taanegl

“We have the best courts, I tell ya - we got this vending machine, a vending machine, right outside of the supreme court, and you just go up to this thing, and if you have some gifts - nice gifts - then you get a little bonus stat the next time you’re summoned.”

Damn, these rpm-ostree distroes are taking off. I mean tbf, having a “cloud native” approach (a two buzzword combo) with system images is kind of great for testing, and it shows people can now actually carve out some systems in a relatively effective manner. Good show!

That is supposing it is rpm-ostree, because ostree can actually rebase to an entire different distribution. There’s people getting arch working as an ostree install, and eventually, we’ll have gone over to a new dawn, where you don’t need to reinstall, just rebase.

Goddamn open source is awesome.

Friggin’ GIMP 2 is sun setting. GIMP 3 with everything replaced in GEGL and non-distructive editing is the new standard. Who tf needs Photoshop?

This person, nay, this legend, has reached across language barriers and opened up entire new worlds to people who suffer from lacking or outdated documentation.

If you or your loved ones are afflicted by bad documentation, please voice your grievances to whatever ticket or email chain deserves to be told their documentation is absolute ass.

Yes, I can read the code API, now delete that old ass mess. If you don’t want to communicate it, let someone else have those search engine results.

Ffs.

Thanks Microsoft for spotting that, and thanks to Google and CloudFlare for blocking or redirecting Polifyll.io network traffic.

Credit where credit is due.

Namaste.

This is what corporate speech control looks like, kids. Not even once.

Ah yes, DRM… burn it down, burn it all down

Hopefully rpm-ostree is just the beginning. When SuSE Mint, Zorin, etc have some form of ostree tooling, then it’s over for you bitches, and by it being over for you bitches, i mean the need to do a full system reinstall will be over because you bitches can just rebase.

It truly will be the evolution of distro hopping, codifying a “of fuck, GO BACK” function by way of image handling, rather than barfing your operating system file system hierarchy on to your root partition like some caveman.

The future… is OCI images and layering, like in containers, because cloud native containers is the way - for the desktop… no, seriously. Stop laughing.

Biden 2024 - wear an union around your belt

The RISC-V is an extensible ISA, so yes. All those vendor extensions are optional, when fabricating the processor, which can be replaced by other extensions over time.

Both Intel and AMD have had vendor extensions in the designs that they no longer use, even ones that have been “retracted” (i.e whatever in the heck Intel is doing with their AVX extensions).

But yeah, currently, there are a lot of proprietary extensions, which could still be declared as open hardware as well. So yeah.

Too late, the clock is already ticking. We only need to count the years after the fact when it hits Google Graveyard

Find the make and model of your system and search for it with “Linux”. This is a really easy way to avoid big problems, and finding a suitable distro for said system. It sucks installing a system, only to find out a certain boot flag needs to be turned off, or some kernel has a patch your system doesn’t like. Avoiding all that or even going into the situation prepared is much less stressful.

It also helps to know that with the freedom of Linux, there is a lot of difference in how systems are built, and that is a benefit and not a drawback.

Uhhh pre-modern architecture is uhhh inherently uhhh socialist and is therefore uhhh classified as terrorists.

Neo-liberals, probably.

We’ve been trained to react to sales more or less, since before Steam… but what, am I not going to get that AAA game for $8 that was $70 3 years ago? I mean it sucks balls, because all good AAA games don’t go down in value - in fact, if we look at Elden Ring, GTA, RDR2, they increase in price over time.

If we had a piracy statistic, we’d probably see how much money publishers are losing at this strategy, and that the only way they can ever prevent piracy is by promoting authoritarian regimes that will take away your rights if there’s as much as an R2R file on your system.

So yeah, the gaming market is dumb by default. When publishers cry their salty tears about their intellectual property being pirated, my eyes roll back into my head.

You’re telling me a program you developed 8 years ago, that receives nominal updates, is still worth full asking price, even when the teams and the developers have moved on to other projects and you’re not actually putting that much money into it? Gtfo here. Oh no wait, that was rude. Let me rephrase.

Awwwwww :3 piwacy owie, UwU? Maybe adjust pwicing? No? No sympathy for you, because I don’t have sympathy for grifters.

Here’s a careful reminder that “public domain” is not a worldwide thing ^^; in fact, very few countries have a public domain.

In some cases, if you try to publish something as “public domain” from a certain country, it is invalid - because their judiciary does not define public domain as anything.

It maybe considered public domain, until you die and someone wants that copyright, in which case the family takes precedent over the estate - full stop.

There’s a difference between countries that have common law (US and UK) and those that have civil law (the Nordics), so yeah.

But CC is valid license pretty much everywhere, with a few exceptions.

Primeagen?

When it comes to creative work, Creative Commons is the way to go. I know a guy who exclusively releases music under the Creative Commons license.

Here’s a “Chooser” wizard, that asks you some questions and then suggests a suitable CC license for you.

My testicles, my lungs, the brain, my bone marrow…

Seriously, it’d be easier to list which parts of the body that don’t contain plastic.

TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

This - is what we need.

The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

I await your ire.

And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.