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

How would you buy it in the US? I can see any uk retailers stocking it

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

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.

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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.

It isn’t a good move.

A domain name can cost as little as £10, similarly most email services cost ~£5-£15 per person per month. Its normally pretty easy to link a domain to an email provider and doesn’t cost anything other than time.

If a company can’t be bothered to implement the most basic online branding people will make their assumptions and some will filter your company out because of it. With the cost to implement so low (e.g. £160 per year), even the loss/gain of a single customer would justify it.

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.

Pirate Trainer & Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

I remember trying Pirate Trainer in a Nvidia game booth when VR was new. It was incredible, years later I get a VR headset and its the free game. I don’t understand how no one has improved upon it.

Uru was the first puzzle game I thought struck a good balance between physical and mental puzzles. They were set at a level that felt challenging but not impossible and laid out so you alternated really nicely. Myst Online actually went backwards in this

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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 wouldn’t use “certified” in this context.

Limiting support of software to specific software configurations makes sense.

Its stuff like Debian might be using Python 3.8 Ubuntu Python 3.9, OpenSuse Python 3.9, etc… Your application might use a Python 3.9 requiring library and act odd on 3.8 but fine on 3.7, etc… so only supporting X distributions let you make the test/QA process sane.

This is also why Docker/Flatpack exist since you can define all of this.

However the normal mix is RHEL/Suse/Ubuntu because those target businesses and your target market will most likely be running one.

I suspect they mean around packaging.

I honestly believe Red Hat has a policy that everything should pull in Gnome. I have had headless RHEL installs and half the CLI tools require Gnome Keyring (even if they don’t deal with secrets or store any). Back in RHEL 7, Kate the KDE based Text Editor pulled in a bunch of GTK dependencies somehow.

Certification is really someone paid to go through a process and so its designed so they pass.

Think about the people you know who are Agile/Cloud/whatever certified and how all it means is they have learnt the basic examples.

Its no different when a business gets certified.

The only reason people care is because they can point to the cert if it all goes wrong

Debian isn’t old == stable, its tested == stable.

Debian has an effective Rolling distribution through testing than can get ahead of Arch.

At some point they freeze the software versions in testing and look for Release Critical and Major bugs. Once they have shaken everything and submitted fixes where possible. It then becomes stable.

The idea is people have tested a set baseline of software and there are no known major bugs.

For the 4-5 releases Debian has released every 2 years (Similar to Ubuntu LTS). Debian tends to align its release with LTS Kernel and Mesa releases so there have been times the latest stable is running newer versions than Ubuntu and the newest software crown switches between Ubuntu LTS and Debian each year.

For some the priority to run software that won’t have major bugs, that is what Debian, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL offer.