- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
i can tell because there are like 9 of them in the thread right now lmao
Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts
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- Joined
- Apr 11, 2023
The sphere of Amiga influence I'm most familiar with is the sample-based music approach that was copied in the SNES and PSX. Amiga musicians had a huge leg up on these markets. In this sphere alone, Amiga's influence is hard to overstate... and then those devs moved over to DOS.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
Quite, there's one standing next to the screen I type this on, currently running. I like doodling and writing on it but actually want to turn it also into a home assistant of sorts. I made an i2c adapter for the parallel port and I'm writing the software to use it in JForth. The other one I bought in 1987 is on the other desk. That one in it's temporary configuration in the 90s ran a BBS long after the Amiga's high point. It's got a serial card with so many lines that the serial card has it's own 6520. It also has an Opalvision, an MPEG decoder card, and a shamefully expensive accelerator and graphics card. The other, assorted, rubbish (and various other analog video knick-knacks) it had changed over the years and ended up in a box a while ago, anything I've ever known about analog video signal processing is absolutely useless knowledge know. And yes, I also have a Toaster somewhere but I'm in PAL land and it's more of a curiosity. Going after current market value of all parts in- and outside of that machine it's probably the most expensive computer I own which amuses me to no end. I think you never stop liking the Amiga if you used it seriously. You just die someday. It is fundamentally a machine that was designed around analog video. This is true for many home computers but for the Amiga it's like, insanely true. The RGB port has a pin where you can feed an external frequency for the entire system in just to sync it up perfectly with other broadcasting hardware.
But this is the opensource thread and the Amiga was shamefully, shamefully prorprietary. (although it's such a simple and well documented platform that it's more "open source" than the PC I'm typing this on ever will be, Linux nonwithstanding) These were different times, open source as a concept didn't really exist. Even all the C compilers were proprietary. Somehow things still felt a lot more free, because everything was so hackable, both soft- and hardware. When I bought that computer in '87, it came with a manual containing the schematics and several chapters on how to develop hardware for it. Hard to imagine now.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I never personally used an Amiga but I knew lots of people who were fanatical about them (I was a Rexx autist though).
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2018
Some light drama is brewing on the Canonical (Ubuntu) forums!
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2024
Imagine the incompetent technical management of NASA combined invisible and impossible-to-quantify outputs of CIA and that's how I imagine NSA.
My experience in tech is the fancier the keyboard the more opinionated, performative and unproductive the guy.
That quote is everywhere and always out of context. It one single quote that seems custom-made for Redditors and other online types still angry at Dad.
In fairness to Linux every GUI is a mess. Even the vaunted macOS is a hodge-podge of various old and new technologies, apps that don't fit the right design language, and stuff that is ported and barely works. At least with Linux is generally possible to stick to a path, choose GNOME or KDE and get a generally more consistent experience.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
There's so much technical debt in all that stuff everyone gleefully keeps heaping on top on that I can't really see it ever being fixed either. The only way that's ever gonna happen is somehow AI becoming an autistic savant at coding and just bulldozing and magically fixing and equalizing everything. So basically star treks post scarcity space communism, just for GUI toolkits. We're screwed.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
WARNING: this post contains a whole lot of disorganized Deep Thunking® and assorted autistic niggery, do not read if you are allergic to walls of text or off-topic babbling
computers can do fuckton more than they could do back in the 90s, so obviously it's going to be proportionally jankier because the first law of computers is complexity->jank
i can accept a few idiosyncrasies from some nigger deciding to use fltk or something and not porting it to gtk because (a. it works) and (b. nobody cares if the buttons look slightly different, as long as they work properly when you move your pointer over it and click it)
this is a bit more complicated than it needs to be though, but you can still do quite a bit
of course it's best when everybody has already done the work for you, which leads me into the following sperg sesh:
like kde plasma basically does by default
having a decently consistent look and feel is not too hard if you go along with the general zeitgeist that everybody has been designing their shit for
a good thing for somebody to make would be an automated tool that can somehow take 1 theme and convert it to all 27 theming formats for the various toolkits
maybe it already exists, i'm not into ricing my desktop
or just make a fully standard theme format
better standardization for this kind of thing isn't totally impossible, look at how dbus managed to kill kde and gnome's competing implementations of the same thing
the ideal solution is to decouple software from its gui so people can write a new wrapper using <your favorite meme human interface guidelines here> which tends to happen a lot to command line tools because they're so easy to compose
imo the biggest problem with the desktop isn't that it's inconsistent, it's just fundamentally not very well-developed, which you can see from the large multitudes of ways people want to do it
this may change one day as people perform horrible and ugly experiments and slowly sort out things that work (hypertext, blender-style node graph dsls) from things that don't work (extremely skeuomorphic bullshit, whatever the fuck mobile ui is doing) and the platform itself gets more standards as the experience solidifies and everybody gets sick of all the problems (you aren't alone, nobody likes a weird-looking electron app)
eventually we will have to figure out things like "why is this even an application, can't it just be a function?" and "where should we put all the little functions?"
