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Does anyone here use Bitwarden? I didn’t know about it, but it looks really attractive.
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Yes. It has some rough edges – I wish syncing was better – but it’s working great.
My syncing issue has to do with the fact that everything has its own copy the data: desktop app, mobile app, browser plugins, etc. When you make a change they do not sync between them all immediately. You can have a Bitwarden app or plugin that is days behind so you have to go to settings and do a manual sync. Very annoying, but not a deal breaker.
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I use the venerable
pass. It has none of this mobile mumbojumbo or autosync frills the kids today are talking about.It’s so simple and lean, I never thought
pass git pullwould be annoying.I would appreciate a mobile UI sometimes, though. A Sailfish client. But that’s not a dealbreaker either.
Maybe I could hook the missus up with Rubywarden, though. Pass would be too much for her.
Addendum: There appears to be a QML frontend on OpenRepos. Found through storeman. Not a complete client but have to give it a spin :)
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There is definitely a
passapp for android. I’m not sure about iOS. -
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yeah, it’s open source and possible to run self-hosted as well.
check out the discussion from a topic from a few days ago, id just be copying from there:
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Hail_Spacecake
21 days ago
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What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same
This article is a good argument against treating a lack of gender diversity in video games as a problem to be solved. Men and women are systematically interested in different types of video game experiences, and game creators who cater to one type of experience or the other will naturally have a gender imbalance in the sorts of players who want to play that type of game.
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There’s nothing obvious about it, and re-examining unfounded claims is not bizarre. We know that, historically, plenty of claims made were just plain wrong (consider the anabolic-catabolic “theory”).
Boys and girls had very different /roles/ since the dawn of time for obvious reasons. If you tried, as a girl, to play with the “wrong” toys you could see quite a bit of resistance.
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I’m not saying this is wrong (I haven’t done any research so I don’t know) but it seems very likely that kids are pushed to play with specific toys by society. We label toys as boys or girls, we market toys as being played with by either boys or girls and we give kids toys that we associate with their gender.
I saw a video this year where young babies were placed in a room full of a range of toys. Each time the baby was dressed in either pink or blue and given a female or male name regardless of their actual gender and a babysitter was in the room as well to help them play with the toys. Each time the babysitter would tend to help the baby play with toys stereotypical for their perceived gender. After the babysitter was asked which toys they thought the baby liked and they would say the baby seemed to prefer the toys of the perceived gender regardless of what the babys actual gender was.
Now that’s not really a scientific study but it does seem to suggest that things are not as “obvious” as they seem. It’s a little hard to test because really you would have to raise a kid in an alternative society to see what differences it makes.
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There’s also evidence that toy choice is gendered along the same lines that we in our culture are familiar with among chimpanzees, suggesting that toy choice has something to do with biological mechanisms of gendering bodies that are older than the human-chimpanzee split.
Anyway, this entire article is already presupposing that gendered differences in toys (well, video game tastes, but is a video game not just a more sophisticated toy?) exist and are important. As per the title, what men and women consider hardcore gaming are not the same.
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Could as well be the kids wanted to be nice to the babysitter who helped them play. The type of play also needs to be accounted for. There are studies as well which show that very young kids tend to gravitate to certain types of play.
Of course there’s going to be some overlap and gray areas, but what’s the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with biology?
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but what’s the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with biology?
There is no harm in thinking maybe it might be true and maybe it might not. There is harm in things like OPs comment stating “It’s a sign of bizarre times that this isn’t obvious.” When it’s extremely complex and not obvious at all.
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There is no harm with acknowledging that they “have something to do with biology”, the difference is how much weight is put on it, and the problems are caused when that is used as an excuse for things like exclusion, whether that’s subtle coercion of “oh I wouldn’t bother with that, because it’s been shown that people like me are bad at that sort of thing”, to the deep personal exclusion of “I will never be able to do X in a good way because of my biology, so I should not try”.
Equally, what is the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with culture?
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I don’t know where coercion or exclusion came from here.
And surely society has some effect, but reading something like The Blank Slate makes me think it’a not such a huge factor.
