Posts by Mozzie

Re: No mention of pip and venv?

Have an upvote.... in fact the only upvote for some reason.

I'm with you on this. Nothing wrong with a requirements.txt, a supporting .md and a small directory with your systemd service files and startup scripts in.

That said, Armin is a huge source of talent and Rye has just gone into my priority learning list. I'm still waiting for him to convince me asyncio is better than Gevent though.... or anybody for that matter.

Re: Interesting and exciting times

"RaspberryPi Foundation who, to date, haven't shown any interest at all in RISC-V"

I would guess their relationship with Broadcom could become fragile if they showed any interest.

Re: VSCode?

I use it because I haven't had time to port a decent theme to another editor and judging by the fact that the themes extensions websites are the most popular results when looking for extensions I'd hazard a guess that this is the reason for popularity.

In use I've had no end of problems with syntax highlighting getting stuck, spent hours switching off Intellisense junk and auto-completes and dealing with numerous updates that often seem to reset most of my custom configuration. The settings in VSCode are a joke, completely illogical naming schemes, equally bad descriptions, weird side effects and most get lost in the ocean of extensions available.

The best thing I've used on Linux for development is Geany, Kate, Micro and whichever appropriate command line tools. When I've got time I'll customise a color theme for Geany, but so far VSCode is the only editor with ready to go themes that my eyes agree with.

If you're going paid JetBrains is very nice on Linux.

The Japanese are shifting very rapidly to lignite brewed blue hydrogen. Nuclear is very much out of favour at the moment.

Re: It’s actually all fine

You say 'ALL optional' like systemd can be swapped out at a click by the average user. It takes a lot of (hundreds/thousands of) hours by the MX and Devuan crew to eliminate the dependencies on systemd within their respective distros. That is not ALL optional by any distros standards.

Or do you mean optional as in you can pick a completely different non-mainstream distro to avoid systemd?

On the basis of your ALL optional theory I'd like an up to date edition of Ubuntu running on OpenRC where everything in the repos and PPA's will run without issue.

Re: Fraudulent too...

It was a different era, and at least Sir Clive delivered.

This was an era where you made the promise and did everything you could to deliver on it because you believed yourself it was possible. These days taking pre-orders is about building up some capital that you can fall back and you still get paid even if you get caught out on the bullshit you're spinning. You don't even have to provide a finished product.

For me is was the ZX 48K. It got upgraded with a Saga 1, had an astonishing Saisho cassette player that never to failed to load anything except LoTR. Chuckie Egg, Dizzy, Wriggler, Harrier Attack, Target Renegade and even HiSoft Pascal.... thanks Clive for giving me the means to feed my family the last 16 years.

If the last 12 months had left cash in my wallet...

I'd be buying one of these workstations, especially for the dedicated serial ports.

I often have a number of VM's running in a test lab setup and I'd say 40% of what I interface too is RS232 based. Very reliable and no issues when hooking up to dev boards where I've built stuff myself. I get a fair chunk of relatively modern equipment to work on that just works straight off when connected RS232 whereas with USB there's almost always some kind of driver issue, proprietary lockout or OS incompatibility.

USB-to-serial dongles in my affordability range are also flakier than a box of Kelloggs and the last professional one I bought costing a few hundred quid lost driver support 14 months after I bought it.

"Did Bill ever do any actual coding?"

He did, and he did it well in the early days.

No matter my personal opinion of Microsoft, their business tactics, their senior employees from chairman to 'Chair'man, their modern coding practices (since 1986).... Gates and Allen were pretty talented and worked hard early on.

In my head IBM were to blame for the focus to shift from technology to business, and shareholders in hand with Ballmer were to blame for taking technology around the back of the shed for a quick bang. Take that how you will.

As a mainly python oriented developer I feel a little concern at the future with Guido suddenly chipping in again from Microsoft's turf, especially after their 'assistance' with javascript and anybody thinking asyncio is an attractive implementation.

Re: Young people these days...

"No real laptop I remember had less than 2M RAM"

Zenith ZL-1,Toshiba T1200 or Amstrad PPC?

Re: "Court digitisation has gone poorly in the UK"

"Could someone please point me to a Government IT project that has not gone poorly in the UK ?"

Bletchley Park?

That's my one, don't ask for another.

Re: CEO Dr Janko Mrsic-Flogel

Please don't equal his business or ethical powers, one lot of RCL is enough in the retro/reboot industry.

