lproven

https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-12-29

PC: "Your new software has successfully installed. Do you want to send your registration info by modem?"

Dilbert: "Yes."

PC: "The software has found your credit card number and is placing orders for new products it thinks you need... please wait."

Dilbert to Dogbert: "I can't tell if it's a virus or just excellent marketing."

PC: "Making room on your hard drive..."

Dogbert: "Either way..."

It would mount read-only, then? So you could copy your stuff off onto other media? Because if so, it's better than my experiences with Btrfs.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linu...

<- 5Y ago.

It's not materially better now. The devs are in denial about the problems because lots of big users are saying "works fine on my machine."

Sure, if you have lots of backups, if you have huge volumes on huge disks and they never fill up...

But it's the default in Fedora, Spiral Linux, Garuda Linux, siduction and others. Personal distros for people's own PCs and those are not well-supported enterprise kit.

Don't.

Learn to be a better writer, because a bot cannot and will not help you.

But the reasons I choose filesystems are more about reliability, failure modes, surrounding tooling, and so on.

Btrfs fails in several critical areas:

1. No way to accurately find free space

2. catastrophic failure on write if a volume fills up, the probability of which is greater because of #1

3. repair tools usually do not recover a corrupted volume and in my testing are most likely to render as damaged volume completely unreadable, which makes #2 worse

Put these things together and I can never trust Btrfs again. In the 9 years since I encountered these, I see no effort to fix them, just fooling around witg unimportant side details like performance tweaks.

Fix the critical issues first then make it faster.

Broadly and generally:

• cilia come in large groups, in rows or in sheets; flagella come singly or in pairs (occasionally more)

• cilia are short, and they beat backwards and forwards in a coordinated way, like a Mexican wave; flagellae are long, and in prokaryotes, they spin around their axis.

(Eukaryote flagella -- e.g. spermatozoan "tails" -- are a different structure that just resembles the ones in prokaryotes. Prokaryotes are bacteria and archaea -- no cell nucleus. Eukaryotas have cell nuclei and other organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts. Their flagellae bend and flap, they don't spin.)

Take 1 cell. Can you count the moving hair things? Then they're flagella. Is the beastie covered in lots of them, countless, like fur? Then they're cilia.

It's real, and that's a real video, but it's a very weird, very atypical ctenophore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_girdle

The "Venus's girdle" is a long thin flat belt-shaped thing, but it is not wormlike. It has no head, no sense organs or anything, and the "mouth" and other main organs are in the centre of the belt, not at one end like a worm or a snake -- or you.

Most ctenophores are called "comb jellies"; one group is named "sea grapes". They are hard to generalise and not all are like this by any means, but most tend to be small, and egg-shaped, possibly with protrusions. Most tend to have 2 long trailing tentacles they use to catch food.

Most don't have muscles. They swim using bands of cilia,which are the same fine hairs that unicellular organisms use to swim, and that line your bronchi and throat. Your body uses cilia to propel mucus out of your lungs and up to where you can cough it up.

Comb jellies' cilia are in long lines, usually 8 rows. They move like a Mexican wave in a sports crowd. The light refracting through these near-microscopic beating hairs looks like they flicker with rainbows. Thus the name, comb jellies. They are often radially symmetrical along the line from mouth to other end.

That's all they have; no legs, no fins, no eyes, no dedicated sense organs. Most are not bioluminescent, but like I said, there's pretty much nothing you can say about comb jellies that applies to all of them. One type is an internal parasite that looks like a worm, although internally it's nothing like a worm. (That one is not 2-way symmetrical like us and most animals; it's four way symmetrical. It is alien compared to all other wormlike things.) Other parasitic ones are just small branching bags that don't move.

They are about the only multicellular animal that swims with cilia. They are so unlike all other multicellular animals it's just about possible that they evolved the whole plan of being multicellular entirely independently.

They look like jellyfish but are nothing like them.

Jellyfish have lots of tentacles; those comb jellies that have them, have 2, no more, no less. The tentacles don't sting; they are sticky, and the animal catches tiny plankton this way and pulls them up to its mouth to eat.

One type, Beroids, have a mouth they can close, and they can actually swallow other smaller jellies (comb jellies or jellyfish). Their lips zip shut from the edges and they have more cilia inside to propel the prey down their "throat," but they can't chew.

Some have muscles and can flex and move. Some but not many sort of swim this way, like the Venus's girdle. A very few stick to the bottom and stay there.

Comb jellies tend to have a front end and a back end, but most have no anus, just 1 hole; any food waste is vomited. But, rather wonderfully, some form an anus only when they need to poop and then it closes up again, "heals" shut, totally gone.

https://www.livescience.com/64956-ctenophore-sometime-anus.h...

They are just wonderfully weird.

They are not really alien; their genetic code is the same as ours, although they don't do things all other animals do. For example their nerves do not have synapses, so they don't need neurotransmitters to carry signals across the joins between nerves. They don't have joins. Their nerves are a continuous mesh, with long lines of cytoplasm dotted with nuclei, not divided up into separate cells -- the same sort of structure as most fungi, but flexible.

I think they are beautiful. Little was known about them when I did my biology degree, but I got into them about 5 years ago and read a lot about them for a while. They are like nothing else. Even the parasitic ones, while kind of nasty, are deeply weird.

