kbal

I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:

He enjoys the arguments, it’s nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.

It’s more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don’t, and that’s okay.

Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he’s optimistic about it.

The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.

There aren’t many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it’s going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.

If you make your own he’s looking forward to seeing it.

While I could imagine reasons to protest against “space radar dishes” it seems that these radar dishes are to be situated down on the ground. They already have nuclear weapons, you know. It’s probably okay if they have radar too.

I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

Failing to respond in detail to all of the claims you believe to be your most important ones is not what is usually meant by a “straw man.”

While I don’t mind Rust (although I’m not too good at it yet) I really do find the crowd of overzealous enthusiasts claiming in the most hyperbolic terms that the necessity of its universal use is an urgent security issue quite off-putting sometimes.

I’ve yet to see any serious usage of SELinux in the real world

I too have successfully avoided it, but we must acknowledge that not everyone has been so fortunate.

How now, you secret, black, and midnight Tories! What is’t you do?

Indeed the language is extremely fashionable among government types and many others. I did not really mean to suggest otherwise. If accusing me of erecting a straw man is your way of apologizing for your initial comment, I accept it.

Nah. If you’d been leaning on specific statements of any given expert — of which it is of course possible to find plenty that might in such casual rhetoric be used to support whichever conclusion you like — that would’ve been argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to authority. Instead you cited an imagined “vast majority” to exaggerate the universality of your opinion.

P.S. Whilst I’m indulging my argumentative side perhaps it is also worth pointing out that you totally mischaracterized my own statements and motivation. I am not primarily a C programmer, and I’ve been happy to use Rust myself when the opportunity arises. I have no personal stake in this particular fight.

Turns out there is a name for that. I had to look it up. Never seen such a striking example before.

Gender neutral pronouns are pretty huge too. Sure you can do them in English without too many problems usually, just as it’s also possible to code safely in C. It requires everyone to change their old habits, but it’s much less of a change than is involved in adopting a whole new language.

Anyway, I do like Rust better personally.

Switching everything from C to Rust because it has better memory safety is more akin to changing languages from English to Esperanto because it has gender neutral pronouns and other cool features. Maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s understandable that some people are reluctant.

wealthy people had reacted by leaving the country or rearranging their business affairs to minimise any tax liability.

There’s no point making laws, the crooks are just too clever for us.

Immutable IoT thin-client Snap container-based systems seems like a pretty weird kink, but who am I to judge?

It’s not for the end user’s boss, it’s there to collect data for the future Microsoft user behaviour analysis tools that will be sold to the end user’s boss’s boss.

Rust is a good language. There is no reason not to use it for userspace tools if you manage dependencies with sufficient care. As with most other currently fashionable languages they make it easy to not do that.

Sorry, I was assuming everyone knew that. Should’ve said “nagware” instead.

it’s running as a daemon specifically so you can easily disable it

It occurs to me that even if I were a KDE user, I probably wouldn’t see it. I’m not a DE developer, so I’d be getting the packages through Debian, and the people who package things for Debian tend to remove such prominent features that for the users are all cost and no benefit.

I suspect that none of the people who are “complaining” are doing so because it’s some kind of personal inconvenience that they’d find intolerable. The only thing it does to make my day worse is to slightly cheapen the reputation of the KDE project, and by extension — since it is such a popular and highly visible project — that of free software in general.