Next someone will probably point out Pinker is a white supremacist or something and I’m done with this already.
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I don’t know where coercion or exclusion came from here.
Do societal consequences not matter, just because they’re societal?
reading something like The Blank Slate makes me think it’a not such a huge factor.
The Blank Slate, last I checked, ignores a lot of hard evidence done in the social sciences in favour of bashing Pinker’s strawman of the subjects. In addition, I’m not sure how someone can place a single reasonably cited book as a justification for ignoring 70 years of hard evidence. Especially when such a book’s argument is strongly contested.
Next someone will probably point out Pinker is a white supremacist or something and I’m done with this already.
Does someone’s political views not have any bearing on their research? Surely years of study have found bias in study construction extremely easy. I take the attitude that it must be so, for politics is how we view and frame all manner of parts of the world. Whether or not someone is a racist matters deeply as to the purpose behind the arguments that they make, and the ways that they approach certain details. Likewise if I am a monarchist you would surely wish to know that when arguing about matters of state, since my arguments might be led by conscious or unconscious motivations.
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I don’t think Pinker has a political horse in the race, but I do understand he can be misunderstood to have one even if he didn’t. So as far as anyone should care, the discussion could be limited to the science.
I’m just not particularly interested anymore, because something like infant behavior, sex vs gender, toy preference, biology, anthropology, primatology and who knows what “always” gets conflated with coercion and exclusion.
It’s essentially impossible to discuss matters online, text-based, time-delayed and without real interaction. More so when it starts to feel like something someone wants to win. The easiest win is to claim the other party doesn’t care about something not immediately related yet important and he’s therefore a bad person by implication.
That’s why I’m done.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and men and women choose different toys, ways to play, subjects to study and careers to follow.
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Yes as a hypothetical, and in a context where social coercion doesn’t exist your statement would be totally fine and good. Saying it with certainty, even though it runs contrary to the scientific consensus lacks epistemological responsibility. It’s fine to say I’m not sure I agree with the scientific consensus, however it’s irresponsible to say that the scientific consensus is certainly wrong without any evidence. Once you add in the fact that some people will try to use such claims as a way to pressure a demographic out of an activity, then you have the risk of real harm. I’m not saying you’re the kind of person who would do that but it’s important to be aware that people will try to use your message there to exclude others who are wholly capable.
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I mean there’s no reason to believe that there’s real sexual dimorphism in the toys children choose to play with. I’ve seen boys play with dolls and girls play with trucks. Gender is a construct, that’s the scientific consensus and those saying otherwise value tradition over evidence.
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There are also a lot of arbitrary gendered items that change over time or across cultures. For example skirts of some form have been either male or female clothing depending on the culture/location. Also pants have been male clothing but are now neutral.
There are no doubt very real differences between genders. The obvious one being physical strength/body shapes but I am willing to bet that a majority of the differences between genders today are formed by tradition and not biology.
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The differences in gender as you said are formed by tradition. When you talk about physical strength and body shapes however that’s sexual dimorphism, unless you are referring to the cultural mores that pressure men to bulk up and pressure women not to. Sex informally speaking is the bits between your legs, sexual dimorphism is the physiological difference that often (but not always) come along with that like testosterone or estrogen production, gender is the cultural construct we have around sex. You can have sexes without having gender, which I’m sure has existed and you can have many genders within a single sex if you’re like creating a sci-fi culture.
You weren’t wrong in any way I just thought it would be useful to be clear.
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The reason there’s a push to solve it is the profit motive.Given that roughly 50% of women play games if you could create an experience that tailors to both cultures you could make a lot more money than if you didn’t.
Though I personally also enjoy playing games with people with different backgrounds. Sometimes a different cultural outlook also can have refreshing outside of the box ideas. It looks like for example that according to this survey while women value competition and challenge, they also value looking good while doing it, and going all the way to completion. That would mean if you want to hook women, make sure to add robust customization options or ways to build or design things. I think the completion aspect is already in most games, cheevos. Notice that they don’t disvalue destruction, but they find it less interesting than a well written story.
