Posts by AJ MacLeod

Re: fine, change it

Maybe not the best example - sure, they replaced IE with Edge, which they then replaced with... Edge. But not Edge Edge, Chrome Edge.

Re: You did look at Liberty Linux, for those systems that need patches/support/to be compliant?

Interesting, thanks. I actually didn't realise anyone was still offering updates for CentOS 6 too... Generally I use Debian or Alpine for servers but have two still on CentOS 7 which there's no other pressing reason to "upgrade" so it might well be worth a fiver a month for basic security updates for them.

Re: cool beans!

Power off _used_ to do a nice clean up, unfortunately MS have managed to screw up even since Win 8! (You'd have to disable fast boot/startup to get proper shutdown and not glorified hibernation.)

Re: Oops, we stole it

Actually there is data on the effectiveness of face masks and the answer is yes, it was pointless; any benefits are indistinguishable from noise. More than that, face masks are not free from side effects either so quite probably caused more harm than good (including to the emotional development of millions of children worldwide.) Personally I'm fine with you wearing a face nappy if it makes you feel good about yourself; I might quietly judge you to be a bit of an idiot but wouldn't say anything. On the other hand, I massively resent being ordered to do something which I am convinced is at best pointless just to make you feel good about yourself.

PS - re: the vaccines you're fortunate; both my in-laws were not and both are now on long term treatment for vaccine-induced heart issues.

PPS - you almost certainly have had covid. For many people it was barely noticeable or virtually symptomless, just as for some it was fatal... your genes and other health factors are far more likely to have helped you than the vaccines. Again... if vaccines made you feel good about yourself, I'm quite happy with that - I object however to people losing their jobs, being turned into social outcasts etc for not wanting them.

Re: There may be alternatives available

Superb - strangely I had just come up against this in the past day, upgrading a elderly Win 7 laptop for an even more elderly lady who doesn't expect to last very much longer. I had totally forgotten that MS had closed the 7-10 upgrade route until the activation failed... Your post may or may not have resolved this issue, thank you! Not sure how I hadn't come across that before, but this is why I still waste time reading The Register - there's something to be learned in the comments most days.

(In this case having she had a plain black desktop anyway so I'm sure she could have lived quite happily with a watermark warning her to activate, but it was annoying to me nonetheless.)

Re: Improvement?

The brand new socket LGA1700 MSI motherboard I built into a PC earlier had a header for a parallel port... (Can't say whether it would work or not mind you as thankfully I don't deal with parallel devices very often any more)

Re: How to compile from source

Not saying I don't recognise that, but one of the beauties of Gentoo is that pretty much all the drudgery is handled automatically and failed builds are very rare indeed (particularly if you stick reasonably closely to the "stable" branch.)

The biggest benefit for me is that my system is always up to date and only contains those packages and services I actually want; the biggest optimisation is not necessarily in terms of CPU flags but rather in cutting out large swathes of stuff I just don't want. Binary distros have to cater to as many as possible so tend to build in the kitchen sink too just in case.

Personally I already use (through Gentoo) binaries for one or two things that are really tedious to compile, such as web browsers; everything else just gets compiled in the background and if it wasn't for the fact I'd started the process I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even notice it was happening...

Re: chromebooks suck

Rather a sweeping generalisation, no? You bought one and it was a lemon therefore all Chromebooks suck? FWIW if you're interested in parts availability and repairability you should probably not buy from ASUS (laptops in general are poor but they are particularly bad for this.)

Re: Enlightenment

In one of my few brief experimental deviations from WindowMaker I switched back to Enlightenment for a little while (post E16). It was as glitzy and swish as ever but I quickly got sick of the binary configuration format which I wouldn't have cared so much about had it not the maddening habit of obliterating my settings every time I upgraded to a new version; also stability wasn't quite good enough for my tastes. On my main desktop I think staid and boring is a good thing...

