XMPP

Making people unhappy

A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.

Interesting read.

https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483

The announcement resolves one of my last fears for Aux: development on Nix itself. It is no secret that the number of people knowledgeable about the project and are willing to work on this CPP codebase is small. You have probably seen me mention multiple times by now that @sig_cli needs all of the help that we can get. Lix resolves this entirely with a trusted team of experts. This means that Aux is now able to remove Nix development from our priorities and can instead collaborate with Lix moving forward.

PS. “but what about GIMP, or Krita, or Inkscape, or OpenOffice, or using rsync for cloud storage, or <YOUR_FAVORITE_TOOL>?” you may ask. Trust me, I tried it all. Every last presentation, raster/vector graphics software out there. Regardless of how much I hate Adobe, their software is top tier, and until GIMP becomes the Blender of graphic design, I can’t really rely use it for most of my purposes :(

The Trust me, I tried it all. and mentioning OpenOffice in one paragraph doesn’t feel quite right. OpenOffice is obsolete. Instead there is ONLYOFFICE and LibreOffice as open source choices for Linux users, available as Flatpak, Snap and probably AppImage.

• Most folks will probably freak out when they see a terminal window (“DOS box”) on a computer.
• Most folks in my country have no idea that there is something else than WhatsApp as alternative to SMS.
• Whenever I’ve tried explaining to people that stuff on their website violates privacy or when I try to explain why they are having email delivery problems almost always results in permanent silence or disbelief.

Technology appears to be a scare factor for a lot of people. But in this case the librarian maybe thought that Ethernet was only for their qualified IT department to use.

Reading a bit into this https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html The irony!

The only requirement is to have GNU tar and Xz.

2024, the most memorable year of Linux gaming so far :-)

“Paid for by a state actor” Yes, who knows.

• Could be a lone “black hat” or a group of “black hats”. Who knows.

• Could be the result of a lot of public criticism in the news regarding Pegasus spyware. Who knows.

• Could be paid by companies without any state actors involved. Who knows.

• Could be a lone programmer who wants power or is seeking revenge for some heated mailing list discussion. Who knows.

The question of trust has been mentioned in this case of a sole maintainer with health problems. What I asked myself is : How did this trust develop years ago ? People trusted Linus Torvalds and used the Linux kernel to build Linux distributions with to the point that the Linux kernel became from a tiny hobby thing a giant project. At some point compiling from source code became less fashionable and most people downloaded and installed binaries. New projects started and instead of tar and gzip things like xz and zstd were embraced. When do you trust a person or a project, and who else gets on board of a project ? Nowadays something like :

curl -sSL https://yadayada-flintstones-revival.com | bash

is considered perfectly normal as the default installation of some software. Open source software is cool and has kind of produced a sort of revolution in technology but there is still a lot of work to do.

Asahi Linux folks, impressive again

Here’s a tl;dr : https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

• Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
• Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
• Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority

• This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community

• Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community

And a not too long read : https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html