And you find my response "uncivil" but I find yours very much so as well. You won't even entertain my use cases, and my own direct personal experience, but your bad advice that would have repeatedly lost me all the data in my home directory on my work PC if I used your methods, for you trumps my 38 years of Unix experience.

No. You are being dogmatic, inconsiderate, not listening, responding with ridiculous strawman arguments ("keep swap in your home directory" as a response to "duplicate swap files waste space" -- that is ridiculous) and mockery.

You are rude, and you are arrogant, and you are wrong.

> Of what distro?

Of any distro. I have done such configs with Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, SLE, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Alpine, Arch, you name it.

> If you mean that the example code shows the swapfile directly under / , well of course you don't have to do it that way.

Point missed. If you have a swap file created by the installer then you do not get to specify where that swapfile is, in any distro I have seen in my 30 years of working with Linux and 38 years of Unix. (Not that swap files were common on Unix in the 20th century.)

If you specify a swap partition then you choose where it is.

> I think this is untrue on both counts. First, nobody is going to dedicate an entire physical device to swap,

Incorrect assumption. You inserted "entire device" but I did not say that. A swap partition is part of a device. The clue is there in the name.

All my Thinkpads, for example, have 2 SSDs and typically I put root on the faster SSD and /home and swap on the slower SSD (or HDD). I typically configure 4-8GB of swap even if the machine has 32GB or more of RAM -- I rarely hibernate these boxes, TBH. That is plenty. If you hibernate, swap should be at least as big as RAM, or maybe 10-20% bigger in case it's already swapping when you hibernate.

> If the device is "separate" (from what, / ?)

Yes. More or less all typical Unix-like OSes read and write a lot to and from root in use, and under load, from swap. So, put them on different physical drives and spread the load.

This has been standard practice since the 1960s!

> But also it's trivial to put a swapfile on whatever device you want. It can be anywhere reasonably sane in the filesystem, you just give it a path.

It's extra manual config. A partition is one box in the installer and done. Zero manual config.

> The file could go on whatever partition the distros can share.

Again, you miss the point.

1. Distros do not by default mount one another's partitions.

> Maybe put it under /home or something.

You can but suddenly permissions and ownership become issues.

> It's your system, the FHS is up to your own interpretation.

It is preferable to do this in the installer and not worry about interpreting anything.

> Why would that matter? You're expecting a file not to survive the low-power state?

Have you read the other comments?

* If you have a small root partition, the default config puts the swap file on there, wasting precious space.

* With a partition, it's easier to put swap on a separate physical device, which is good for performance.

* If you dual boot 2+ Linux distributions or installations on a single machine, as I do routinely, you can share a single swap partition between distros no problem. This means it's more space efficient and keeps down partitioning complexity.

* And of course there's hibernation, as others have mentioned.

Conclusion: no, bad advice, except for very simplistic scenarios.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/11/digital-rese...

I love that it fulfils some of Digital Research's original ambitions. The company planned a version of its multitasking X/GEM for X11, but as far as I know, it was never released. Now, 37 years later, here it is.

Thanks, I hate it.

;-)

There is a fork that doesn't need Google accounts. It's called Fyde OS. I tried it:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/08/21/fydeos-offers...

The only modern Linux distro that feels to me like Linux used to feel in the 20th century -- minimal, fast, simple, clean -- is Alpine Linux.

I miss the PC version of Raspbian. It was my go-to OS for reviving very old PCs.

A: An immediate cessation of funding and a stern letter from the Ethics Committee.

I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played.

It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian.

ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.

Don't be daft. Of course there was. It could save programs onto cassette as well as load them from cassette.

The ports are labelled MIC and EAR because that's what you connected them to on the cassette recorder.

Someone tried to instigate that on Mastodon recently. It didn't work.

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116959309031485270

Spread the word. Contact the developers, ask them.

The forks I know about:

• Waterfox -- https://www.waterfox.com/

• Librewolf -- https://librewolf.net/

• Floorp -- https://floorp.app/

• Zen browser -- https://zen-browser.app/

• Mullvad -- https://mullvad.net/en/browser

• Konform -- https://codeberg.org/konform-browser

Others:

GNU IceCat – https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Mercury – https://thorium.rocks/mercury

I fear it would be hard to get some of the earlier forks on board... these are all based on much older codebases:

• Palemoon -- https://www.palemoon.org/

• Basilisk – https://www.basilisk-browser.org/

• Seamonkey – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

GetRight, then DownThemAll, and now, Multithreaded Download Manager:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610538

It started 9 years ago.

That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.

By 3-4y later this was worldwide.

So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.

But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538096

It's more complete and has loads of apps now. It fixes the main problems BeOS had.

https://github.com/rcarmo/haiku-arm64-build

"how people pronounce words ending in that"

You did not restrict which people you were talking about, and that's a critical omission. Nobody in my daily life, in real life where I live or on TV or radio, would ever say "missal" when they meant "missile".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678

(No comments.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494856

  > Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining

  Why thank you! :-)

  There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
  uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
  plenty of broken links and things.

  Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)

> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)

Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.

I was very vaguely notionally Church of England until age 11, although still had to go to Chapel daily from 12-17. I have never been to Mass and I don't really know what goes on in a Mass. I'm not even sure if Anglicans have Mass.

My local Canon certainly had plenty of small-m mass: big lad. Nonetheless, when he scattered my father's ashes in the sea, he got caught by a wave, and proved that despite this he could run backwards up a shingle beach, wearing wet robes, at surprising speed.