Re: Plusnet Party

Hmmm, I've got IPv6 with Plusnet (via John Lewis Superfast Fibre). The Zyxel router actually wouldn't let me disable it either which turned into a lot of messing around last year with pre-configured VPN apps to try and stop them leaking. Fortunately the apps have improved greatly since then.

Plusnet have failed to provide me with just about everything it should have in the way of service, not even half of the advertised speed which is an ongoing issue, but I definitely have IPv6.

Re: One day, not to far in the future,

"the biggest problem with anti-virus is not CPU or memory utilisation"

It's certainly CPU utilisation on my Windows machines. If I turn anti-virus off I get roughly 7% CPU back. Add to this the consistent fan operation under Windows on both of the laptops I run it on, idling at between 4% and 18% (Mint 0.5-1%) with no desktop applications running and occasionally even mouse jitters with background processes on a desktop i3-8100.

The audio bandwidth might not free up much but what about a much reduced SNR margin due to the audio no longer being a consideration?

Re: Are you watching this RCL?

They're probably watching closer than you think. Janko is quite involved with the Vega+ (CTO of RCL).

A friend has a Gemini and retreated back to his very well maintained Series 3mx for writing on. He describes his Gemini as 'like a cheap Chinese smartphone hinged on to a not so bad keyboard' (none of the usual issues). Again the disappointment is being on Android. Also mentioned the buzzing audio issue and gone back to using his Nokia Xpress Music on the train.

Re: and i doubt anyone on the El reg Forums does either

Your doubt is incorrect.

I'm pretty sure most of us have a similar opinion as to how this reverse migration has come about but unfortunately there were quite a few genuine issues that may have given the recent decision the back up and support of a number of users. I'll just add I've been primarily a Linux user for almost 20 years so no bias or trolling intended:

Firstly, the Limux desktop environment feels dated and depressing. Many of the comments here have emphasized Linux' problem of software availability, some about quality, but look and feel plays a big part in a users 'usability'. Dated interface, dated applications, dated functionality. Many users of Limux have got Linux distros installed at home, but all up-to-date, modern desktop interfaces and applications. People have a whole list of complaints about Windows 7/10 but one thing I hear fairly often is that the desktop still provides a 'professional warmth' that just feels right.

Another issue is functionality. Limux has not just been installed on council desktops but attempted on laptops too. Munich civil servants occasionally have to make presentations or show training videos for example, or demonstrate something over the internet. Simple things like switching to an external monitor, data projector, dual monitors really did just work on Windows but turns into a huge headache on some Linux machines. USB data transfers suddenly crawling down to 970Kb/s are a pain when you need to get away from your desk quickly.

Then there is software availability and quality. Little things like poor font quality on PDF's, logistics client software that won't run, quality issues with video playback, lack of decent presentation software (with smooth animations/video), no reliable fully integrating email client, outdated office software, convenience utilities (right-click USB format)......

Otherwise, Calculate Linux has shown that Linux can integrate seamlessly with Windows networks and servers whilst easily maintained. Combine that with a stable desktop distro like Mint Mate and it really wouldn't be much effort to migrate again from what they have now to a much more modern Linux ecosystem, and keep their Windows pool flowing.

Re: TT's TV Adverts

"They also have sales reps in most supermarkets and shopping centres, they really are trying to mob customers left right and centre"

FTFY.

My mother in her 70's now travels 2 miles on the tram to get to Tescos than walk the 120 metres to Morrisons to avoid what is, borderline, a mugging by these clowns. I've been over to visit her recently and they completely ignored the reply that they would need a 6500 mile fibre cable to reach MY home and the rep just kept putting his hand out to shake mine and asking what my name was.

Because the distros that the major distros are built on adopted it.... mainly.

Debian switched to systemd which in turn pushed distros like Ubuntu on to systemd, which then resulted in Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) shifted on to it as well. Red Hat (and thus CentoOS and Fedora) are responsible for systemd in the first place, with Lennart Poettering, Kay Seivers and Harald Hoyer all being Red Hat engineers and the authors of systemd.

Have a quick check on Distrowatch to see how many of the top 20 distributions are based on these two base distros, it pretty much covers the large majority of installs out in the World.

There is also the issue of desktop environment dependencies. As the article mentioned Gnome, KDE and Cinnamon somewhere along the line depend on a library that is systemd dependent, with Gnome going full steam ahead with systemd reliance.

Arch Linux is systemd based but also offers a way to remove it and is also available systemd-free via Manjaro-OpenRC, otherwise I personally am just ever hopeful a number of traditionally Debian-based distros will move over to Devuan.