I think if you have some use-case that Wayland doesn’t fulfill, it’s totally fine to just pin some version of Plasma and stick with it. Maybe even switch to Trinity. Chances are it will keep working for like a decade or more.

I still use kdenlive 18.08, because I know how to use that version, and it does what I need it to do perfectly well. They broke something I needed in 19.whatever (I don’t remember what it was anymore), so I just pinned it and kept using it ever since. Maybe one day I’ll try to figure out the latest version, but there’s no real incentive for me to do so.

Nah, social division of labour is almost as old as civilization itself. It’s not possible to do everything by yourself, if you’re lucky enough not to die of hunger in a few weeks, you’ll die of a preventable disease within a few years.

Capitalist exploitation of it (combined with faux individualism) is the issue.

Translating to this scenario, there would be no issue if we had community kitchens with cheap/free food and well-paid workers. The issue is the capitalists extracting surplus value from a basic necessity, partly by convincing everyone to hate their neighbours and eat alone.

It was used to deliver the comic to you in the first place.

The intended use-case is for bit-banging, i.e. sending electricity to places according to certain algorithms. Think about simple automation, like the control chip in your washing machine which executes the selected program by sending enable/disable signals to the water pump, valves, and the motor. Well, the same basic principles could apply to a lot of industrial processes and such, helping us rebuild the civilization.

It would also be really fucking great for helping post-collapse engineers do various calculations. Those chips are really slow by modern standards, but insanely fast compared to an abacus, a slide rule, and a sheet of paper.

BTW there’s also dusk OS, which follows similar principles but is targeted for more advanced hardware, like the abundant x86 and ARM chips. It has a way more user-friendly interface, a basic GUI, filesystem drivers, and IIRC even networking capabilities, all possible to run on a PC from the early 90s. It also has great bootstrapping flow, allowing you to rebuild itself from source, flash itself to other computers, and flash Collapse OS onto microcontrollers.

Basically like a Linux install with all the dev-tools and sources already there, except much simpler, to the point that you probably can figure out how every component of the system works yourself, and fix issues when they happen. This knowledge will also directly translate into writing programs for collapse OS, because they share the programming language and many OS paradigms.

I like how the rememes of this only get more complicated and less stable with time; hopefully this means the collapse is approaching, or else I’m learning forth for nothing!

I guess we have vastly different expectations from our phones, then. At a minimum, I need to:

1. Have reliable, snappy maps with precise GPS (for trekking)
2. Be able to interact with my bank on the go, at least via a web app
3. Be able to chat with people via Matrix
4. Get transit routing via a web app

And in my experience, Librem5 just doesn’t have enough processing power and RAM to do any of those quickly and reliably. It was not comfortable at all, e.g. the browser kept filling up RAM and locking up the device with constant swapping, and finally OOMing. GPS took 5-10 minutes to get a lock, even with AGPS, and after that wouldn’t reliably keep it. Both Nheko and NeoChat were slow and laggy. It also died after 4-5 hours of suspend with a modem on, unacceptable for a reliable daily.

OnePlus6 is a rocketship in comparison, and performs all those tasks with ease. The battery also lasts for an entire day with conservative suspend settings (but with the modem on), and for a couple days in airplane mode (e.g. while hiking in the mountains).

Yes, but that shouldn’t generally explode the RAM usage by an order of magnitude. In terms of information amount, most of the data that computers handle is an internal binary representation of real-world phenomena (think: videos, pictures, audio, sensor data) and not encoded text.

I understand Unicode and its various encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) fairly well. UTF-8 is backwards-compatible with ASCII and only takes up the extra bytes if you are using characters outside of the 0x00-0x7F range. E.g. this comment I’m writing is simultaneously valid UTF-8 and valid ASCII.

I’d like to see some good evidence for the claim that Unicode support increases memory usage so drastically. Especially given that most data in RAM is typically things other than encoded text (e.g. videos, photos, internal state of software).

Wait, really? How does Unicode of all things increase RAM usage that much?

I own a Librem5, and let me tell ya, it’s not a daily phone, hardware is just way too slow. Even with sxmo it lags a lot, opening a browser is a whole ordeal for it. Meanwhile when I tried my friend’s PinePhone Pro, it felt a lot better. Oh, and for context, I’m currently semi-dailying a OnePlus 6 with NixOS.