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I haven’t heard that particular complaint, but one I hear often is that it’s quite absurd to have a genre lineup that resembles something like “action,” “comedy,” “drama,” and “not for men,” as if “not for men” were its own genre (it’s obviously not literally called that, but you provided your own example above). Deciding to use a “not for men” genre immediately creates its counterpart, “for men,” which is every other genre.
You logically have two choices here:
- Accept the dichotomy and make explicit the implicit labels: “action for men,” “comedy for men,” “drama for men,” and “not for men.” You’ll have to train your brain to see this everywhere, as the implicit labels are extremely implicit. Along with appeal to the targeted demographic comes license to exclude the other – after all, if your genre is “not for men” then you don’t care if your movie makes men uncomfortable (this is different than making it desirable for not-men). If your genre is “action for men,” you don’t care if your movie makes women feel uncomfortable. It’s not for them.
- Reject the dichotomy, and distribute the “not for men” qualities into the core genres – “action for men” just becomes “action”. Along with this comes the lack of license to exclude. This has made some movie watchers/videogame players mad – even though there is still plenty of content around (and more being made every day), the consumers of the previously “for men” genres see this as dilution and loss. Some of the things they liked excluded people, and instead of trying to untangle the good from the bad (or learn to coexist with new expressions of things they liked before) they’ve decided to double down and defend everything.
Whichever decision you make will impact how you see the modern media landscape.
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mjtorn
21 days ago
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link
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How I slashed a SQL query runtime from 380 hours to 12 with two Unix commands
Nice hack! One has to wonder, though, how it would work with Postgres.
We had this case, albeit years ago on an olden version of MySQL, where a slightly more complex JOIN with aggregate action, but less data than in the post, would not be “web-scale”.
I tested it rogue with Postgres, for which it was a piece of piss, but because we were stuck with MySQL in production, we had to implement denormalization through the app :(
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It’s bad too, last I tried. Postgres has a hard time lifting the JOIN above the DISTINCT. I had to use subqueries with PG10 when I tried a similar “select distinct and join on the distinct rows” at work. Took the join down from a few hundred thousand tuples to less than 100. :-(
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ZALGO RISES FROM THE DEPTHS!
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Advertising has always been about manipulating people into buying stuff they likely don’t need. It’s a bit coercive. In the days of mass media, advertisers used mass psychology to sell product to a mass audience. The media landscape has changed. With the arrival of personalized media, advertisers are going to try to build a psychological profile of the target (that means you and me) and use individual psychology to try and sell stuff that the target most likely doesn’t need. Same game, different techniques. The difference between this and advertising in the age of mass media is the sheer invasiveness and ubiquity that advertising now takes.
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It has also been about announcing the availability of products and making innovations known outside eg. journals. Stuff people may need.
I’m not defending modern advertising, or all old advertising, but the ads of old were a lot more understandable in how and what kinds of reactions they were trying to evoke. You could reason your way around an ad for cigarettes, but you can’t reason your way around invisible yet targeted ad networks.
So this communist-Cuba approach to advertising is understandable, but calling it just another technique is a bit harsh and underestimates the audience.
I’d even go so far as to say the inefficiency of classifieds and such are a self-regulatory system, which should not be removed lest more and more people do believe they need a new microwave oven every year.
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“but calling it just another technique is a bit harsh and underestimates the audience.”
I don’t know. They’d have done it in the past if they were allowed. They’ve usually been about whatever gets them the most dollars now or later. Tech and people’s habits finally let them do what they always dreamed of doing.
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Sure, I suppose, maybe.
Low-tech ads have not had highway billboard tracking or any of that stuff. So if Charles Babbage had constructed the ad networks of today for newspapers in the 1800s, the case could still be argued for a dumber way of handling the better minority of advertising.
It is good that tech has also given us better ways of spreading information and reviews about products, just if we could keep the ad networks at bay.
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It is good that tech has also given us better ways of spreading information and reviews about products, just if we could keep the ad networks at bay.
