QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks

Nah Linux Mint is a Kia Ceed.

Ubuntu is a Ford Focus, they successfully stole the volvo estate market (Debian). The car was fun, good value and very practical. It was everywhere. Then Ford started increasing the size, weight, price, etc… killing the point of the Focus.

So along comes Kia trying to make a competitor in the Ceed.

In theory the Ceed is a great car, its super cheap, lots of cabin space, nippy, the inside has every modern convenance, but…

• It plays engine noises via speakers that aren’t aligned with what you are doing
• The boot space is rubbish, so 5 people can happily travel in the car you barely fit a suitcase in it
• There is an steering sensitivity button that stays on at 70 MPH with no indication on the display
• A Vauxhall Nova just out accelerated you

Your left wondering why anyone is bothering with hot hatchbacks these days as you climb into your volvo

Debian would be a Volvo Estate, its the boring practical family choice, the owner is soneone boring like an architect or a financial advisor.

Arch is a Vauxhall Nova, second hand battered owned almost exclusively by teenage lads who spend a lot of time/money modifying it (e.g. lowering so it can’t go over speed bumps, adding a massive exhaust to sound good but destroys engine power).

Fedora is something slightly larger/more expensive like a Ford Focus/VW Golf/Vauxhall Astra owned by slightly older lads. The owners spend their time adding lighting kits and the largest sound systems money can buy.

Slackware is clearly a Subaru Impreza, at one point the best World Rally Car but hasn’t been a contender for a while. Almost all are owned by rally fans who spend fantastic amounts of time tinkering with the car to get set it up an ultimate rally car. None of the owners race cars.

OpenSuse is a Nissan Cube, its insanely practical. It should be the modern boring family choice, but it manages to ve too quirky for your architect while not practical enough for van drivers.

I don’t know the other distros well enough.

I run Debian btw

I would argue this is good journalism, you have a noted economic expert that the SNP tried to hire and is pro independence give his opinion on the SNP independence plans from an economic perspective.

He thinks they are pretty disastrous.

Immutable distributions won’t solve the problem.

You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

Debian’s change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely ‘free play’ testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven’t stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you’ve just given yourself a means to back out of it. It’s a band aid to the actual problem.

The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel’s on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn’t the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

Similarly website’s are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc… for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc… for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

All this is kinda boring while ‘containers!’ is exciting new technology

You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate…

You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

Ideally everyone would be naked, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless

The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren’t entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc…).

The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

Hopefully this also explains why it doesn’t matter people enter the sea fully clothed

Uhh how?

The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn’t. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

The developer behind KBin seems to have issues handing over control/delegating.

If you look at the pull requests, most have been waiting for considerable time and he tends to regularly drop big changes which don’t seem to go through the process.

That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but couldn’t.

To some extent that would be ok, but KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

Compounding all this is the fact the dev has recently gone through a divorce, move out, been forced to get a full time job and has recently had surgery. So they have even less free time.

Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

deleted by creator

Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory…

Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious…

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc… Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

Docker swarm was an idea worse than kubernetes, that came out after kubernetes, that isn’t really supported by anyone.

Kubernetes has the concept of a storage layer, you create a volume and can then mount the volume into the docker image. The volume is then accessible to the docker image regardless of where it is running.

There is also a difference between a volume for a deployment and a statefulset, since one is supposed to hold the application state and one is supposed to be transient.

So I know thats a joke but…

With Java 11’s inclusion of ‘var’ I have successfully copied JavaScript code into Java without needing to change anything.

I judge the direction Java is going in

Society is complex, visting a country is different from living there an extended period of time and even then even small geographical distances can result in huge changes in culture.

For example if you started in London and travelled the M4 to Bristol and carried on through Newport and then Cardiff. You would find dramatic differences in housing costs, religiousness, sports played (e.g. football to rugby), views on public transport, job market, jobs people work, education level, favourite drinks, marriage, etc…

You could spend 3 months basing yourself in any one of those locations and derive completely different views on what is wrong with the UK.

Which is why the OP brushed this off as nonsense. It also isn’t uncommon for Americans to go somewhere and suggest it would be miles better if it was exactly like the USA, which is why you get the ad hominem.

It would be like a British Tourist suggesting they don’t drink enough larger or accusing themof being savages for putting salt in tea

The splash screen (boot screen instead of text)used to get me. It provided by an application called ‘Plymouth’.

You used to need to install it and configure grub, however I think if you go into ‘System Settings’ and type ‘Splash’ KDE has an option to install and choose the screen

I thought server side anti cheat was the most effective. Since it can’t be modified by clients and tracks clients for impossible behaviour.

I wish a company would build 4.5"-5.5" and 5.5"-6.5" flagship phones, put as many features that make sense in each.

Then when you release a new flagship the last flagship devices become your ‘mid range’ and you drop the price accordingly, with your mid range dropping to budget the year after.

When Nokia had 15 different phones out at a time it made sense because they would be wildly different (size, shape, button layout, etc…).

These days everyone wants as large a screen as possible on a device that is comfortable to hold, we really don’t need 15 different models with slightly different screen ratios.

I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google’s first release. So I am wrong.

Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). As a result I would get called in when projects had dependency issues.

The biggest culprits were Guava/GSon, projects would often choose to use them (because Google) and then would discover a bug that had been fixed in a later patch release (e.g. they used 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 had the fix). However the reason they used 2.2.1 was because a library they needed did. Bumping up the version usually caused things to break.

The standard solution was to ask’why’ they needed Guava/GSon and everytime you would find they are usually some function found in one of the Apache Commons libraries. So I would pull down the commons library rewrite the bit (often they worked identically)

Fun side note in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of convoluted bespoke things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle ‘feautres’ were a massive headache in 2012 and told you to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.

We tried using Protobuf in 2008 and it was worse than the Apache Axis for JSON conversion (which feels too harsh to say), similarly I had been using AMQP or Kafka for years and tried gRPC when it was released (google say 2016 but I am sure we tried in 2014) and it was worse in every metric I still don’t understand why it exists.

I was using Vaadin in 2011 and honestly thought GWT was released in 2012. I had to use it in 2014 and the workflow, compile time and look of GWT is just worse than Vaadin.