Some people see “free stuff”, and assume that it’s now open season on wasting OP’s time.

It’s a good way to kill any enthusiasm. Imagine your kid made a spaghetti portrait as a gift for you and instead of just accepting it you asked, “but what exactly did you do differently from all kids on the block?”

Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.

my go_to NamingCovention: ANYTHING but camel-case 🤮

Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it’s not in the video you linked).

I had such a trouble finding it that I’m starting to feel like it might be one of those “quotes” where the credited author never really said that, but I haven’t completely given up :D

Here’s one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)–quoting an article from cio.com

While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”

First of all. This is not another “how do I exit vim?” shitpost.

Oh, I see, so just a clickbait! 👎

Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.

33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.

(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)

(Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I “hallucinated” the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else’s comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )

Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it’s been already well recognized by then.

If I recall correctly from some RMS’ talks I’ve seen many years ago, they’ve been working on it for years before, it’s just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there’s GNU Hurd, but I’m not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)

Fun fact: With those 4 games it looks like a tie, but weighed by Steam scores, Linux wins. (Warhammer has like 3/5).

(Disclaimer: I have never played any of those 4 games and don’t plan to in a forseeable future. I also realize full well how ridiculously insignificant a sample of 4 is.)

I can’t verify it now or any time soon, but you might be right.

Thanks for the pointer!

you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist

On the site I see like, one stock footage of a plant, one of a ladybird and some rando abstract graphics. What are you guys talking about here? Am I out of date? Should I ask for raise? (I’m not an artist but SW engineer, so probably not.)

Cool. But some other people have morals

Come on, that’s a far stretch. What the person said does not imply that they don’t have morals.

don’t be surprised when people think you’re a cunt because of it.

Maybe no one should be, especially on the internet ;-)

I’m a debian-er at heart, as much as I’d praise it (and have, in other thread in this post), there’s one issue that might be relevant. Almost all of this has been with Debian 10 and 11, I think it’s been improved in 12, though, but I’m not sure.

See, I have sister to whom I gave laptop with Debian & Xfce. And created normal (non-admin, non-sudo) users for her as well as both of her kids. Now when they login, NetworkManager will refuse to let them use Wi-fi connection, and require them to choose a different (admin) account and type its password.

Unfortunately although I’ve been seeing this issue for years now, I never had an opportunity to test it properly, since it always seems to happen to non-admin users only. Also I’m not sure if NM can properly manage connections if a non-admin user creates it – will it let other non-admin define the same connection? And I spend 99% time on a desktop (mini-pc) with ETH connection, being sudoer, and no Xfce, so I never get to “enjoy” any of these.

(This is also particularly ironic because I always set up wireguard and tell them “if you have any problem, just call me, I can fix it remotely” – and then literally the only problem they ever have is the one I can NOT fix remotely. 😆 )

Also sometimes after login the system will bug them with “unlocking keychain” dialog which can’t be closed, but that could be just side effect of the NM issue and/or just Xfce thing.

I’ve been using almost exclusively Debian for over 15 years now, and experimenting with it (not stable) couple years longer. Last time I had issues booting or upgrading was loooong time ago, but I think I was using sid back then. (Yeah, I was young & restless back then! 🧓 🙃 )

Traditionally, the flipside of this was that the packages were sometimes old. Maybe 10 years ago I would still have reasons to complain about some parts being too old but nowadays I have basically no issues. Especially since most such gaps can be filled with flatpak or AppImage. (I rely on flatpak for Signal, Telegram, Minecraft, and AppImage for NeoVim and several other things.)

(My usage is development under i3+alacritty+nvim, browsing using qutebrowser (running directly from git repo), Firefox and Chromium, sometimes gaming, mostly steam or gog.)

One point, though, In my experience Firefox is updating much more often than “once a year”, which is annoying because it basically goes on a strike every time.

We can all get smart and snarky about “average persons” but then again, who says the OP was for average person.

Your “average” person is not even on Reddit, let alone Lemmy, and if by chance they stumble along they are probably not clicking posts like this.

So when you stop laughing from “hilarious disconnected Linux folks”, maybe sleep on it, then try thinking about this.

In context of this community and this thread, no, Linux is not all that horrible compared to Windows.

Then again, it’s not about Linux, it’s just about your-favorite-few-click-program not being available for Linux.

There’s nothing technically preventing Adobe from making Reader & Acrobat for Linux (they actually used to, around 2007 I even worked in a L10N company and we tested it.) It’s just a business decision.

Once you start asking questions of why eg. Photoshop is not on Linux while eg. Firefox, VLC or GIMP are on all platforms, you will learn stuff about the world, which has little to do with Linux per se.