This creates a new problem. Lets say we suddenly lived in a advertising free world. So, how would you find out about products … various intermediates. These intermediates are easy to pay off, as they are few in number and you STILL have to get your message to them. So instead of advertising to the masses, you advertise by putting your product announcement in the trunk of a new Telsa and sending a Telsa to each of the meaningful reviewers… cheaper and higher impact.
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If anyone is interested in a more detailed history of the topic, I can recommend Curtis’ The Century of the Self. Even though it’s quite informative, it’s easy to follow along.
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Having PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD is a good thing and once you get used to it, it’s like having two clipboards.
Shame he never tells how to actually use them both. Afaict only the primary selection is usable with the default binds.
XTerm.VT100.translations: #override \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD)Now if only I could get all the other software to support them both as well.
EDIT: Another tip. If you find the font sizes available in the menu to be ridiculous, they’re pretty easy to change.
XTerm*faceSize1: 8 XTerm*faceSize2: 10 XTerm*faceSize3: 13 XTerm*faceSize4: 16 XTerm*faceSize5: 20 XTerm*faceSize6: 26faceSize1 corresponds to “Unreadable.”
Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
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You might want to read X Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings for how to use the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X Windows.
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It doesn’t, and can’t really explain how to use them because there is no way to use them in X. Instead, you have to use them in applications running under X and each application does its own thing. I still don’t know if there’s a way to copy to clipboard in xterm without creating a custom bind.
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I’m pretty sure “X Windows” is much older than that (as is MS Windows). I vaguely recall reading about “X Windows” in Byte magazine in 1993 or so.
The comp.windows.x newsgroup goes back to at least 1987 (https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.windows.x/TtNRIfTKqsw/i7hzWBiDfkgJ), a month after X11 was created. They even refer to it as “x-windows”.
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Could it have been a different implementation? Cuz I remember doing the RTFM thing way back when, and it was very clear about not being “X Windows”, though didn’t specify why.
Sorry if this is explained in the link. Can’t be arsed with Google. Usenet used to come without opt-in spying.
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Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
i have the following
*VT100*translations: #override \ Meta <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Meta <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\and either meta/super keys work as expected.
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On a related note, it’s also worth noting that the user control situation is even worse on mobile devices. You pretty much can’t buy phones or tablets with unlocked firmware that you can easily put your own operating system on.
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Well there is the Librem at least.
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This is correct. Purism routinely exaggerates about what they are able to provide in terms of openness, without any plausible way of actually delivering. It’s quite tiresome.
Not only will Librem 5 have blobs, they’ve now shamelessly announced they intend to use a loophole to procure FSF RYF certification despite this. If this is allowed to stand, it also makes RYF rather meaningless.
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Also Fairphone:
We offer the ability to choose between the Google experience and the freedom of open source. Both versions are officially supported by Fairphone and we will provide continuous software updates.
In addition, and because the code is openly available, everybody is free to work on making other operating systems work on the Fairphone 2. The community already offers alternative operating systems like Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch and LineageOS.
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Fairphone requires proprietary firmware blobs anyway.
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As a Fairphone user: the market is made by buying the damned phones.
I wish there was an official Sailfish distro. I’m a happy user of the community port, but I also tolerate some glitches. Like not being able to calibrate the proximity sensor or run android apps.
But, as stated, they do have a non-Google android for those who want to be closer to the mainstream and a Google android for people who don’t care that much.
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You can unlock the bootloader on most Android phones and you can run LineageOS or other AOSP forks, sometimes Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish ports, or postmarketOS.
You typically have to run the vendor android kernel fork if you want to have useful functionality, but some devices (Nexus 5, Nexus 7, Xperia Z2, Xperia Z2 Tablet) can run mainline Linux.
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I remember playing with Slackware around 20 years ago - it was so nice fast distribution with dead simple package management. Non-standard software you had to compile yourself with all the dependencies resolved on your own :) Oh fond memories…
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Same for me but two years later, 1998. Using Slackware was likely one the biggest contribution to my career. The fact that it forced me to really understand what was going on taught me so much about operating systems, software development and open source. I haven’t used Slack in a looong time, but I hold it dear in my memories!