Re: Chromebook Your-Personal-Lifetime Software Updates for Free

On this lovely Dell Chromebook 13 (which has run Void Linux since Google dropped support) I have delete mapped to altgr-backspace which works fine for me. I also have the power button remapped so that I don't switch off the laptop every time I aim for backspace!

I must say I wish I'd switched it to Void years before; "Crouton" etc were useful but nowhere near as good as a proper minimalist but fully functioning Linux install. Battery life and performance are really impressive considering how old and low spec this thing is - I haven't used any laptop since that I'd like to replace it with. (Oh - and the sound is far better than any other laptop I've ever used, which is a very large number!)

Five or ten years ago maybe I would have assumed that but not now that the Reg has been so thoroughly Americanised.

Re: functionality

Remember when Windows 8 came out and once you'd made the mistake of opening a program you suddenly found there was no obvious way out and no obvious way to shut down the PC without pressing the physical power button? What about the Mac method of ejecting floppies back in the old days... drag them to the bin. As for Android... how do I get to the full list of installed apps on most launchers; somehow I should just intuitively know to swipe up from beyond the bottom edge of the screen?

I've yet to see a computer desktop interface that is actually intuitive - some are less logical than others (and Windows is high up that list - which of the many control panels do I need to go into to do X?) but none of them is intuitive.

That said, this particular user has found Linux to be invaluable for the past quarter of a century...

Re: Killer app

Well my mileage varies - I ditched tabbed terminals / tiled terminals years ago for multiplexers and have never looked back. One big reason is that I can trivially access exactly the same sessions on my main desktop PC from anywhere using virtually any device; my laptop, other people's Windows PCs I am working on, my phone - so long as I have at least a basic Internet connection and ssh client I'm sorted.

My desktop is for managing the GUI based programs I rely on; one virtual desktop for my web browser, another desktop for my accounts software (GNUCash) and another desktop for graphical remote desktop software or GUI access to VMs as occasionally required. The bulk of my work happens within that tmux session though...

The article says they were using a massive one Volt...

Re: Thanks for the memories

That was the first distro I installed too, never looked back. I'd been driven to desperation by the awful lack of stability of Windows 95 and considering what to replace it with; plain old DOS was actually a serious contender, as was OS/2 but I'd been reading up on Linux for a few months and that cover CD was the impetus I needed.

I probably did the install about ten times before I finally got a working X config (not having a clue about Linux I didn't know any other way of getting back to the configuration menu!) What a world of possibilities opened up once it was up and running though, and I actually ended up with both a prize at university and shortly afterwards a job there largely thanks to being able to transfer my new-found knowledge straight to the SUN systems used for CFD.

I suppose is "thanks" is in order!

(Personally I've never liked the Slackware experience and these days use Gentoo / Alpine / Void / CentOS (Rocky) / Debian depending on circumstances, but happy to see it still alive and kicking as a choice for others.)

Re: Street signs

I wouldn't upgrade a RHEL/CentOS server either, my point was that you don't have to as each version is supported for a decent amount of time. Debian's support cycles are far too short in comparison.

Re: I don’t think I really get it

I couldn't really care less about what you use, but surely you're not really so ignorant as to think that Linux boot messages aren't available afterwards?

Also, computers require precise commands which are entirely correct in order to produce the correct output. This is not exactly ground-breaking revelation, it's a fundamental of computing. Come to think of it, it's a fundamental of the universe. Sure, my shell can offer corrections to things it thinks I may have typed incorrectly but most of the time it's wrong - I'll stick with the error messages thanks.

Re: DELL wins this one

The keyboards are dire; I've seen them properly faulty right out of the box, keys with no spring at all. Latitudes are definitely not business grade any more.

Re: Reporting just as bad as ever in El' Reg...

