I use it for letters too. It is a breeze to use.

LaTeX is by far easier to use than “word processors” if you want consistent formatting.

Arch is often pictured as some Uber hacker magic which it isn’t. It is a useful collection of software packages with great documentation.

Arch is for example useful if you want to program with new Rust versions, tools like jujutsu, cross-compile for your Sailfish phone, and so on.

(By the way, Guix features now a recent Rust/cargo version, too!)

And both Debian and Arch have advantages / disadvantages, so both are useful for different tasks. Learning Arch is really not a big step or costs much time if you know the foundations of Linux.

>= 33 years

• Unix
• C
• the shell and commands like cd, ls, find, xarg, cp, mv, ln, df, du

>= 32 years

• vi/vim
• LaTeX
• tar

>= 28 years

• Emacs
• awk, bash
• C++
• Linux

>= 26 years

• Python & Numerical Python
• screen and tmux
• rsync
• ssh
• InkScape

>= 20 years

• git
• literate programming tools

>= 17 years

• Thunderbird & forks
• Debian & Ubuntu
• GNOME

>= 15 years

• MeeGo, Maemo, Sailfish & siblings
• Lisps (Clojure, Guile, Racket)

>= 11 years

• tiling WMs (i3)
• Arch (as second system)

what I use now and will very, very likely still use in 10 years

• Rust
• Guix
• Gollum wiki
• Gemini protocol

❤

Looking at young people and having sad thoughts about their future - feeling we owe them something I can’t give them.

One huge advantage that I forget to mention: Since Gemini does not use “addictive by design” UI elements popularized by social media companies, like feeds, timelines, likes and upvotes, colourful and distracting elements, endless scrolling, and comments that invite trolling, it feels a lot calmer.

Whoa. An update to the HTML Hell Page!

The easiest and possibly most secure server I know of is agate, written in Rust. But there are many implementations to start from…

Images and documents with any MIME type are part of the protocol. Clients decide how they do display that.

That said it is a medium primarily geared at displaying text. Not animated gifs with ads.

It can transmit any media or mime type. It just does this one document at a time.

Clients can display linked images inline of course.

The purpose of this and other limitations is to make it useless for advertising and tracking.

Sounds like hell is freezing over…

But you might have noted that weather patterns are becoming a bit strange recently.

Guix vs Nix will be an interesting example. Nix has a way bigger user base right now but it has the whole Anduril & governance issue.

Guix has a way better configuration language and one can learn in an afternoon enough to use it productively.

What is your experience with guix like?

I am mainly using Guix as a package manager on top of Debian stable (and on top of my Arch install running in a vm). I use it mostly to have a reproducible development environment for my free time projects (which use Rust and Guile), and it works very nicely to that. It is also certainly a nice way to distribute software as source, with very little effort (just putting the own package definutions into a channel repo).

Does getting away from systemd affect things?

I have also started to run it directly on my PC as a base system. After replacing the NVidia GeForce card with an AMD Radeon one, I had no issues.

The configuration and init system work well - the only thing I would have to do is to write my own stumpwm(*) init script, which I didn’t have time for, so I use, as a fallback, i3wm and Gnome or XFce2, what I use at work, too.

(*) Stumpwm is a highly configurable tiling window manager written in Common Lisp. Similar to i3, but using key chords, and window manager actions are just lisp functions one can program and extend - they are called via key chords like Emacs commands.

In respect to the init systems, I have to confess that I am mostly agnostic. As long as it works, I am fine. I think Guix is the more modern and better approach.

Depends on the license.

And yes, you could say that the relationship between companies and open source contributors is a bit parasitic at times. But a part of them don’t care because for a start, they are not motivated by money to write open source software.

Nail on head! Exactly!

Here a summary I posted a while ago:

https://feddit.org/post/23120439

I think that one reason why the proportion of open source code grows is software quality:

Companies would love to own all their code. So, when they employ people who work on proprietary code, the amount of proprietary code should grow, shouldn’t it?

Except that companies have mostly very short-term goals. And this affects quality: A lot of proprietary code has quite shit quality and is not really maintainable. Which has the effect that either the project dies, or becomes very slow to develop further, because of tons of technical debt.

FOSS projects do not have this constraint on short-term returns, so they often have better quality. Which makes it more likely that these projects live and prosper a bit longer. The short-term difference might not be even large - but the process goes year for year, round for round, and it becomes an evolutionary advantage.

In the end, everyone uses that Finnish students former hobby kernel project, and nobody uses Windows 95 - or wants to use its shitty successors.

(And this is why I also think that Guix will win in the long term: The capability to re-produce all components of a program or system from freely available source is, in the long run, an overwhelming evolutionary advantage.)

As a Sailfish Linux OS user, perhaps about every five to six years. The last two died because of falls / hardware damage. Performance was fine.

To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn’t need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn’t be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it.

I think exactly here is the crucial difference to the GPL and the rights it is concerned about: The GPL is concerned with the rights of the users. The reason for this is that closed-source and non-free software turns into a means of control that affects the sphere and rights of the users. A few examples:

• email services which scan your private messages for advertising - or controlling you in a police state
• operating systems which upload most of your data to the vendor’s cloud, including passwords
• applications and whole operating systems which are carefully designed to be very distracting, for example because this allows to use advertising or maximizes time spent with a service
• printer drivers which only allow to buy expensive ink cartridges made by the printers vendor and waste ink on top of that
• scanner drivers which stop to work after an OS upgrade, so that you have to buy a new scanner because the company will not give you any software update for the driver
• printers which print tiny yellow dots on each page to identify stealthly who was printing it
• web apps that are choke-full with dark patterns that manipulate you into allowing things you don’t want.
• trains that stop working if they are maintained by another company than the one that produced their software
• digital hearing aids which are locked to the chain that sold it so their owners can’t let maintain and repair them elsewhere
• phone apps that track your location and send it to companies and state organizations

these problems are what the GPL and copyleft licenses address, and the reason why systems like Linux are much more user-friendly.

Oh, and in respect to the artists: Yes, many do art because they need to do that. And this is all the time blatantly exploited by companies. And companies try to exploit open source developers in the same way.

GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source […]

I am somewhat tripping here over the word “force”.

Do you want to say that non-commercial software developers should give away the fruits of their work for free, in general?

But companies not?

Do they have a kind of right to that? What would that right be based on?

To make a picture: Let’s say we have a farmer who goes to the farmers market and sells his stuff. Does his offer to sell his vegetables violate anyone’s rights? Or freedoms? Is there any right to go and take his stuff away without paying?

Now, let’s say the farmer realizes that there are poor people which are starving, and because he is from a culture in which sharing has a very high value and people help each other all the time, he decides that people can take some of his vegetables for free.

And then he observes that there are companies which take all his free stuff and sell it again to poor people. And he thinks “wait a minute”, and writes a contract stipulating that anyone who takes his free stuff, agrees to not sell it to other persons, but to only give it for free, too. Anyone who takes his free stuff must sign that contract first.

Does existence of this contract make others unfree? Or forces them to do something ? In exactly the same sense in which you were using the word “force” above?

And still, we are only scratching the surface of the issue, since the GPL is not at all about the rights of software authors - it is a contract which uses these rights - but actually it is about the rights of the software users.