I was unclear: I did not mean to imply that it will work with it.

It’s OT, but I’ll clarify since it might be useful for people who find Bash cryptic.

Thing is, roughly speaking:

• eval will evaluate its first argument as Bash code
• eval "$(any_command really)" will run run any_command really, take its output and then use it as first argument for eval. So the assumption is that any_command really must output a valid Bash code snippet.

So what eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" really means is, "run ssh-agent -s, collect the output and run it right here, where we are calling eval. Compare to ssh-agent -s | bash – this would also run ssh-agent output but it would run it in a new process–a child process of the current process—so the whatever the snippet would be, it would have no way of affecting state of the parent program, which is why it’s safer.

Aside: The reason we need eval in this case is that we actually need to affect state of the program: that’s the whole point. We need to set several environment variables to values that ssh-agent “knows”. Without eval we would have to “ask” ssh-agent separately for each value (I’m assuming it’s not even supported) and then set all these envvars using eg. export keyword. Using eval we let ssh-agent dictate the whole process: which variables are going to be set to what values, with the caveat that if compromised, it could do “evil” stuff like setting PATH to override common commands with compromised code. etc.

So what’s the problem with the quotes? The Shell syntax, foo "$(bar baz)" will make sure that the thing between quotes is

• kept verbatim
• treated as a single argument, even if it contains newlines (with some ugly exceptions to this regarding the final newline)

Now without quotes, Bash (as well as POSIX shell) actually have several things they can do with the output (read man bash for full list, but keep it for a long rainy evening). Some of it involves substituting eg. values like * with matching filenames, some of it may involve actually splitting the output to separate arguments based on spaces or other special characters (which can even be different characters depending on current state, see IFS and the likes).

You can see the difference, if you run eg. printf '[%s]\n' instead of eval. This printf syntax will simply print all of following arguments on a separate line, adding braces before and after. You can compare

printf '|%s|\n' $(ssh-agent -s)      # printf will probably receive multiple extra arguments
printf '|%s|\n' "$(ssh-agent -s)"    # printf will receive just one extra argument (and print it as specified)

(both of these commands should be safe as long as ssh-agent is not compromised and as long I have not made any terrible typo)

please, it’s eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" (quotes!)

Depends on your distribution. I guess most of them use pipewire nowadays, and the bug has not been fixed yet so… if you are using a common GNU/Linux distro, the bug is likely on your system.

Does it affect you, well, from what I understood, as long as your system registers the camera and pipewire is running, your camera is going to waste energy regardless of whether it’s actively streaming video or not.

From what I’ve understood there are several workarounds, each bad but in a different way:

• Disabling pipewire is not a good universal solution since it would effectively disable all audio on your system.
• Disabling the kernel driver for your camera would be a more precise workaround but it’s not simple: apart from knowing how to do – and undo – that, you would need to find out which driver it is, and that depends on your actual hardware. And of course, with the driver disabled you would not be able to use the camera, so depending on your situation this might only be viable if you were willing to go back and disable/enable the driver as you need.
• Physically disconnecting the camera - with desktop computer with the camera connected using a cable; you could just unplug it and plug it back in when you need it. With laptops, this is generally not possible; some laptops do have switches which effectively do the same thing but from technical standpoint that switch is a liability and costs something so most main-stream laptops won’t have it.

In either case, it’s also worth noting that whatever app you are using the camera with is likely to keep a “list of cameras” and some sort of memory of your last selection. In theory, disabling or enabling a camera should work fine, but it’s not uncommon that apps will have bugs when managing the list; for example an app might not “see” the camera being back on, etc. so if you are going to use any of the above you might need to get used to restarting an app from time to time.

Assuming that eventually this bug is going to be fixed, the question of when it will be available for your system, again, depends on the distribution you are using. Many distributions have own public bug trackers so you could try and look it up and watch their ticket (in some cases, some distributions might even have fixes available sooner than the bug is fixed upstream, but I would not count on that), or you can try and talk to the community (look for an IRC/matrix channel, discord server, etc.)

Pipewire is not an app, it’s a system service. It’s not like people are going to say, “i’m gonna install pipewire” and then go install pipewire and also happen to have stats from before and after that installation.

Most people who have pipewire have it either by having it already installed as part of the initial installation or part of some larger update, but in either case, they probably aren’t particularly aware of it, especially as long as things are functional.

To answer the question whether it affects one’s system requires a different strategy than and likely a little bit of research.

makes me think of the good ol’t times when the air was cleaner, roads were safer and our bosses used to pay us in Thinkpads, not this “fiat money” nonsense.