nycticorax

Does anyone know what exactly what were the legal/financial mechanics of RedHat 'absorbing' CentOS in the first place? Is "CentOS" a trademark? Is the CentOS logo trademarked? Who exactly owned the servers that CentOS was distributed from? Did CentOS have people on the payroll who took jobs at RedHat? (Did CentOS have a payroll in the first place?)

Which is a good reason someone might choose a RHELish distro over Debian, no?

This 'middle ground' you describe is essentially how macOS and Windows work, isn't it?

Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.

This seems to be getting a lot of downvotes, but I think it's correct, strictly speaking. There are a lot of business practices that are legal up until the point where you've acquired sufficient market power. After that, antitrust law applies. Similarly, regulators don't care if two companies with negligible market share want to merge, but they may care a lot if the two dominant players in a market want to merge.

Doesn't seem like it's based on any already-existing distribution:

https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/80/attachment...

This this this.

I also find that, for me, cygwin is a better solution for what I want: A bash shell and a decent set of unix-like command-line tools, that (critically) uses the same filesystem as Windows programs do.

I've honestly been kind of perplexed by all the excitement around WSL. A lot of people seem to say they want it for "development", by which I guess they mean web development. And I could see WSL being a nice alternative to running a full Linux VM for web development. But I don't do web development (mostly). I just want a unix-like shell and tools on my Windows box. And I don't want to have to think about whether the files I'm creating and working on live in Linux-land or Windows-land.

I think it's cool that NumPy is being recognized in Nature, but I'm a little surprised that "the NumPy paper" wasn't published 10-ish years ago...

I don't think it's at all clear that it would lead to high numbers of boxes with vulnerabilities. Is it clear that a Mac is more vulnerable than a desktop Linux box, if you control for for the technical sophistication of the person maintaining it? I don't think that's at all clear.

I just honestly don't understand this. On Windows and Mac (the OSes that 99% of the planet uses on the desktop), this is exactly how things work. The OS provides a set of APIs. If an application author needs a library that isn't in the OS, they have to ship it themselves. If a vulnerability in that library comes to light, they have to fix it and ship an updated version of your application. If it's a commonly used library, a lot of application authors are going to have to ship updates.

Why couldn't this work for a Linux-based OS? Honest question.

The one ray of hope there is that they eventually gave up on Unity. Hopefully they will give up on snaps also...

I'm not saying that you should do this, necessarily, but I just installed regular Chrome from the Google .deb. That also fixed an issue with snap-Chromium not handling web app shortcuts properly.

The 'horror story' people always mention, which is a special case of "having to wait for each application to update its own dependencies", is that if there's a security vulnerability in a much-used library, you have to wait for each application maintainer to update their application, rather than simply having the distribution maintainer update the shared library. I'm not sure I agree that this would be worse than the current situation...

I find it so strange that most people still talk about their monitors' resolution in terms of pixel counts. Oh, you have a 4k monitor? Well, if that's a 43" 16:9 4k monitor, then that's pretty close to 100 dpi, so you basically have a big-ass traditional ("lodpi") monitor. Whereas if it's a 24" monitor, then it's a smallish hidpi screen. Rather than pixel counts, I find it much more helpful if you tell me the size in inches and the DPI.

This is related to one reason why I'm not so crazy about 4k: At most of the usual screen sizes, they occupy an unpleasant middle ground between a traditional screen (~100 dpi) and a 2x hidpi/retina screen (~200 dpi).

Yes, this. Even if you have only one hidpi screen, Windows still looks bad, because the fonts look terrible when rendered on a hidpi screen. This is one thing keeping me on "lodpi" screens for now.

Yeah, it's funny how often I end up going to the Wikipedia page of a company or product to find out what they're selling in plain language.

It's striking to me that it already looks like an old castle, at least from a distance.

