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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2024

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  • Latest Tumbleweed snapshot has a Mesa bug that causes 50% chance of black screen after login. A few weeks before that Plymouth was broken causing >1 minute boot times. To solve these issues users need to learn how to rollback updates from command line, so it’s certainly not a good replacement for Windows.

    I know it’s rolling release distro but you can’t claim “it’s rolling release so bugs are expected and it’s your fault for using it” and “it’s betest and stablest system ever, everyone should use it” at the same time.


  • Not quite true. Code still has copyright owners and they are not bound by terms of free software licenses (they use licenses to allow other people to use their code). This means that copyright owner can make their code proprietary at any time, or change the license to any other. Although they can’t do anything about previously released versions AFAIK.

    However in case of projects with many contributors that don’t have a CLA (which transfers an ownership to some organization) nothing can be changed in practice since every contributor owns their piece of code and will have to consent to the change of license. Linux is such a project so it will forever remain GPLv2 licensed.


  • It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken.

    Tech companies are fully capable of being lazy for free. Fixing this takes dev time from other work that brings Discord money so doing this costs them, especially considering that Linux userbase must be rather tiny. 99% of software companies don’t give a shit about making quality product and will always try their hardest to do as little work as possible while making as much money as possible. If fixing a bug will cost them more than potential profits from making it work then they won’t fix it.




  • I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

    Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

    Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).


  • They absolutely can implement China-level censorship right now, they have technical capabilities. In fact there have already been tests of complete isolation from foreign internet in remote regions of Russia.

    They just don’t use it much, yet. I guess they are afraid of consequences and prefer to let people live pretending that nothing has changed. He will go slow with it. Russia is still tightly integrated with western culture and economy (e.g. they have a strong IT industry and internet isolation will kill it for good). Russian culture has been aligning itself with European culture for centuries. They watch western movies and tv shows, read western books, half of the memes they use are from anglophone internet, etc. They are much closer culturally to Europe than to China, even despite all the politics.

    Also legally the initial versions of this thing are from 2005, I think? Rather old. Just nobody cared.

    2014 is when it started for real. At first the laws were rather innocuous (protect the children and stuff). But with each year they were “improved” to become more and more oppressive. Putin is smart enough to realize that if you do it incrementally then there will be less protests and he will appear as a good guy, “protecting the people”. It was the same with “foreign agent” laws.








  • Variable names shouldn’t need comments, period. You don’t want to look it up every time this variable is used in code, just to understand what it holds. Of course there are always exceptions, but generally names should be descriptive enough to not need additional explanation.

    And context can also come from names of other things, e.g. name of a class / namespace that holds this variable. For example AccessibilitySettings.HighContrast, where AccessibilitySettings holds all options related to accessibility.





  • Even “real” fractional scaling in Plasma with Qt 6 is not much better. Text will look slightly sharper, but icons are still blurry. There is no way for them to look sharp with 1.25 scaling since they are drawn with a pixel grid in mind. Unless you invent some way to stretch svgs so that their individual elements and spaces between them retain their integer-ness while the scale of the whole image is fractional.

    The only other solution is monitors with 300+ PPI where blurriness is simply not noticeable (that’s the way Apple went).