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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • “This hardware works fine and even has compatible software that it works great with. But I’m going to prefer the broken software for other reasons. And that means it’s the hardware’s fault.”

    Software that is built to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware should be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.

    If software can’t handle a 16.5:16 aspect ratio, then that’s bad software. I don’t care how weird of a niche thing that is… just make your software abstract enough to handle those cases.

    It’s 2024, any resolution/aspect ratio/DPI combo should be supportable. There’s enough variety of monitors out there that we should have a solution for handling things on the fly without needing to have a predefined solution.



  • Should they? Yes. They should also be searching for previous bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people do. But if you have enough users, even if 1% of people don’t use good reporting behaviors, you wind up with a lot of duplicate or bad reports.

    There are plenty of blog posts out there that basically can be summarized as talking about how grueling open source work can be because users are often aggressive in their demands.

    But this is a prime example of debian “stable” doesn’t mean “no crashes” but instead it means “unchanging, which means any bugs and crashes will remain for the whole release”



  • Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.

    They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying “this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year”. Debian didn’t want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldlow effort maymay
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    5 months ago

    my rant was not about your meme. But people actually use this argument seriously, and that frustrates me.

    And I will admit that learning a new system has a time cost, but once you reach experience parity, the time cost per problem is less, and the number of problems is less. In that way, the “time spent” is an investment rather than wasted.

    So A+ meme, it triggered me in all the ways it was supposed to.



  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldlow effort maymay
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    5 months ago

    The thing I hate about the “value your time” argument is that windows is shit.

    Let’s be generous for a minute and assume that windows and linux have the same amount of problems. Someone who is on windows for the past 30 years has 30 years of acquired knowledge and will probably know quickly how to solve it on windows, but not linux. Someone who is on linux for the past 30 years has 30 years of acquired knowledge and will probably know quickly how to solve it on linux, but not windows.

    So the entire argument is just “but I have muscle memory tied to windows, and I already know how to solve those problems, but I dont know how to solve the linux ones, so they take me a lot of research and time to solve, therefore all linux problems always take a lot more time to solve”

    On windows, I have to spend time fighting BSODs and finding out where to download software from that isn’t just bloated up with viruses, and how to run registry hacks to get rid of start menu ads and to stop microsoft from phoning home. None of those things i have to do on linux.

    On linux, today my biggest issue was figuring out how to change the keybinding for taking a screenshot… And that was an easy issue, but it’s also not even possible on windows.

    So I guess different types of problems. My “wasted” time is customizing my OS/environment so it works the way I want it to, not trying to fight back any ounce of control.


  • You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

    It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”


  • Debian aims for rock solid stability

    To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

    So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”


  • IMO it doesn’t matter. People don’t read news on updates. Should they? Yes. Do they? No. Should they have to? Also no.

    Linus’s point is to never blame the end user for something the kernel changed. If you want software to have widespread adoption, adding homework to simple updates isn’t how you do it. People don’t want a hobby or something to babysit, they want an operating system. Debian will go out of their way to make in-release updates go as smooth as possible, but are willing to through out entire parts of functioning packages between releases.

    But this isn’t even about breaking things for the end user. This will create excessive amounts of noise on the upstream repo. People will say “Hey! My keepassxc broke!” and they report it to keepassxc, and not to Debian. To which keepassxc just has to constantly reply “no, debian changed this on you, this is not a bug.” If Debian had to deal with the fall out of their own decisions, I would say “yeah, im not sure if i agree with the decision, but oh well”… But they are increasing the workload for other teams.

    It is already happening. The debian dev’s stance is “This will be painful for a year.” But it will be painful for keepassxc, NOT debian. The keepassxc devs asked them to not do this. Debian’s response might as well be “Im inflicting this pain on you, even though you’ve asked me not to. But on the plus side, it won’t hurt me at all and it will only last a year for you.” If they really have that much disdain for the project, they should just stop packaging it altogether.

    So yeah, debian has the legal right to do whatever they want because keepassxc is open source. but “just because I can, and you cant legally stop me, and its extra work for you, not me” is kind of a jerk move. This is what drives FOSS contributors to get burnt out and abandon otherwise good projects.


  • It’ll also break all your keepassxc plugins soon. Because debian version to version compatibility is not a priority. They also don’t care if them breaking something triggers a ton of upstream bug reports, because it will only “be painful for a year”

    Linus for the kernel has a strict “don’t break userspace” policy, and Debian has a “break things whenever you want, and just blame the user for not reading the news file” policy.