Well, it's been a while, but the last time I tried VNC it was much, much slower than RDP. Also, (and I haven't really thought deeply about why this is) I much prefer "remote desktop" solutions (like RDC) to "screen sharing" solutions (like VNC, TeamViewer, AnyDesk) for day-to-day work. (That having been said, I love TeamViewer for helping my parents with their computer issues. But luckily I don't have to do that too often.) My ideal is something like ssh, but, you know, with graphics. So I should be able to login with my usual credentials, and not have to set a special uber-password that can hypothetically allow someone to connect to an ongoing root session (like VNC does). Bonus points if it's installed by default and I don't really have to configure the server. Windows RDP does all of this.

All the Linux remote desktop server solutions are bad enough over a WAN that I typically VPN into my office, then RDC from my home Windows box into my office Windows box, then ssh -X from there into my office Linux box. It's kinda crazy, but it works better than anything else I've found, and I've tried almost all the options mentioned here. I wish there was a better way, but I don't think there is (for me)...

The bottom of the Waypipe README says: "This is usable, but still somewhat unstable right now".

I feel like the Elementary folks have a lot of the right ideas about how to build a desktop OS and a third-party software ecosystem around it. (In particular: They have a HIG, and seem to make an effort to make their platform appealing for developers.) But it sounds like they struggle with execution in some ways:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/elementary-0-4-loki-agai...

I haven't tried Elementary, but I've tried a lot of distros, and I always come back to Ubuntu because it comes the closest to just working. (It doesn't do as well as MacOS or Windows in the 'just working' department, in my experience (let the flames begin!), but it does pretty well, and better than any other Linux-based OS I've tried.)

And although reliable statistics seem to be hard to come by, my impression is that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux-based desktop OS by a pretty wide margin.

That this is the top story on HN currently is one of those things that makes me think I should just stop looking at HN. Look, if you want to use Plan 9, go nuts. Follow your bliss. I guess. But the slice of humanity that finds this to be an appealing option is such a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total. How is this relevant to any vaguely reasonable person's life? Why would anyone upvote this Quixotic nonsense? Plan 9 may the be operating system analog of pumpkin pie, but what could it possibly matter given that it has zero ecosystem and zero uptake? Jeezum frigging crow. Give it up. It's dead.

Although I guess one nice thing is that is puts in perspective the fact that stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN. Kind of like when you see someone, who you can never understand what the hell they're jabbering about, give a talk about something you already know, and you realize that there's no way in hell you would have understood the topic based on what just came out of their mouth. Which is clarifying, because it reveals that they just suck at explaining things, and it's not just that you yourself are a dumbass.

The fact the code comments aren't meant for public consumption, and figures are, is completely irrelevant to the analogy. The point is that lots of things we do could be done better, but having an outsider focus on one of them, and tell you you could be doing it better, is not super-helpful. It's like being told by three people that you need to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.

That said, and having looked at the article more carefully (ahem), most of the concrete suggestions they offer are sound, and are things that I think are pretty well-known, at least to the practicing scientists I talk to. "Pie charts are bad", and "Beware of false color images, especially ones that use the 'jet' colormap." are both (parapharases of) statements that I hear from working scientists.

But then there's this: "And yet few scientists take the same amount of care with visuals as they do with generating data or writing about it. The graphs and diagrams that accompany most scientific publications tend to be the last things researchers do, says data visualization scientist Seán O’Donoghue. “Visualization is seen as really just kind of an icing on the cake.”"

This bears zero resemblance to my experience. Most scientists of my acquaintance make the figures first, and then write the text. And certainly I'd say that more care is taken with the figures than the text.

I guess I just feel like I see a certain amount of fetishization of beautiful scientific illustrations (Tufte, etc), out of all proportion to its actual importance to the scientific endeavor. The readers of most scientific articles are probably not going to be flummoxed by a pie chart. And of course, time spent focusing on this kind of stuff is time that might very well be better spent doing experiments.

This is like a non-programmer telling programmers they need to comment their code better. In a sense, it's probably true most of the time. But it's also sort of hard to take very seriously, because the non-programmer doesn't have any real understanding of the day-to-day challenges and trade-offs faced by people who write code for a living.

