jamesh

@jamesh@aus.social

Ubuntu Desktop developer at Canonical.

Living in Perth, Western Australia.

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whynothugo, to random
@whynothugo@fosstodon.org avatar

It’s often very hard to make good metaphors about modern business practices in the tech industry. Imagine a stove that won’t heat your pots and pans if they are not from the same manufacturer as the stove. Imagine a pens and pencils that don’t write if you try to use it from paper that’s not from one of the pen manufacturers’ partners. These ideas are so absurdly inconceivable in other industries that metaphors don’t make sense, but these sort of practice are the norm in tech nowadays.

jamesh,

@whynothugo It doesn't seem that unusual outside of the tech industry.

For shavers, we've gone from safety razors taking standard blades to razors that only fit cartridges from the manufacturer. Vacuum cleaners often require bags specific to their model, etc.

Vendor lock-in and bundling aren't that new.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I've been on Mastodon for a year now. So it seems only right to have switched my old twitter account out from underneath my name there (which is now sitting on an empty account with no follows and no tweets) and sent it to the knacker's yard for deactivation.

jamesh, (edited )

@cstross just wait for them to reactivate the account, and have an LLM start making new posts trained on your old ones...

jamesh, to random

@popey's Steam Deck running the Ubuntu Core Desktop preview.

jamesh,

@AnnoyingRains @popey he was running Steam under Core Desktop too.

popey, to ubuntu
@popey@ubuntu.social avatar

Canonical just announced plans for the Core desktop at the - I took it for a test drive on a totally regular PC - my SteamDeck.
https://popey.com/blog/2023/11/ubuntu-core-snapdeck/

jamesh,

@jorge @popey it's a Flutter app that can create and launch lxd containers, with a terminal emulator to interact with them.

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

"Why does ACPI exist" in the beforetimes power management on x86 was done by jumping to an opaque BIOS entry point and hoping it would do the right thing. It frequently didn't. Failed to program your graphics card exactly the way the BIOS expected? Hurrah! Data corruption for you. ACPI made the reasonable decision that, well, maybe it should be up to the OS to set state and be able to recover it. But how should the OS deal with state that's fundamentally device specific?

jamesh,

@klausman @mjg59 The real test is whether it makes the system simpler over all. And I'd argue the one-kernel-device model seen on Android phones is complicated in a different way, even if each individual kernel might be simpler.

jamesh,

@klausman @mjg59 every smartphone I've owned so far has stopped receiving OS version upgrades before it became unusable.

In contrast, I've got a 10+ year old x86 server in my closet running a recent Linux distro. It just works because no one has to do hardware enablement for that specific system in the new OS release.

cassidy, (edited ) to linux
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

Canonical has poisoned search results for many apps plus a Linux distro name. For example, Googling “Spotify elementary OS” returns an auto-generated page on the Snap Store site that requires using a terminal, installing a whole package manager as root, and missing out on details and updates in AppCenter.

elementary would point you to Flathub where you can install w/two clicks and then get AppCenter integration.

How do we feel about this?

jamesh,

@cassidy While I find those pages a bit obnoxious, maybe Spotify isn't the best example: the snap is an official package from Spotify. It's not obvious to me that it would be better to redirect people towards a modified third party version.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Can someone ( @pganssle ) tell me why I shouldn't do this:

ZoneInfo("/".join(readlink("/etc/localtime").split("/")[-2:]))

jamesh,

@glyph Not all time zones contain a single slash. Some examples I see on my system include "UTC" and "America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires". It seems like it'd fail on them.

Also, on some systems /etc/localtime might be a regular file, or pass through an intermediate symlink before it gets to /usr/share/zoneinfo.

ebassi, to random
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

Closed source software had it right: never allow direct public access to a project's issue tracker

jamesh,

@ebassi So something like https://bugzilla.kernel.org/?

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

Let's be fair to PKCS#11, it might not be worse than the NPAPI plugin architecture

jamesh,

@mjg59 Irrespective of the APIs, NPAPI likely has the benefit that it was targetting a single implementation of the host process for plugins, and any interoperability problems would be looked at in relation to that reference.

ebassi, to random
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

In the year of our lord 2023 I still get exposed to people that "hate" systemd, use monikers like "systemfail", and are likely younger than me.

The brain worms are everywhere…

jamesh,

@ebassi I often wonder if they remember how slow Linux systems used to boot. Do they assume the improvements are simply due to increased CPU speeds?