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Exactly! And these were times before Google, even, so everything had to be learned the hard way. Like patching Joliet support into the kernel for cdroms.
LFS was another big thing. I ran that for quite a while too, think with Debian packaging.
The switch to Debian, after forays into Red Hat and Mandrake, felt like a nice retirement from that, like something I’d earned through self-education.
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Those were likely Infomagic ones, like these https://archive.org/details/Linux_Developers_Resource_InfoMagic_March_1995_Disc_1
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Nowadays the package management is as simple as ever, but the collection of binary packages is huge and very up to date (much more so than ubuntu). For example, there are only a few days between a new release of gcc or clang and their official slackware packages, so you always run a really modern system.
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I think USB drives are cheap enough and floppies relatively expensive, so the value of targeting floppies feels weird.
There is the exercise gain of building a kernel, of course.
What would be interesting is a combination of modern hardware and oldschool demoscene demos that you boot into. A standardized kernel and set of libraries that you code your demo against without using existing engines.
I don’t that will happen and hardware support pretty much requires Linux, but it would be interesting!
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I’ve been using Macs for nearly a decade on the desktop and switched to Linux a couple of months ago. The 2016 MacBook Pro finally drove me to try something different. Between macOS getting more bloated each release, defective keyboard, terrible battery life, and the touch bar I realized that at some point I stopped being the target demographic.
I switched to Manjaro and while there are a few rough edges as the article notes, overall there really isn’t that much difference in my opinion. I’m running Gnome and it does a decent enough job aping macOS. I went with Dell Precision 5520, and everything just worked out of the box. All the apps that I use are available or have equivalents, and I haven’t found myself missing anything so far. Meanwhile it’s really refreshing to be able to configure the system exactly the way I want.
Overall, I’d say that if you haven’t tried Linux in a while, then it’s definitely worth giving another shot even though YMMV.
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I don’t know about Dell, but my 2016 MacBook Pro was hit pretty hard after the Specter/Meltdown fix came out. I used to go 5 or 6 hours before I was down to 35-40%. Now I’m down to %20-25% after about 4 hours.
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Same here. I wonder if the specter/meltdown fiasco has at all accelerated Apple’s (hypothetical) internal timeline for ARM laptops. Quite the debacle.
In regards to the parent, I have actually been considering moving from an aged Macbook Pro 15” (last of the matte screen models – I have avoided all the bad keyboards so far), to a Mac /desktop/ (mac pro maybe). You can choose your own keyboard, screen, and still get good usability and high performance. Then moving to a linux laptop for “on the road” type requirements. Being able to leave work “at my desk” might be nice too.
(note: I work remotely)
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It’s an artifact of, among other things, the idea that you PURSUE YOUR PASSIONS and DO WHAT YOU LOVE*; I don’t want to “work anywhere” – I want to work from work, and leave that behind when I go home to my family. But hey, I’m an old, what do I know.
*: what you love must be writing web software for a venture funded startup in San Francisco
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I bought a Matebook X to run Arch Linux on and it’s been pretty great so far.
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I didn’t read this novel, but I do think systems like SVN are under-appreciated.
At one point I set up a dropbox like system for completely non-technical employees to use. They just had to edit their documents in
MS-{word,powerpoint,excel}, hit save, and then hit sync or whatever in TortoiseSVN and I basically never got any “I deleted everything, what is a staging area? omg I am freaking out right now” sort of support requests. The system never degraded when they accidentally committed massive files to the repo and then went “oops” and deleted them.Good experiences had by all. Git would not have worked.
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Out of genuine curiosity, do you have recommendations for a good document store that does versioning?
I’ve committed stuff in Git because it’s only been me caring about said stuff, and also sync things with ownCloud, but there could be something better, esp. wrt versioning and non-geeks.
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I asked an applicant to a job posting I had open to complete a short 30-minute coding exercise when they didn’t have any public code available. Really, they had no Internet presence except for a barebones LinkedIn profile.
They provided their code test result as a git bundle and specifically called attention to their commit history. I was thoroughly impressed. It was like they’d memorized Deliberate Git, my favorite talk about git etiquette. Their code was great and the story the commit messages told was enlightening. They got an interview.