"We further noticed the issue only occurs if you have given the Facebook app access to your camera." Are there any good reasons for FB to be asking for this, or for people to grant it?

I'm not sure I agree. It reminded me of certain "great" textbooks that sometimes get recommended by experts, that aren't actually that great for someone learning something for the first time. They get the reputation as being "great" because they are great for people that already have a good basic grasp of the material: They are precise and pithy, and they contain insights that are deep and useful, but hard to appreciate if this is your first encounter with the material. (Kleppner & Kolenkow would be a good example of a freshman physics textbook in this category.) It seems to me that maybe the ZeroMQ Guide is in this category. Which, of course, is a noble and important category, but maybe not the most important category if you're just starting out on a topic.

This blog post provides rebuttals to some of the points made in this comment thread:

https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...

That blog post was linked to from here:

https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issue...

I have a lot of sympathy for the signers of this letter. As Havoc Pennington (team lead of the GNOME 2 project) liked to point out, every option you provide to users has a cost to the developers in terms of testing and maintenance. Maybe a better way for the letter signers to communicate their position would be to simply say "We don't support nonstandard GNOME themes". Certainly, they're within their rights to say this, and you're within your rights to not use their apps if you don't like it.

Another thing Havoc Pennington liked to talk about in developing GNOME 2 was 'crack'. These were things in GNOME 1 that were bad for the community, but that a lot of users were addicted to. Like, for instance, an overabundance of user settings.

By all accounts, it's hard to write a GUI app for the Linux desktop, in part because of the huge variety of distros and desktops, and apparently even themes within a single desktop. And as a user, my biggest complaint about desktop Linux is the relative paucity of high-quality applications. (Yes, I know there are many high-quality desktop Linux applications. But there aren't as many as on Windows or MacOS.) I can't help but wonder if most of the community wouldn't be better off if a single distro, hopefully with a single desktop and a single theme, decisively 'won' and claimed a dominant usage share of the Linux desktop. Then third-party developers would be incentivized to just develop for that distro, which might make the lives of both users and developers better in the long run.

And of course, since it's open source, if 'the one true distro' went off the rails eventually, someone else could fork it and become the new 'one true distro', with relatively little danger of vendor lock-in.

Does Firefox have an equivalent of Chrome's [...] > More tools > Create shortcut... these days? With an option like Chrome's 'Open as Window' checkbox? I would love to give up Chrome, but that's a really important piece of functionality for me. I hugely prefer webapps that mostly act like normal apps in my desktop environment. I want then to show up in the window list, have their own icon, be alt-tabbable, etc.

I could have used some examples of "the war" in progress. Personally, this war has not really impinged on me. I'm not claiming it's not happening, but it would be good to have some evidence that it is happening. Or that the war has gotten hotter recently.

Also, I have to say that I think it's a mistake to view "open source" as solely motivated by commerce. One big practical difference between FSF and OSI is how accepting they are of permissive licenses like BSD and MIT. Basically, OSI likes them and FSF doesn't. (Or at least FSF prefers copyleft licenses like GPL.)

It's true that permissive licenses are more commerce-friendly, but one could also argue that they are more freedom-friendly as well. After all, with a permissive license, you can add your own proprietary extensions to a codebase and then sell the resulting executable without sharing the source for the extensions. With copyleft licenses, you are restricted from doing this. Thus permissive is arguably more free-as-in-freedom.

Of course, copyleft advocates argue that copyleft licenses are more free in a larger sense, in that they guarantee that the code stays free. And, you know, maybe they're right. But I think it's something that reasonable people can disagree about. Whereas a lot of copyleft advocates seem to think that permissive licenses are a sign of moral weakness.

I would say the permissive licenses are "free" in a libertarian sense, and the copyleft licenses are "free" in maybe an anarcho-syndicalist sense.

It seems like a lot of people are convinced that copyleft licenses are more ethical than permissive licenses. I'm afraid I just don't agree with this.