hell every now and then a program becomes a small operating system where all the apps are little functions, but then advancements in computing happen, and it turns out that text is in fact not the only thing that a computer can edit. the biggest and hardest question of ui is probably "how do we get our bunches of little functions to talk to each other, and what do we do when somebody thinks up a new way to abuse computers?"
i really think a world with less applications and more tools would be easier to make consistent guis with, but maybe my hatred of the concept of "applications" is just another case of brainrot; all i know is that nobody agrees on everything and it's both unavoidable and not entirely a bad thing
of course "ported and barely works" is better than "not ported and unavailable"
computers can do fuckton more than they could do back in the 90s, so obviously it's going to be proportionally jankier because the first law of computers is complexity->jank
i can accept a few idiosyncrasies from some nigger deciding to use fltk or something and not porting it to gtk because (a. it works) and (b. nobody cares if the buttons look slightly different, as long as they work properly when you move your pointer over it and click it)
you can even use 27 different toolkits worth of software if you get out the extremely powerful theming tools and beat the gui into submission until it looks exactly how you want
this is a bit more complicated than it needs to be though, but you can still do quite a bit
of course it's best when everybody has already done the work for you, which leads me into the following sperg sesh:
really the problems aren't that bad if you apply a nice qt theme and then apply a nice gtk theme that looks almost exactly identical
like kde plasma basically does by default
having a decently consistent look and feel is not too hard if you go along with the general zeitgeist that everybody has been designing their shit for
a good thing for somebody to make would be an automated tool that can somehow take 1 theme and convert it to all 27 theming formats for the various toolkits
maybe it already exists, i'm not into ricing my desktop
or just make a fully standard theme format
better standardization for this kind of thing isn't totally impossible, look at how dbus managed to kill kde and gnome's competing implementations of the same thing
the ideal solution is to decouple software from its gui so people can write a new wrapper using <your favorite meme human interface guidelines here> which tends to happen a lot to command line tools because they're so easy to compose
imo the biggest problem with the desktop isn't that it's inconsistent, it's just fundamentally not very well-developed, which you can see from the large multitudes of ways people want to do it
this may change one day as people perform horrible and ugly experiments and slowly sort out things that work (hypertext, blender-style node graph dsls) from things that don't work (extremely skeuomorphic bullshit, whatever the fuck mobile ui is doing) and the platform itself gets more standards as the experience solidifies and everybody gets sick of all the problems (you aren't alone, nobody likes a weird-looking electron app)
eventually we will have to figure out things like "why is this even an application, can't it just be a function?" and "where should we put all the little functions?"
hell every now and then a program becomes a small operating system where all the apps are little functions, but then advancements in computing happen, and it turns out that text is in fact not the only thing that a computer can edit. the biggest and hardest question of ui is probably "how do we get our bunches of little functions to talk to each other, and what do we do when somebody thinks up a new way to abuse computers?"
