Adding rust to a massive mature C project that targets lots of architectures and has many contributors is a difficult process. If it succeeds it is going to take a lot more time and patience.

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True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist “tweak” apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.

A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don’t understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn’t exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.

GUI config isn’t practical for hardcore linux users. It isn’t scriptable, we can’t store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.

Surviving the first and perhaps only crewed Starliner flight, getting a full ISS rotation and a flight home on Dragon feels like a bit of justice for crew who put their careers on hold for Boeing. The Starliner assignments got the short straw and hard to imagine other astronauts not being sympathetic.

Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.

If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.

Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.

Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.

However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.

Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.

I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.

The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.

I purchased in December 2022. I have not needed to buy any replacement parts but availability appears good.

At the same time I bought one of my kids the cheapest MSI laptop I could find for school. I just learned some of the keys on the MSI have been working intermittently. I have no idea what to do with it. We didn’t value a laptop for running Microsoft Word very highly and spent the savings on linux desktop upgrades. I can’t say it was the wrong choice. With the Framework it is trivial to check the connector or order a replacement but there was a substantial price difference.

Out of selfishness I would like people to keep buying Framework so they keep their replacement parts stocked but blind brand loyalty is stupid. People don’t need remuneration to engage in a hobby but if they are working for a company then unpaid labour is generally an abuse.

I have a Framework 13" DIY running Linux. It is functional. I am reasonably confident I will be able to buy replacements for anything that breaks which is important to me. It is well designed for repair and upgrade but other devices offer better price/performance/features. If you are on a tight budget and care about the environment buy used.

The loss of life from WWI and WW2 in particular had a huge impact on country towns. They planted avenues of trees, named roads, engraved the names of young people on walls.

Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.

Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.

I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren’t necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.

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Pretty much the entire Internet runs on Linux or BSD. The systems are cheaper, more reliable and more flexible than Windows. Also you put only what you need in a container or virtual machine and it runs with such limited privileges there is really no need to have intrusive one-size-fits-all malware detection systems as it would only increase the attack surface and make the system more fragile.

Microsoft spent a lot of money increasing mind share in education and creating developer tools in the past that led to a massive ecosystem developing business logic with their tools. It created a huge software legacy that isn’t going to be replaced any time soon. That leaves enterprise IT in a very different position to orgs running Internet services as enterpises need to secure this legacy from modern threats while facing budget and staffing pressures that are sometimes self-inflicted. My opinion is that enterprise IT has embraced some very bad practices and sought to normalize them but I also don’t work in that environment and it is easy to be critical if you don’t have to deal with the same shit.

Most Internet facing services were created more recently with tools popular at the time (Rails and PHP at the time of Twitter/Facebook), then Golang, Python, nodejs, and more recently lemmy uses Rust which has only been in stable release for a decade. While these languages and associated tools run cross platform, Linux is generally preferred for deployment and often has the most mature support though I believe Netflix is a heavy user of FreeBSD.

The only notable Windows backed “Internet scale” website that isn’t a frontend to some internal business system that I can think of was Stack Overflow though there are probably others.

Linux/BSD threats differ from those on Windows as do the mitigations. Some best practices in Windows land would be considered highly irresponsible in Linux land and the reverse is also true.

They run Windows and all this third party software because they would rather pay subscriptions and give up control of their business than retain skilled staff. It has nothing todo with Linux vs Windows. Linux won’t stop doors falling off Boeing planes. It is the myopia of modern business culture.

Windows usage isn’t the cause of dysfunction in corporate IT but a symptom of it. All you would get is badly managed Linux systems compromised by bloated insecure commercial security/management software.

I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.

I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.

There have been widespread reports that a faulty software update from security company Crowdstrike is crashing a lot of corporate Windows systems and disrupting many transport and financial services globally.

Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn’t obsolete.

What is the appropriate response to fascists though? Can we joke about them getting hung from lamp posts or is it too soon?

I am driving in country SA this morning and I see a fossil in a red trump hat walking in the car park in front of my bumper. He would have been fucked if I was driving a Tesla or one of those stupid yank tanks. Thought about telling him to fuck off back to America or throwing a Seig Heil but I think the sad old fuck was just looking for attention and I wasn’t going to play. His grand kids probably don’t talk to him anymore since they succumbed to the “woke mind virus”. Poor fucker, joining a doomsday cult must be isolating.

Over a century ago the locals were goose stepping down the street in support of the Kaiser. Nothing much has changed I guess. While we will be dealing with the consequences if the US fucks things up this isn’t our war. People who are disconnected from society think it is but why become one of those sad fucks.