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Can someone with cognitive science back me up on my gut feeling? Everyone has a hard time learning new skills and everyone uses search engines occasionally, but going to these lengths to cheat actually impair learning.
Unless you count learning how to use the cheat sheet as a valuable skill.
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Absolutely right! And I was feeling guilty while creating cheat.sh. That is why we have developed some countermeasures. If we manage to implement this, cheat.sh will have the most important feature of any real cheat sheet: it will help not really to cheat, but to learn too.
Thank you for this your comment. That is actually the comment that made me register here. This is a very very deep and important thought. Thank you
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The stuff usually found on cheat sheets is “How do I reverse a list in Python?” and not some insanely advanced skill.
Usually the answer is something inefficient and misleading, when it should be “Mu! You do not.” - and even then it’s not a hard thing to learn.
Learning how to deal with your language’s and framework’s etc reference manuals, now that’s a worthwhile skill. A gift that keeps on giving.
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But it could potentially also grow the cargo-cult culture of programming: those who don’t understand the language and don’t care, but copy and paste snippets together and bash on it until they reach some definition of success. The snippets are helpful reminders for those familiar with the deep details, but could be uninformative and relatively context-free crutches that only hobble newer programmers from understanding why that particular snippet needed to be different to be the right answer to their actual problem, in the context of the code they’re actually working on.
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The snippets are helpful reminders for those familiar with the deep details
Yep.
Sometimes I use snippets for complex operations that I don’t really care about.
I think this is a great example. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39799999/parsing-a-soap-message-using-xpath-in-java
Let it suffice to say that I need that for some reason, and it’s not performance critical, and I fully understand that I’m going to get really deep call stacks and great gooey gobs of complex objects in memory during runtime. I can picture some approximation of it in my mind. (I use rectangular prisms, nested like Russian dolls, in primary colors, megabytes upon megabytes of them, and the tiny little strings that are actually useful data are glowing, everything else is dusty-translucent.)
I’m also going to literally println a CSV file on the other end, throw it in a Scheduled Task (no, I didn’t say cronjob), and move on to a more important project.
Using the snippet is the right choice for this part of this project. All I need are those little (glowing) strings.
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The sexist behavior of those guys at Sun was just disgusting. It’s good she wrote about this.
But at the first beer bust I went to, two of the sales guys were standing around rating the women…only they called them “units.
Bob Coe once told me he did not have to interview the candidates for his Administrative Assistant position. I should simply ask each candidate to link her hands behind her head with her elbows pointing forward and walk toward the wall. If her elbows were the first part of her anatomy to touch the wall, she was eliminated from candidacy. All applicants whose breasts touched first, he would interview
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it really is beyond the pale of what I would consider possible in a professional work environment.
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I’m really glad she kept with it after the blowback she got!
I wonder why we don’t hear these “horror stories” as much from HR folks (who presumably have far more visibility of them than engineers!) as often, but I suppose that it’s probably a much bigger career risk to call out this stuff publicly when your job description is basically to deal with all of it and make sure it doesn’t become a legal or PR issue.
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Wouldn’t hurt to have an alternative to elinks, but Firefox would pull in such an amount of dependencies that it would hurt the elinks use case :(
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I did use CVS a bit in my hobby projects and as a sysadmin at work, but jumped ship to Subversion as soon as I heard about it. I remember CVS as something that constantly gave small paper cuts.
What I never was involved with was the merging of branches. I’ve understood merging a branch involved summoning the Lord of All Fevers and Plague, having time itself frozen outside the confines of the lead developer’s cubicle, and luck.
This I would have liked to read more about.
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PPP and Freshmeat. The kids today have no idea!
Generally not a huge fan of the style here, there are things you still can’t do as easily on “Linux” as you can on an Apple computer, like html design.
Could be that fewer people cared about home computing those 20 years ago, and Apple wasn’t big shit and smart phones didn’t exist, so more people were intrigued and at least tried a distro or two.
