Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[snotang]

And let’s be real, tech people are too chicken shit and clout chasey to use anything that could cause “reputational damage”. Even if Reiser came out and made a new FS, no one’s gonna use it because the furries and the weirdo gooner high sock wearing code babies won’t touch it because it’s “TOO PROBLEMATIC!!”

Well, there is the one demographic...

It's time for Hans Reiser to step up and fulfill his destiny: serving as a mentor to codetrannies who idolize murderers. He can show those considering shooting up a church that there is a more elegant, refined, high-society way: wife murder. Since there is no risk of codetrannies having wives to murder, this will effectively increase public safety.

Worst-case scenario we get murdered codetrannies or raped murderers. Best-case scenario the quality of code the codetrannies write might marginally improve.

I consider these terms to be favorable overall.

 

[daffodils]

Even if Reiser came out and made a new FS, no one’s gonna use it because the furries and the weirdo gooner high sock wearing code babies won’t touch it because it’s “TOO PROBLEMATIC!!”

Come on, it's not as if he misgendered anyone.

 

[Mikoyan]

Come on, it's not as if he misgendered anyone.

The AGPs would likely even get off on him brutally murdering a natal woman.

 

[Betonhaus]

Looks like for the past six months all of the activity on the Freedesktop Xorg repository has just been reverts. When I saw activity I assumed they were still doing bugfixes and such but no seems they still have their panties in a twist over Xlibre. If they undo enough that Xorg becomes unstable downstream then other distros may be forced into accepting Wayland or Xlibre.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

Looks like for the past six months all of the activity on the Freedesktop Xorg repository has just been reverts. When I saw activity I assumed they were still doing bugfixes and such but no seems they still have their panties in a twist over Xlibre. If they undo enough that Xorg becomes unstable downstream then other distros may be forced into accepting Wayland or Xlibre.

Honestly that sounds solid with either Wayland or Xlibre.

 

[mr_negativity]

Looks like for the past six months all of the activity on the Freedesktop Xorg repository has just been reverts. When I saw activity I assumed they were still doing bugfixes and such but no seems they still have their panties in a twist over Xlibre. If they undo enough that Xorg becomes unstable downstream then other distros may be forced into accepting Wayland or Xlibre.

Wayland is a fucking abomination. Instead of having a single well maintained Wayland server each desktop environment must implement Wayland on its own. Now that X is associated with wrongthink, its going to completely dropped from most distros in the next 2 - 4 years because X users are transphobes. Binutils will have be replaced with a single monolithic statically linked binary written in rust with each command symlinked to it because programs written in C and dynamically linked libraries are favored by transphobes as well.

Want to run XFCE on a headless remote box for applications that require it? XRDP is the only way I know. KRDP, the KDE desktop only RDP server compatible ships in Debian and other distros completely broken and neither KDE nor Debian knows or cares enough to fix it as its a niche application. There's a GNOME version, but then you can only run the GNOME desktop and who the fuck wants to run a GNOME deskop?

As Wayland is a zero trust server model programs that create synthetic keyboard/mouse events such as xdotool will remain broken never able to be fully reimplemented. For some inexplicable reason, apps can't easily pass the bitmap of their icons to the window manager, so about 1/4 of apps in wayland have the generic sloppy looking "W" generic wayland logo in the taskbar.

There are corner case use scenarios of missing features will never be fixed or implemented as there are a least 3 different implementations of wayland, and as long the desktop will run a browser Wayland is running good enough and feature complete as far as the devs are concerned and any bug reports will all be tagged "WONTFIX".

 

[Lard Shart]

The Wayland project perfectly shows us how not to manage an open source project.

Their style of open source development is comparable to lazy communism (they will call it democratic): they made an open source project, knowing it was incomplete crap and believing that with time and free (communist) labor it will converge to good software.

There are two problems:
1. When you publish novel software that is even in one tiny aspect better than the predecessor (not hard with X11), people will use it and it will for always be associated with the flaws it had at the time. Now that you have users in the very early stage, you can't just deprecate something. You sometimes can't even fix bugs as it will cause problems for other users.
2. Communism doesn't work. Most great software is made by an individual, small group or directed by an opinionated BDFL.

Never ever publish an open source project until it's finished or at the very least stable.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I play around a lot with "historical" computers and software and am currently in another marathon looking at and revisiting a ton of old crap and the one thing that holds in general is how UIs are overall going backwards the more time passes.

