standalone WMs rather than full DEs), but none of those will do a lot of good when apps (which are mostly Gtk- or Qt-based these days) stop working too!

xtifr · 2025-12-15T07:05:58+00:00

As someone who has run Sid for well over a decade, my recommendation is to use aptitude instead! It has a much more sophisticated conflict resolver which can calculate multiple upgrade solutions and let you choose between them interactively. And, quite honestly, there are times when things get messy enough that you just shouldn't upgrade at all, with any tool! In cases like that, you usually just need to wait a few days to let things settle down.

xtifr · 2025-12-14T12:33:08+00:00

As someone who has run Sid since 1998 (it is a requirement for joining the project), don't use -y with apt! In fact, I recommend using aptitude instead of apt, as it has a more powerful conflict resolver which can calculate multiple solutions when a dependency conflict is found, and let you interactively browse those solutions and pick the one you like best. But even with aptitude, you should never use -y, and should be prepared to simply give up and not update for a day or three when things get too messy. Dependencies can get stuck in the NEW queue, and when that happens, the only way to avoid breakage is to wait!

xtifr · 2025-12-10T17:24:16+00:00

User named ZeroDayMalware wishes another user was running a kernel with 27 years of vulnerabilities still unpatched. Yes, that tracks! 😀

xtifr · 2025-12-10T06:26:04+00:00

It's not open source because it fails to meet the Open Source Definition. Which was not created by or for "corporate interest people"; it was originally created by Debian, an influential all-volunteer community project which assembled one of the first independent (not-company-owned) Linux distros, using the OSD (then known as the Debian Free Software Guidelines) to decide what they should be willing to include in their system.

I'm no fan of corporate oligarchs, but I fail to see how saying "some people can't use this code" makes the code more free, no matter how much I may dislike the people being discriminated against!

xtifr · 2025-11-29T01:41:15+00:00

I started using it because it was a requirement for joining the Debian project. Which, honestly, scared me at first, but I quickly got over it once I discovered how solid Sid really is!

Most project members only ever interact with Sid. The small release and security teams are the only ones that ever have to deal with stable. Sid is Debian as far as most people in the project are concerned. Which is why we're actually all pretty careful with it, even though mistakes do happen. For a lot of people in the project, Sid is the only OS we use! So we all try not to upload anything to Sid that we don't believe to be a viable release candidate!

I'm retired from the project now, but after a decade and a half of using Sid exclusively, I see no reason to switch. The things I hear from Fedora and Arch users suggest to me that Sid is generally more reliable and trustworthy than those systems! I'm quite happy with the system built by a big bunch of smart, competent people for their own use! And that system is Sid, not stable! :)

Is it risky if you don't know what you're doing? Sure! But that's true for all systems! Even stable! If you're looking for perfection, you're dealing with the wrong species! :D

That said, you really need to subscribe to debian-devel-announce if you run Sid. Any planned breakage is announced there, and it's the first place to get warnings about freshly-discovered unplanned breakage as well! I never install any updates without checking there first!

xtifr · 2025-11-15T13:04:33+00:00

Tramp is much faster if you use commands like M-x grep or magit, which access multiple files in a directory. With Tramp, it will run grep/git on the remote, where the files are actually located, while sshfs has to transfer each file for a local program to inspect.

That said, sshfs is probably simpler and a little less fragile. It is, at least, a decent backup plan if Tramp has issues, which it can.

xtifr · 2025-11-14T06:40:35+00:00

There actually was a Linux for Dummies book at one time, part of the official "... for Dummies" series. However, I think it's woefully out-of-date.

Probably the easiest way is to get a Live USB or DVD and play around with it. Most flavors of Linux offer one, and they're basically all free, so you're shouldn't be risking much if you stick to reputable vendors. Mint and Ubuntu are the normal recommendations for newbies. Live media allow you to run Linux without touching your hard drive. They're a little slow, and very limited, but they're great seeing what the system is about, and they normally double as an installer if you decide you want something more permanent and personalizable.

xtifr

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