And some of the complexity drawn into the init system has resulted in reduced complexity elsewhere. If I discovered a bug in an old sysvinit script, chances are the same bug would exist in 10 other scripts that copied from the same place.

geordie, to random
@geordie@aus.social avatar

I have an idea, hear me out. “Jane Wick”

jamesh,

@geordie I think they're already making that: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7181546/

popey, to random
@popey@ubuntu.social avatar

Uhoh, just seen my first Christmas advert on TV.

jamesh,

@popey They've been selling fruit mince pies at the supermarket here for about a month.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I've been told people on this website enjoy me trying to think through computer problems out loud while in incredible pain, so good news: I'm taking my new Thinkpad T14 (https://mastodon.social/@mcc/111218408629532857) out of the box and I'm going to install Linux on it first thing. So expect a LOT of complaining.

jamesh,

@mcc If it doesn't show up, one option is to run "update-manager -d" to let it prompt you to upgrade to development releases. While the release is out, there's usually a short delay before existing users are prompted to upgrade.

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

Pretty much exactly 19 years ago I got on a train to Oxford and made Mark Shuttleworth's laptop successfully suspend and resume using ACPI and that was the turning point in my entire career

jamesh,

@mjg59 It was definitely August 2004, based on the dates of my photos.

Looking at those photos, it's weird how young everyone is and how bad cheap digital cameras were back then.

jamesh,

@mjg59 To be fair, they only let the employee steal the Apple laptops from the room.

cassidy, to random
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

“Google needs to step up and commit to supporting their phones for longer like Apple, especially now that they control the chip and OS!”

Google commits to 7 years of OS updates for Pixel. Apple doesn’t publish support timelines; the longest has been 6 years, most were 5 and some were as short as 4.

“Hm, Google has only been doing this for a few years, can we really TRUST them when they say they’re going to support the phone that long‽ Seems risky!”

Google has been making phones for 15 years.

jamesh,

@cassidy I mean, you could turn it around and say they have a 15 year track record of not supporting devices long term.

I do think there's a good chance they'll deliver. When they were using chips from Qualcomm, there wasn't much incentive for Qualcomm to make it easy for the phone manufacturer to provide long term support since Qualcomm just gets paid on the initial sale of the chip. With the vertical integration, they save money if they can build multiple generations of devices from the same source tree.

One interesting thing to look for is whether the Pixel 8 is running the same kernel version around this time next year.

ebassi, to random
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

I'm beginning to think this is Google pulling a Microsoft/DR-DOS. It seems YouTube does not detect that I disabled the adblocker until I go through the "show me how to disable my adblocker and then reload" sequence.

I bet this does not happen with Chrome.

YouTube's warning after I disabled the adblocker, showing that it did not detect the change.

jamesh,

@ebassi Just wait for "please enable Privacy Sandbox to view this website"...

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

“Deadloch” won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you’re in the mood for an over-the-top black comedy with a foul-mouthed female detective who makes Malcolm Tucker look like Mother Theresa & Inspector Clouseau like H. Poirot, with bonus satire of the infamously fatuous Dark Mofo …

jamesh,

@gregeganSF It's weird reading some negative reviews from people complaining that the show isn't serious enough.

It's far more restrained in that respect than previous shows by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan.

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

Train just went past a station that I'd never heard of and which isn't on the timetable so I searched and just what? https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/transportation/article4203314.html

jamesh,

@mjg59 Privatised rail tracks seems like a mistake.

pid_eins, to random
@pid_eins@mastodon.social avatar

This whole mess just makes me think we should try harder to kick suid/fcaps out of general purpose Linux distributions. The whole concept is fundamentally backwards, and one of the major weaknesses of traditional UNIX I am sure. The idea behind suid/fcaps of first granting the privileges, inheriting some major, uncontrolled part of the execution environment/resource context/security context and then expecting the binary to securely gate its misuse is just a major mistake: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/10/03/2

jamesh,

@dalias @pid_eins @mariusor While I'm not the biggest fan of Polkit's JS rules system, the vast majority of access decisions get made based on the default rules in the action files.

And at the end of the day, all access decisions are made by code. Having it in human readable text files is not the worst thing in the world.

jamesh,

@dalias @pid_eins @mariusor I work on a distribution that is only upgrading to a JS-capable polkit in this month's release: more than a decade after upstream made the change.

In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it is particularly important. We're talking about a couple of hundred lines of JS that doesn't make use of loops and is very easy to reason about. A more restricted language could achieve the same thing, but it's not something I think is worth fighting about.

jamesh,

@dalias @pid_eins @mariusor On the other hand: the fact that the JS rules that have accumulated over the last decade are so simple could be used as evidence that a simpler language could have handled it.

I think David's original rationale was that PKLA files were too simple, and he wasn't sure what features people would need. So we ended up with Turing complete.

jamesh,

@mariusor It's the .rules files found in the /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d directory. This is what Polkit >= 0.106 use instead of .pkla files, which were simple ini files.

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