I'm comparing to some 80s GUIs and even though some of them only have a usable maximum of 4 differing colors, it's still really refreshing how clean they are and how nicely all comes together - and If you want to dramatically change the overall style and tone, just change two of the colors. Since colors are indexed, this also changes all applications, icons etc.. so you remain consistent. Want to have a new mouse cursor or a new (bitmapped) font? Just draw them with OS onboard tools. These were all responses to technical limitations but something is seriously wrong if these GUIs feel more comfortable to use than using a browser on my modern PC. That's the big thing with the modern GUI: Nothing is consistent. Every Application, webpage etc. does whatever it wants from keyboard shortcuts to appearance. Compared to some of these old OSes and their GUIs, it looks and feels like crap.

Everything Linux GUI is a complete mess. I haven't used windows seriously in about over 20 years now but I doubt it's any better there. To be fair though, graphical user interfaces on everything *nix were never really all that good to begin with. Even as a terminal hobo I'll be the first person to tell you that there's nothing wrong with mice, GUIs or even the desktop metaphor, it just sucks how incoherent it all is now. I blame the internet and the browser-as-OS paradigm, a paradigm that is also inherently user hostile.

I think the religious adherence to TUIs by some you can observe in the Linux space is not really a stylistic decision by people who adhere to it or one of conviction, but more the desperate wish to interact with a computer with a consistent-looking and feeling interface. I count myself in there too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, as much as I disagree with Wayland, that whole X vs. Wayland debacle is honestly really the smallest of all problems. It somehow should not be that I could imagine foregoing both and completely living in the Linux terminal, if I wouldn't want to browse the web (which honestly also gets less and less attractive as time moves on). What gives? What's going on with computers?

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Everything Linux GUI is a complete mess.

Interestingly, or at least anecdotically, the Linux GUI misery is coming over to Windows through OSS. Recently I've installed some Linux-first OSS on Windows in an attempt to have a solution to a problem, and the GUI was complete asscancer for my standards. Like, it disgusted me, I uninstalled that shit right then and there.

 

[Zeftax]

I wonder if someone (successfully) implemented a xanadu-inspired desktop (or if someone ever will, really). Ted's attempts were all failures as far as I recall. I've thought about what would be needed to take the idea to its logical completion a few times but I think you would need to create almost all of the software from scratch, including the filesystem and such. Also the best usecase for it would imo be a touch screen wall screen, try to convince someone to get that, hah!
But if someone did it in an intuitive way, I think it would legitimately be the best OS around (for "user" workflows).

You can't combine GUI applications effectively. Command-line tools, you can just pipe from one to the next.

IMO, this is one of the things that would work really well in that hypothetical OS btw.

 

[analrapist]

I think the religious adherence to TUIs by some you can observe in the Linux space is not really a stylistic decision by people who adhere to it or one of conviction, but more the desperate wish to interact with a computer with a consistent-looking and feeling interface. I count myself in there too.

As a reasonably-newly-minted (2014-era) TUI zealot, the value isn't just the consistency, but the composability. You can't combine GUI applications effectively. Command-line tools, you can just pipe from one to the next. GUIs represent a step backwards, niggerlicious design versus divine intellect design. GUIs are designed for Karen from Accounting and Jacquarius the felon.

 

[AmpleApricots]

You can't combine GUI applications effectively

The Amiga did it with AREXX (an old scripting language). Basically every application had "ports" (you youngsters would call it an API) and programs could communicate with each other or receive commands via that, for example you could write a script that'd take data from your FinalCalc (excel like program) and draw you a graph in DPaint. Or take data that's incoming from a sensor on your parallel port and write the values automagically into the cells of your excel table and make an outgoing modem call via modem on serial port (with the phone number found in another opened "excel" file) if the sum of all cells exceeded a certain threshold. Or call in the latest news text from home via modem, have the Amiga standing in the TV station pick up with it's modem and generate a video overlay in the current broadcast the Amiga is tapped into with it's video toaster or similar with whatever message you called in. It's kinda like pipes just nicer. These are all things that already worked on that 80s system. Every application worth it's salt had comprehensive arexx port support.

dbus was supposed to be kinda like that but like with so many things in this sphere, it is over-engineered, complicated to use and kinda went nowhere for most people. (even though dbus is actively used)

 

[Creative Username]

Wayland is a fucking abomination. Instead of having a single well maintained Wayland server each desktop environment must implement Wayland on its own.

somebody hasn't heard of the horrible x11 abominations like icccm that you have to implement where the slightest fuckup will make copying and pasting and drag-and-drop break in violent and mysterious ways
anyway on x11 everybody just uses qt or something which just renders everything to a buffer and passes that to x11

also wayland compositors aren't required to implement the entirety of wayland completely by themselves, as evidenced by the dozens of shit-tier compositors on my system that depend on wlroots
the only reason why we haven't had alternative x11 servers is that x11 is pretty fucking hard to implement and the original implementation sort of just works so people don't touch it

As Wayland is a zero trust server model programs that create synthetic keyboard/mouse events such as xdotool will remain broken never able to be fully reimplemented.

there is some shit in my package repository called ydotool, you are saying it's not actually real?