  • I use wayland, but be warned that there are downsides.

    X11 is 40 years old. Which means that even though it has 40 years of bad decisions baked into it, it also has 40 years of features and tooling built around it.

    And in some cases, things are purposefully broken in the name of security as mentioned above. Writing a keylogger on X11? Easy. Every app can watch the keyboard even when they aren’t in focus. So if I type my password into firefox, Discord can listen. Hope you don’t have any malicious apps just patiently listening to all your keystrokes.

    Getting rid of input listening sounds great! … Except for the concept of global keybinds. Have a Push to talk button in discord that you need it to be able to listen to while youre playing a game? Sorry, the game is in focus, so discord can’t see ANY of your input. Including the push to talk button. Different wayland servers have different ways of handling this with their portals. Some don’t have it at all. And the ones that do don’t always have great solutions.

    One major issue that has been in wayland debate hell… how do multi-window apps communicate with each other. For example GIMP. The editor window is a separate window from the toolkit which is a separate from the layer view. GIMP on X11 knows where all of its windows are because it can see everything. if you wanted GIMP to save all the window positions, it could. GIMP on Wayland has no idea where each window is relative to each other. Each window knows its own size and shape. And thats it. It doesnt know where on the screen it is. Which means it doesnt know where it’s other sub windows are relative to itself. Which means GIMP on Wayland can’t really save the window positions for next run. Wayland is working on a protocol for handling this, but its been caught up in debate hell last I saw. This is a prime example of a thing X11 had. And Wayland will someday have, but the 40 year headstart and disregard for security gives X11 a huge headstart.

    Most of these problems have workarounds and solutions, but you might find yourself in a situation where you do in fact need to implement a workaround instead of having everything Just Work.

    “Better” means different things to different people. Architecture and security and technologically? Wayland is better. Just Works and its what your apps were probably built to run on so less weird edge case issues? X11 is still better just due to inertia. (And again, I use Wayland, I’m willing to deal with the workarounds, but you do you).



  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldsources.list
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    8 months ago

    The point of the meme is “Debian users are so proud of not having frequent updates… but when they do update, they have a huge backlog of things to update” … so yes, the fact that it’s not apples to oranges, and yet Debian users act superior is kinda the point.

    And I use arch on my desktops but debian on my servers. I understand the difference. and yes, 20+ config changes is a bit of an exaggeration. I more frequently have to do minor tweaks to fix things on arch, but I also don’t need to set aside time to do arch updates “just in case” … because I have had debian upgrades cause weird side effects that wound up taking up my whole day.

    The fact that i can go 2 years between those weird update days means I will still use it for my server, because “just security upgrades” is good enough for a server (even though I would love to have an updated tmux and neovim, so i could share config files, but oh well, i can go without config files on my server, debian DOESNT manage user config files, definitely not any more than arch does.). I don’t “not get it” or something. I understand why people use debian, I use it in certain contexts, but it does also have it’s own set of drawbacks.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldsources.list
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    8 months ago

    “update” here referring to the version update, eg bullseye to bookworm. hence the title sources.lists because version updates disable all ppas.

    Also, because of the “stable” nature of things, instead of a slow trickle of updates, when you finally update the version, you get a flood of updates. Changing from $PACKAGE version 5 to $PACKAGE version 9 very likely has breaking config changes… Avoiding breaking config changes is the entire purpose of a “stable” distro right?

    If on arch, you get those breaking changes once a month, a two year release cycle means that the update to the next debian will have 24 breaking changes involved that you get to deal with all at the same time, while accounting for the fact that your /etc/apt/sources.list.d are all disabled.



  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldOld is stability
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    8 months ago

    Most people use stable to refer to something that doesn’t crash or cause issues. Something that you might call “rock solid” which implies it’s not going to fall over. Something to put on your server because you’ll get great uptime without issues.

    Debian is one of the few places where stable might crash more than unstable, because known bugs in Debian don’t get backported unless they cause security issues.

    I use Debian on my servers because “some testing” is nice and the only thing I run on my servers is docker. And ironically, I have to use a PPA for docker.

    So for me, it’s a stable enough base OS, but it “too stable” for anything that actually runs on the servers.