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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The things I’ve read (admittedly mostly from the OpenBSD camp) from BSD devs, they seem to not worry about corporations building from their source that much, instead they actively try to get rid of GPL code because it isn’t permissive enough for their standards.

    Theo wrote "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope—the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time.

    But once the code is GPL’d, we cannot get it back."




  • The original vi has not been maintained for many years. Most distributions, including Debian, Fedora, etc, use a version of Vim which (mostly) is similar to how Vi was.

    From Fedoras wiki:
    “On Fedora, Vim (specifically the vim-minimal package) is also used to provide /bin/vi. This vi command provides no syntax highlighting for opened files, by default, just like the original vi editor. The vim-minimal package comes pre-installed on Fedora.”

    From the vim-tiny package description on Debian:
    “This package contains a minimal version of Vim compiled with no GUI and a small subset of features. This package’s sole purpose is to provide the vi binary for base installations.”






  • There is something “clunky” about the website, but to be fair, the first page has a big button to download the installer, which leads to a page where the first link is the version most people want, the second link leads to instructions how to get it onto a usb (or cd/dvd) for linux/windows/mac, and clearly visible a link to all the other versions of the installer that people might want, with explanations what they are for.
    For me it’s hard to put my finger on why the website is bad, all the information is there. I do agree that it just somehow feels bad, but I don’t understand why.




  • I see, so then there are two options: 1) Make the full offline installer the default, or 2) put all options side by side and explain the difference.

    The first option isn’t good because any default will not fit everyone, there will always be someone looking for what isn’t the default. The second option would just be confusing for the person who knows nothing about computers. “I have to read a wall of text to decide what to download? This is too much!”

    I mean, there’s no way to win here. Is there any OS avaliable that can have one installer that fits exactly everyone, or a way to have a list to choose from if the user knows nothing about the choices?






  • People will say “use this editor” or “use that window manager”, but honestly it’s just personal preference. There’s no award for using ed to edit files, and almost anything you can do with one distro you can do with any other distro. You might get an urge to distrohop and compile the kernel, and that’s fine, but imho far more useful is to learn how pipes work and what you can do with regular expressions. A tutorial for bash is always useful.