I have the weirdest computer problems
They’re so weird that even the explaining the context will cause many listeners to lose patience.
(more…)Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Imported Rant – Why Redis and MongoDB licenses are open source
This post was originally written in response to The Linux Experiment’s “Redis ditches FOSS” item, where Nick, the presenter, was critical of the recent Redis license change where they moved from the original BSD license to MongoDB’s SSPL, a change that was portrayed (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) as “the company taking the code the open source volunteers have given them and closing it in order to monetize the volunteers’ work”.
TL;DR – the fact that OSI labels SSPL as “not open source” is nothing more than FUD by the major cloud providers, as the only meaningful difference between that and the GPL is section 13 that makes life harder for cloud providers.
(more…)Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey
The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:
Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.
Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:
Why I Switched Firefox from Snap to Flatpak
This – this is the reason:
Unlike other software packages (which includes, I believe, Flatpak) Snap packages will not update if the application is already running. Instead you get this annoying popup “Oh boy, you have 13 days to close your app otherwise nasty things will happen!” Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in and by itself, except that if you close the application – it doesn’t update. Even the notification doesn’t go away.
(more…)Script day: check the currently set Plasma desktop wallpaper
I like to have some kind of slideshow as a desktop background wallpaper, and there are various ways of doing that – using your local picture library or multiple variations of remote image sources (everyone love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day), and you can find a lot of discussions online about how best to go about automating setting the desktop’s background wallpaper image – in KDE Plasma it is particularly not that easy as you have to contend with multiple “activities”, with each has multiple screens, with each has multiple “desktop containments” – fortunately Plasma no longer supports different wallpapers for different virtual desktops – otherwise it would really have been a massive mess.
But sometimes I don’t want to change the wallpaper – just to figure out which one I’m looking it (maybe I want to delete it?). There isn’t any discussion about that on the internet, so I wrote this script and here it is for posterity (and also in this Github Gist):
(more…)Chrome Applications and the cursed CSD
I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.
The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.
(more…)Why Wayland is a Bad Idea™
Most people who have been involved in Linux development/administration/advocacy already know that Linux operating systems are in the middle of a big shift (or actually, almost at the end of it) in the graphics stack used in Linux desktops – from the old and gnarly X11 protocol to the new hotness: Wayland compositing. And it sucks.
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The API wars… who actually cares?
This is a public response to Johan Thelin’s post “The API wars – 16 years later. His blog commenting system looks a bit broken and regardless – I think its an important enough discussion to publish here. The main premise of the article is that the web APIs have won the “API war” in the context of Joel’s Spolsky’s “How Microsoft lost the API war” article from 2014 but the main winner is the globally domineering Google and we should subvert their victory by moving to the new runtime – the WebAssembly, that is better in every way.
Here’s what I had to say about that:
(more…)Why Konsole is the best terminal emulator
I often say that one of the main reasons I use KDE Plasma as my default graphical workspace is that some of the KDE specific software is the best at what it does, and specifically – as a lot of my computer time is spent using a console – the KDE terminal emulator software Konsole is the best in the world.
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