Even as a terminal hobo I'll be the first person to tell you that there's nothing wrong with mice, GUIs or even the desktop metaphor, it just sucks how incoherent it all is now. I blame the internet and the browser-as-OS paradigm, a paradigm that is also inherently user hostile.

no we all know that the real problem is the classic xkcd 927:

As a reasonably-newly-minted (2014-era) TUI zealot, the value isn't just the consistency, but the composability. You can't combine GUI applications effectively. Command-line tools, you can just pipe from one to the next. GUIs represent a step backwards, niggerlicious design versus divine intellect design. GUIs are designed for Karen from Accounting and Jacquarius the felon.

i honestly don't give a fuck what the buttons look like or how subtly different scrolling is or what color the icons are, i just like my programs to work properly

it is over-engineered, complicated to use and kinda went nowhere for most people.

i've seen the spec it's not actually that complicated
the real problem is that application developers are too lazy to use it and want their application to fully work on windows which is why nobody is working on the ultimate dbus interconnected application sharing protocol

 

[analrapist]

Basically every application had "ports"

The Windows end of this had Dynamic Data Exchange, which was minted in '85, predating AREXX by a couple years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange The problem is that the specificity of the definition is antithetical to composition: you must use or mangle the application's native data format, whereas pipes just assume everything is a sequence of bytes. These notions are absolutely not composable in the same way pipes are, though this is still motion towards it and away from today's walled gardens.

 

[AnOminous]

Even if Reiser came out and made a new FS, no one’s gonna use it because the furries and the weirdo gooner high sock wearing code babies won’t touch it because it’s “TOO PROBLEMATIC!!”

They would if he trooned out and claimed he murdered his wife because transphobia.

The Amiga did it with AREXX (an old scripting language). Basically every application had "ports" (you youngsters would call it an API) and programs could communicate with each other or receive commands via that, for example you could write a script that'd take data from your FinalCalc (excel like program) and draw you a graph in DPaint.

That sounds neat. It's a Rexx interpreter. That's one of the few scripting languages I ever actually got good at. It was big on IBM mainframes. I didn't know it was on Amiga, too, although apparently the "ports" part was unique to Amiga.

 

[Coolio55]

I'm not a retro Apple autist but didn't Apple basically rip off the AREXX system with AppleScript?
I wonder if programs can even expose bindings anymore. I know that AppleScript was still available in Mountain Lion.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I didn't know it was on Amiga, too, although apparently the "ports" part was unique to Amiga.

Yes. I think it was less known because true to 80s homecomputer form, early versions of AmigaOS shipped with a BASIC dialect which sucked. Later OS versions got rid of it in favor of ARexx which sucked a lot less but unusual for the kinds of languages these early computers came with, had no multimedia components. The ports killer feature was successful because it established itself as feature applications needed to have to be taken seriously and so everything had some degree of integration. For me ARexx with Ports was my first "aha" moment in that computers could be used to automate tedious things and seeing software as a collection of tools rather than monolithic entities. It's a big pity that many people only know the Amiga as gaming machine, as it was much more than that. It's a very tight, graphical (neither OS nor hardware, has something like "text mode" conceptually) unix-y (in some ways) posix-compatible machine with all kinds of wild concepts like hypertext help files, datatypes (programs didn't inheriently "know" file formats, instead you'd e.g. add a PNG library centrally to the OS and now all your graphical programs can open them) etc.. Lots of Amigas ended up in high-level automation roles around here and served there way into next century. Even if one isn't interested in retro computing, a look at the Amiga and it's OS is definitively interesting as there's nothing else quite like it.

Going from that to a single-minded, single-tasked DOS machine was a culture shock. But that's where the performance was. Linux was better but that kind of tight and smooth operation and integration with all graphical bells and whistles I've never seen again.

 

[Creative Username]

datatypes (programs didn't inheriently "know" file formats, instead you'd e.g. add a PNG library centrally to the OS and now all your graphical programs can open them)

very epic although a hurdnigger once told me that translators could do this kind of thing

Linux was better but that kind of tight and smooth operation and integration with all graphical bells and whistles I've never seen again.

of course to get that you have to rewrite everything to talk to each other nicely, which involves rewriting all the software you typically use (not very easy unless you're at least as powerful as rms)

 

[JustSomeDong]

God, you fuckers are gettin me all misty eyed for my old Amiga...

 

[AnOminous]

It's a big pity that many people only know the Amiga as gaming machine, as it was much more than that.

It was very popular with design people, video and otherwise, and had an autistically loyal fanbase that kept using it years after it was discontinued. It still has a small but fanatical retro community. I know TV stations used it, as I've seen a "Guru Meditation Error" on some small local TV station a dozen times.