LocalSend. It’s exactly like Apple Airdrop

This may be super-nitpicky (and I lose LocalSend and use it a lot), but there is one difference between LocalSend and Airdrop. LocalSend requires network connectivity (and requires the devices to be on the same network), whereas Airdrop can work without any network connection (using Bluetooth).

To be honest I’m more concerned by language-humor. Like not even saying what kind of humour, just any type of humour at all. Jokes are for adults only!

Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.

Anyway it’s a chat protocol

Reminds me a little of the old Jonathan Shapiro research OSes (Coyotos, EROS, CapROS), though toned down a little bit. The EROS family was about eliminating the filesystem entirely at the OS level since you can simulate files with capabilities anyway. Serenum seems to be toning that down a little and effectively having file- or directory-level capabilities, which I think is sensible if you’re going to have a capability-based OS, since they end up being a bit more user-visible as an OS.

He’s got the same problem every research OS has: zero software. He’s probably smart to ditch the idea of hardware entirely and just fix on one hardware platform.

I wish him luck selling his computer systems, but I doubt he’s going to do very well. What would a customer do with one of these? Edit files? And then…edit them again? I guess you can show off how inconvenient it is to edit things due to its security.

I just mean it’s a bit optimistic to try and fund this by selling it. I understand he doesn’t have a research grant, but it’s clearly just a research OS.

It is, but it probably shouldn’t be any more. WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined. (Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG). But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.

E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it). Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.

Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we’ve still got WebP. It’s not super great, but it’s at least better than JPEG and PNG. A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you’re going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won’t happen because “Linux is different”)

The search term is censored by DuckDuckGo in Korea. Even robots apparently think it’s going to be an IoT buttplug.

That’s Saturday night in North American time zones. Just a heads up in case you’re planning a boys’ night out a couple hundred billion years in advance, maybe move it to Friday night in case the world ends Saturday night.

It’s not. He was very explicitly not talking about his murder there.

In a certain light, you could argue that Linus doesn’t really have any control at all. He doesn’t write any code for Linux (hasn’t in many years), doesn’t do any real planning or commanding or managing. “All” he does is coordinate merges and maintain his own personal git branch. (And he’s not alone in that: a lot of people maintain their own Linux branches). He has literally no formal authority at all in Linux development.

It just so happens that, by a very large margin, his own personal git branch is the most popular and trusted in the world. People trust his judgment for what goes in and doesn’t go in.

It’s not like Linux development is stopped because Linus goes offline (or goes on vacation or whatever). People keep writing code and discussing and testing and whatnot. It’s just that without Linus’s discerning eye casting judgment on their work, it doesn’t enter the mainstream.

Nothing will really get slowed down. Whether something officially gets labelled by Linus as “6.8” or “6.whatever” doesn’t really matter in the big picture of Linux development.

Ah thanks for that! You can tell how long it’s been since I’ve used Mac OS.

Isn’t it Mac OS X 14? I.e., Mac OS 10.14?

I’m going to reframe the question as “Are computers good for someone tech illiterate?”

I think the answer is “yes, if you have someone that can help you”.

The problem with proprietary systems like Windows or OS X is that that “someone” is a large corporation. And, in fairness, they generally do a good job of looking after tech illiterate people. They ensure that their users don’t have to worry about how to do updates, or figure out what browser they should be using, or what have you.

But (and it’s a big but) they don’t actually care about you. Their interest making sure you have a good experience ends at a dollar sign. If they think what’s best for you is to show you ads and spy on you, that’s what they’ll do. And you’re in a tricky position with them because you kind of have to trust them.

So with Linux you don’t have a corporation looking after you. You do have a community (like this one) to some degree, but there’s a limit to how much we can help you. We’re not there on your computer with you (thankfully, for your privacy’s sake), so to a large degree, you are kind of on your own.

But Linux actually works very well if you have a trusted friend/partner/child/sibling/whoever who can help you out now and then. If you’ve got someone to help you out with it, Linux can actually work very very well for tech illiterate people. The general experience of browsing around, editing documents, editing photos, etc., works very much the same way as it does on Windows or OS X. You will probably be able to do all that without help.

But you might not know which software is best for editing photos. Or you might need help with a specific task (like getting a printer set up) and having someone to fall back on will give you much better experience.

Yes, it is. ed25519 depends upon discrete log for its security, which Shor’s algorithm can (theoretically, of course, not like it’s ever been done) efficiently solve.

The post-quantum algorithms are in active research right now. I don’t blame anyone for avoiding those at least until we’ve quantum computers big enough to solve baby toy elliptic curves.

JXL is not proprietary. It’s an open, royalty-free format whose reference implementation is BSD-licensed.

You’re just not cloud-native enough to understand how revolutionary it is to run GNOME on Fedora.

And not all GNU is Linux! Beyond the world famous GNU Hurd, there’s also Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Nexenta (GNU/Illumos, which is the OpenSolaris kernel).

I think the most esoteric of them, though, is GNU Darwin (GNU/XNU). Darwin is the open source parts of OS X, including its kernel, XNU. There used to be an OpenDarwin project to try to turn Darwin into an actual independent operating system, but they failed, and were superseded by PureDarwin, which took a harder line against anything OS X getting into the system. GNU Darwin took it one step further and removed just about all of Darwin (except XNU) and replaced it with GNU instead.

It doesn’t change the larger point that GNU is way bigger than Linux, though. There are a tonne of things that are larger than Linux, and GNU is one of them.