• Connected standby is already somewhat possible (it’s actually done on the hardware/firmware side on most phones), it can work with something like ntfy with a fairly simple script IIRC
• We have sandboxing and permissions figured out pretty well with Flatpak (there are improvements to be had for sure, but all the basics are there)

The one main remaining barrier (apart from thousands of paper cuts everywhere and lack of apps), is indeed process lifecycle management. It’s the most complicated one to do, because in order to work well it requires apps to cooperate in some way, either by completely and honestly shutting down when not doing any work, or by providing ways to check if there’s any work to be done without running the rest of the app, or both ideally. None of the apps currently do that, so the only options are (1) just let apps do whatever they want, draining the battery, or (2) send SIGSTP to apps that are not in the foreground, losing background notifications and such.

I’m sure you are already aware, but just in case, there’s a lot of prior work in getting a truly Linux mobile phone.

There are ready-made devices like PinePhone (the PinePhone Pro looks the most promising one of the bunch), Librem 5, and Liberux Nexx. I think at least some of those companies publish schematics for their boards, you should probably check those out if you want to design your own.

There is also another direction, taken by postmarketOS and the like, to install Linux on a phone that shipped with Android out of the box.

It should be easy enough to install postmarketOS on your device, since it seems to have support for raspberry pi. The benefit of postmarketOS here is that it makes it really easy to install mobile Linux UI shells, like phosh, gnome-mobile, plasma-mobile, or sxmo. This will let you try all of them out and maybe pick one as a starting point for your software stack.

At the point of first contact IRL, I avoid mentioning anything even vaguely inflammatory: that I’m an immigrant (that one is hard to hide because my pronunciation of the local language is still quite terrible), vegan, atheist, hold anarchist, marxist, and generally anti-capitalist views. If the relationship lasts longer than just a single contact, as I build up trust and goodwill I slowly start seeping out that info, usually in the order that I listed it in.

How about this:

1. Add ability to make custom “servers” (which can be just rooms on your proprietary server) with no anti-cheat at all, just fool around with your friends and do whatever you want, mods/hacks/cheats/etc.
2. At least for casual play modes, make protocols that are less reliant on clients to do the right thing and instead only tell the clients more or less what the player should know already. This might leave some room for sweaty tryhard cheaters to consistently beat other people, but in a casual game which is mostly just for fun this doesn’t really matter.

There may be some places where a protocol-level solution is not feasible. In that case yeah, require your anti-cheat, but only for competitive game modes. I wouldn’t even be pissed if they didn’t allow it to run on Linux, Linux makes it easy to do whatever the fuck you want with your computer and so a determined cheater will find a way to cheat. It sucks, but I feel like a lot of people don’t really care that much about sweaty competitive game modes anyway. Just give me a way to fool around with friends, it’s not that serious FFS.

For context, I’m using NixOS, not Arch, but it’s a similar enough idea. I have a tiling/tabbed WM configured just the way I like it, and a window switcher thingy, and it makes juggling hundreds of windows really easy and quick. Combined with a terminal-based editor, a custom setup for my shell, and direnv for easy environment switching, I can be switching between a dozen different projects within a single day (sadly a requirement for my work right now).

Whenever I look at how my colleagues with KDE/Gnome are managing their workflows, it makes me appreciate the work I put into my setup a lot.

Also, I have a whole bunch of shell aliases and scripts for tasks I do often.

Sure, you can configure any distro to do that, but things like Ubuntu or Fedora would get in the way. At some point, when you want to choose (or even write) every component of the system and configure it yourself, it’s easier to just build from scratch rather than start with a lot of pre-configured software and remove parts.

My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.

That’s interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.

I just see this as a possible boon for Linux ARM laptops, but then again I’m a glass half full kinda guy (not like this).

Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?

No, not really.

Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they’re trying to optimize isn’t performance, though, it’s more “usability”, i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.

That feels too easy for the requirements they’re announcing, no? It just adds like 12 taps to scammer’s instructions, 10 of which is the taps to show developer menu.

Ooh, cool! Might be my new phone when the current one cacks or Android becomes completely unusable.