But try showing a regular Joe of today LibreOffice, and what it does to Word documents, and apologize by talking about how cool FOSS is as an ideology, and how there is no one “Linux”. See what kind of enlightenment that leads to.
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But try showing a regular Joe of today LibreOffice, and what it does to Word documents, and apologize by talking about how cool FOSS is as an ideology, and how there is no one “Linux”.
True. In the meanwhile, the vast majority of worldwide smartphone users have a small Linux machine in their pockets. If they have a home router or smart TV it is probably powered by Linux as well. Of course, they don’t even know it is Linux.
Many traditional Linux distributions and desktops have for a long time skated to where the puck was (trying to replicate Windows and/or macOS) rather than to where the puck was going (appliance-like computers, where the OS is just a technical detail). Plus some occasional cargo-culting (if we turn our desktop environment into a tablet-fest, the users will come).
I hope that the traditional Linux desktop community has learned from this and realized that their primary market consists of developers and power-users, and will stop butchering the Linux workstation experience for simplicity. The masses of users will never come, that window of opportunity has closed after around 2007 when Vista was a flop and smartphones and tables were not widely used yet. Unfortunately, it seems like some environments still do things like removing menu bars [1] or system tray icons.
[1] The GNOME HIG literally states Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars,
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I remember in college a classmate was a big openSUSE advocate, so I worked in that system for a while. Felt very different from the Ubuntu world, and I almost never hear of them in general chatter. Good to see they’re still moving forward well
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I’ve used openSUSE extensively and think it’s an excellent distribution. It’s also one of the few high quality distributions that still has KDE as a first class citizen rather than an afterthought, with significant testing going into the KDE workspace.
In the past, software.opensuse.org combined with their one-click-install tool in YaST makes it easy to get modern or uncommon software installed.
I think one of the reasons openSUSE doesn’t get featured a lot is because they are the smaller player in the enterprise field (compared to Red Hat) and are eclipsed by Ubuntu in the hobbyist / personal use space.
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I have it good authority from a consultancy gig that it’s big in Germany, especially in enterprise.
I was also told this is, at least in part, because of very long support times for old releases. Which is fine for enterprise, but can lead to interesting situations when upgrades would be in order.
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I have used opensuse on a pet server for a while. Zypper package manager was very convinient in terms of insight into security updates necessary, reboots necessary upfront before the update. I changed to CentOS later on because the hosting only supported that, and it felt backwards. (I have been a longtime redhat/fedora user)
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This type of article misses the point of “Linux on the desktop” and open source in general.
It’s not about giving somebody a pre-built system that magically meets all their needs - its about giving them the power to customize their systems to their needs themselves.
There are lots of window managers, web browsers, editors, email clients, etc. Picking the ones that work best for you is your own responsibility.
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People expect it to Just Work, which should account for pre-existing work and biases. These are different from mobile and IMO millennials should learn the desktop as a separate thing from mobile, just as we old farts learned mobile. This way the baby stays in the bath water.
As for customizability, I’m happy I put the effort into tweaking Enlightenment to how I think, though the defaults aren’t horrendous.
It’s sad that its developers don’t seem to aim for adoptability by distros.
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This is really good news!
It might be that fewer studios or distributors care less about Linux if this becomes A Thing(tm), but it might also grow the SteamOS and Linux user bases. Which may push them to native support if this provides something like winelib and such.
Most engines do Linux builds anyway, which is nice for indies, but this will surely help Linux users who want AAA games from studios that have their own engines and no interest in Linux.
Big +1s for collaborating with CodeWeavers and making it open source!
If non-native, Wine based support becomes good enough (no constant mouse gitching, and some QA by Valve) I don’t mind if there are not that many proper Linux ports. I use Linux for a lot of things, and I would just be happy if most games can run on my system without having to:
Having Vavle provide a “sactioned” Wine with per-game configurations is fine by me, if it means I can just click install & play in Steam!
The younger me would have been adamant about this, but now I buy the occasional drm-free Linux version off gog and play in the steam machine’s desktop mode or maybe something on CrossOver. But as the years pile on, it’s a happy moment to get to play at all.