i really think a world with less applications and more tools would be easier to make consistent guis with, but maybe my hatred of the concept of "applications" is just another case of brainrot; all i know is that nobody agrees on everything and it's both unavoidable and not entirely a bad thing
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2025
I'll give my two cents as someone who has a lot of time using Apple software. I do not care whether all my apps are using the same design language as long everything is readable and I certainly don't want every icon to be the same color. However, apparently Gnome apps can't share the same mouse cursor with non-Gnome apps on Wayland, and that probably would bother me.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
you can make them use whatever mouse cursor you want them to, same as it was on x11
usually your desktop makes sure that gtk uses the exact same mouse cursor as everything else on the system so you never notice
i've had the mouse cursor break on my x11 server plenty of times
modern x11 usage and wayland are a lot closer than people think, to the point that if something uses native x11 rendering functionality a lot of people will think it's horribly broken
both protocols are used by rendering your ui to a framebuffer and then handing it over to some sort of compositing window manager, wayland just makes it explicit
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2024
Since Lunduke was brought up earlier in the thread, I want to post this short clip from one of his recent videos because it amused me greatly:
I find it amusing how some people get irrationally mad about him, and I like the notion that he's trolling them on purpose.
Wouldn't any Windows compatible OSS be using something like Qt anyway, ignoring whether they'd be linux-first or not.
Its usually either that or electron, which has good Windows UI parity but is pretty shit
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
sometimes people use the native win32 ui, it's not hard to compile for if you're cross-compiling from a real operating systemWouldn't any Windows compatible OSS be using something like Qt anyway, ignoring whether they'd be linux-first or not.
Its usually either that or electron, which has good Windows UI parity but is pretty shit
however most people use something like qt because use of the native win32 ui is considered to be a form of incredibly cruel torture by the programmer geneva conventions
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2019
Good news everyone. Famous thought leader and essay writer Eric S Raymond is still alive!
Gotta say I admire the size of this mans balls.
Like BMJ returning from jail he is back to make the gamble of his life, I am going all-in on black.
Either he and his legacy are destroyed like Stallman was or he will become relevant again. No options in-between.
Gotta say I admire the size of this mans balls.
Like BMJ returning from jail he is back to make the gamble of his life, I am going all-in on black.
Either he and his legacy are destroyed like Stallman was or he will become relevant again. No options in-between.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
exactly as autistic as he usually is
he has been drinking the /pol/ juice for a while
also stallman's legacy isn't really destroyed imo, he is still part of gnu and the core philosophy of his organizations are still as steadfastly unyielding as they have been for years
we definitely aren't going to get a cucked gpl4 that works like the mit license or anything like that
and the drama with him is actually mostly over now except for some stragglers who haven't got the hint like drew devault
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2017
ESR was essentially Stallmaned before Stallman himself was, wasn't he?
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2023
I'm not sure this will have much of an effect. For as long as I can recall him having a blog, he's been willing to point out that black people in the US have a nigger problem. He's never been wiling to say the word "nigger", but he's been willing to describe the behavior and mindset clinically, using psychology terms, just like you would expect from the kind of programmer nerd who cares more factual correctness than anyone's feelings about those facts. This of course, has made it very easy to paint him as a racist, with his critics happily passing around select quotes from his blog as proof.
Kinda sorta not really. Again, as long as I can remember him publicly sperging, he's was willing to call a nigger a nigger in all but name, his critics called him racist, and yet that never seemed to stop him. He continued to write, and at least some people kept listening when he sperged on technical matters, or about the old school hacker culture. In more recent years, since the pandemic at least, he has seemed to withdraw a bit. I do seem to remember him saying that he wanted open source culture to be something that grows beyond him and leaves him behind, as opposed to him remaining a load-bearing member of it, causing it to die with him. Both he and regulars on his blog were fond of repeating a Zen Buddhist saying, "If you meet the Budda on the road, kill him." I always interpreted that to mean that he doesn't want other people to put him on a pedestal or take him too seriously, and that he doesn't really care if others decree him guilty of thoughtcrimes; he's going to keep doing what he wants to do.
Quite the fascinating character, ESR. I don't know that he's worthy of a thread, himself, but he can be interesting to watch.
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- Joined
- Nov 17, 2023
Everything he wrote in that tweet is factually correct, no mention of big nose tribe either. Just a noticer being tired and going straight to a logical conclusion.