gabriel

gabriel, 16 days ago

@robpike Just an idea for making a better world. When I bought my framework I gave a thinkpad to my wife and I donated her old laptop to NSW Homelessness Services in Sydney through Givit.org.au. It ended up going to a domestic violence survivor that was trying to end her studies and rebuild her life through a career jump.

gabriel, 21 days ago

@grimalkina Lisp!!!

gabriel, 21 days ago

@thomasfuchs @CStamp @sarajw @iamdavidobrien You add the US international input method and use a [Win] shortcut to switch, same as on a Mac with Ctrl Space. The keystrokes are almost the same but I think I recall they follow the dead keys scheme —first accent then letter.

I’ve been doing this for years as my first language is Spanish.

Seriously, this claim is ridiculous.

gabriel, 21 days ago

@thomasfuchs @CStamp @sarajw @iamdavidobrien You do, you have to add the US international layout for it to work properly. Accents are just the tip of the iceberg. Characters like these ¡¿ç ñ require configuring shit to work, exactly the same.

gabriel, 23 days ago

@mike @following Ghost exposes RSS already. Isn’t Flipboard compatible with RSS? I think it was.

gabriel, 2 months ago

@cassidy I agree with this and this was also my reaction when the internet was broken by the statement of AI by Mozilla.

My example was "I want to be able to select text from a video frame".

What I think I needs more framing is the "funding" part, as in "what kind of funding" --there are very toxic funding sources that shall be avoided for the long term survival of the project.

gabriel, 4 months ago

Since the last time I tried it, it has been polished great deal. The system is fast, stable and I can't see any glitches of any kind.

It's true that I am not the "customise everything" kind of user, so I can't tell you how easy or hard it would be to change the appearance or behaviour or the system.

Or, in other words, where are the editable directories and files that you were used to find here or there in a traditional distribution.

gabriel, 4 months ago

"Immutable" is a very bad name for these kind of distributions, as they are 100% mutable --just in a different way and not while they are running.

They have a "system tree" that gets read-only while the system is running, and a user filesystem that is read + write. In this user filesystem, most system configuration files you may ever need to change are mapped, or an editable copy that takes precedence can be found.

What if you need to change the system tree?

gabriel, 4 months ago

If you need to change the system tree, you usually go ahead and use the tool you are provided with to do so. By doing that, the change is "staged for next reboot", meaning that you must reboot the system to enjoy or regret the changes.

There it is: you have done a mutation over an immutable system. What a disappointing immutability level.

gabriel, 4 months ago

The idea is that you tinker with the system tree as little as possible, to avoid creating dependency issues or stability problems.

That's one for the "Linux never breaks", but anyway.

You still can install native packages on the system tree by doing an operation called layering. But you should keep it to a minimum. I personally create layers for system codecs or modules and a few exceptions where the Flatpak ("the canonical way of installing apps") is not really working for me.

gabriel, 4 months ago

When you have to work with native packages in a very volatile way, as for example when you need to test an application with different sets of dependencies or versions of them, these distributions offer you a more or less friendly utility based on containers.

For Kinoite and Silverblue, that's "toolbox" and uses podman containers.

That is what makes people think that the "immutable" distributions are developer friendly --and they are often described that way.

gabriel, 4 months ago

The problem for the developer(*) is when they (we?) follow the canonical way to install applications, and install an IDE from a Flatpak package.

It takes a lot of work to make a Flatpak, which is a container of a kind, connect to a toolbox, which is an OCI container based on podman. And not always will work. So if you want your the IDE to access the runtimes and libraries you've set up in your toolbox, Flatpak is not a friend.

But that is not the only way!

(*) Except if you're a vi-bro.

gabriel, 4 months ago

Here's where people go nuts: what folks think and will yell at you is that: Flatpaks do not support CLI tools, so toolbox is ONLY for CLI tools, and Flatpak is for ALL UI tools.

And guess what: is not. I challenge you to find such assertion here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-kinoite/toolbox/

If you install your graphical IDE in the toolbox, with dnf, everything works like a charm. Because toolbox is for all native packages you need to work with them as a user.

gabriel, 4 months ago

Indeed, I always install Visual Studio Codium in my "developer" toolbox, for the two stupidities I code before killing my next pet project.

Yesterday I connected Visual Studio Code to a toolbox, but, I saw that due to some podman limitation the IDE would connect to the container as root, messing my file permissions. So I went and I installed it inside the toolbox.

Perfect.

And you can create a launcher in your host system --just run "toolbox run --container [name] codium".

Zero dramas.

gabriel, 4 months ago

In conclusion: "immutables" are not such. They are more solid distributions that, by the way and sorry for not mentioning, allow you to roll back changes you do to the system.

They should be called just "atomic", or just don't bother putting surnames to the thing. They're just cool.

Just go fetch one, create a thin layer with your essential low level packages if you need it (e.g.: drivers, modules, things that won't work well on Flatpak), and play with them.

gabriel, 4 months ago

@fedora they are great projects! They are fueling a distro-hoping spree I didn't have in, like, 20 years --just for the fun of trying!

gabriel, 6 months ago

@adacosta @ActionRetro I have a KVM / QEMU VM of Red Hat 5.2, with a bit of work still to be done on the X, but otherwise fine. How can I do that that you want?

gabriel, 6 months ago

@adacosta @ActionRetro I'm uploading the RAW files and some links to archive.org. Finally I'm uploading a RedHat 5.1 because it works better and works at all --the 5.2 has decided to have a corrupt LILO. Will post the link here later on.

gabriel, 6 months ago

@adacosta @ActionRetro Red Hat 5.1 VM : Red Hat, Inc. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/red-hat-5.1 via @internetarchive

gabriel, 6 months ago

@kroc @adacosta @ActionRetro @internetarchive check the notes on the upload, there is a command to convert it to VirtualBox. I couldn't test it though --I don't use VirtualBox currently.

gabriel, 6 months ago

@jwildeboer @aral I support the message and your support. I have another Brother printer that just prints and with a scanner on top that just scans (both network, not USB) and it's been fine for years.