"Unfortunately for you, energy costs were skyrocketing before Russia goose stepped into Ukraine. "

No they weren't... they skyrocketed after the global covid fiasco, but were coming back down again until Putin started his little excursion. Also, your point about "most EU countries" having gas reserves and the UK having shut down its storage has nothing whatsoever to do with the EU or membership thereof; you are lumping together everything that could be perceived as negative and attributing it directly to Brexit. None of this would have been any different for the UK had we still been a "member" of the EU.

Re: awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

Funnily enough, it did "progress", some years ago - it basically became a different WM, E17 (now E25.) They should get some credit though for maintaining the previous version which many people preferred, and E16 is still supported software with its own page on their website.

I have used Enlightenment on and off over many years but I'm afraid the current implementation uses a binary configuration format which I don't like. I also found that the new version more than once screwed up my config when updating, making me recreate it from scratch which pushed me back to my main desktop for most of the past quarter century - WindowMaker. Now THAT is a good example of a UI which doesn't need to change!

The workstation may not move through the air but air moves through the workstation which is the same thing as far as the fluid is concerned - it's just a question of your frame of reference.

Re: Optional

I have a desktop on order from Lenovo at the moment - I forget exactly how much I saved by ticking the "no OS" option but I'm sure it was over £100. (Ubuntu was also an option, but not free and not the distro I'll be using anyway.)

Dell, on the other hand, wouldn't let me buy their equivalent machine without Windows.

It certainly doesn't seem to do what I want although I perhaps didn't explain it very well. What I occasionally want is to be able to install TB not to send email, but just to be able to read historical emails imported from (say) PST / maildir / mbox. As far as I can see TB forces you to have an IMAP or POP account set up before you can import any messages (in particular using the importExportTools NG add-on)?

Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

Agreed on Alpine, I use it on every server I can. You say barebones, but I say "clean". It's just Linux as it was meant to be, before the billions of layers of byzantine bloat that seem to exist primarily to save the user having to experience the horror of editing a configuration file, or automate things that didn't really need automation. On Alpine, editing config files is generally painless because they are clean and not full of cruft to enable the aforementioned bloat to work.

I switched (from Linux) to FreeBSD for about six months or so back around 2001. For me, the main selling point was that it was a fairly coherent and well documented OS, not just a heap of vaguely related software; it was also quicker on my ancient hardware. As soon as I upgraded the hardware I found it wasn't great in terms of driver availability, and the packaging system was confusing for me (mixing packages and ports.) I then migrated to Gentoo and have stuck with it ever since for my main desktop. I get all the packages I want, built with all the features I want and none of the "features" I don't. There's a management system for handling config file changes and the files are relatively clean.

I wouldn't go back to FreeBSD on a desktop; I just don't see any advantage. Very happy for others to use it if they prefer though - I think the diversity is healthy and there are more than a few people involved in OSS these days that could do with a reminder that their software should be more OS agnostic rather than relying on neo-Linuxisms ( systemd especially.)

Re: Downtime?

What a stupid comparison... why would an organisation require the IT capabilities of Google to run a couple of Email servers?

Re: Just Today I Bought A "Refurbished" Workstation With Windows 10.......

You probably made the mistake of admitting to having a network connection while setting it up. If you really did need Windows for some reason, just leave the network cable out (or refuse to give WiFi details) until the OOBE stage is complete. Doesn't work on Windows 11 unfortunately...

Re: Whatabout massacres

Indeed, we've sunk to the level of people being arrested and charged for simply thinking politically unfashionable thoughts, silently, in the "wrong place" (on public streets in the UK.)

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

It irritated me so much that I stopped reading right there and came to the comments to complain about it. Sadly there's comparatively little worth reading on The Register these days as it is and the Yank slant on everything is just off-putting. I find myself checking here less and less frequently... anyone got any suggestions for better alternatives?

You're still missing the point... perhaps one of the older videos or blog posts describing Arcan would explain how it's not just X11 reincarnated. I've played with it a bit (though not in the past year or more) and I like the thinking that's gone into it. The tech demos are probably not doing it any favours sadly, he really has thought things through in a way that the Wayland project definitely has not.