Debian is all about apt dependencies, which can sometimes break. Debugging tips from there should be obvious.

/dev/null is a special file in the Linux filesystem that contains only 0s which aren’t actually stored anywhere physically.

People often redirect data there in shell scripts to get rid of it without sending it anywhere else.

Usually data is either redirected with pipes to another command, or it’s saved to some file (or used to manipulate a file by typing the little arrows in Shell scripts, >, standard output). This one seems to just reference a file (at least for the last line).

If you wanna get some dev skills, you can understand just one concept to do it and read basic code like this (especially Bash or Python, or a special coding language called Lisp). Be careful though, because this one concept is dangerous in that it can literally send you insane by altering your worldviews as what you can do with it grows. It’s not necessarily an accurate representation of physical reality; for that you need science.

Are you ready? I hope you are lol

A computer is like one big hollow orb full of other little hollow orbs. They each contain concepts, conceptual data (like in mathematical Lambda Calculus), along with possibly other hollow orbs (coding procedures) that reintegrate with this data. You can store basically any concept in them and have the computer act it out when you’re good at doing it. Lisp programming (where everything is in brackets) acts quite directly like this, and this is the main way I’ve thought about coding stuff.

Terry Davis probably used this concept (but not Lisp) to make his own operating system from scratch, which drove him insane. He thought it was perfect and in a way holy, even though it wasn’t. Hope that helped lol.

Doesn’t seem like people think this works consistently on wayland, which was what made the post sound a lot more interesting. Hopefully every desktop will soon get full wayland support and be able to take screenshots without it not working. It seems like getting screenshots in wayland is difficult because of the security stuff.

Really I’m not just talking about operating systems. I was trying to make a point about how using Windows instead of an open source OS wouldn’t violate this law.

The same could be said for any other software used by the Swiss government. They could be using Excel or other niche proprietary software. Hospitals in Switzerland could also be using obscure proprietary software for their patient databases, especially since that information would likely not be made available to the general public anyway.

According to my literal interpretation of the article, it would need to be made “by or for” the Swiss government. They could use any proprietary software they want based on this phrasing, as long as the software wasn’t made by government workers and the government didn’t hire any outsourcing company to make it.

Most software we have has been made irrelevantly to the Swiss government or any government in general. Even if they used Linux, Linux has nothing to do with the Swiss government. Unless Switzerland are gonna code their own extensive open source computer infrastructure, the law doesn’t really apply to almost any software used in their offices at all.

It seems likely that the Swiss will hire people to write a few open source pieces of software, like maybe an open source hospital software for doctors to put notes into their computers and have it on the database, for the sake of argument. But that might all be a bit of an empty promise from the people signing in this law anyway.

If reading that headline made you think the Swiss government is gonna start using mostly open source software, that might be true, but I don’t think the law enforces that as it’s explained in the article.

To me this seems to be somewhat of a soft law that could lead on to more laws phasing out proprietary software in Swiss government offices and public sector workplaces. That at some point could include Windows, but swapping Microsoft Office for Libreoffice would be a far easier short-term goal, and that in itself might be a bit of a headache logistically.

If you’re interested in what sort of software will be running on Swiss government-owned computers and how much of it will be open source, I think we can’t say at this point. You’d have to see what laws they pass in the future and how that software changes.

Anyway, government offices ideally shouldn’t use Windows on their computers, especially outside of the US. That is one of the most important things if they’re doing this because they think it’s more secure.

This would apply to lots of software other than Windows (or operating systems in general).

It doesn’t seem like this law would mean that their government is necessarily using much (or even technically any) open source software.

Based on the article, the law seems to apply to software developed “by or for” the public sector. Windows wasn’t made “by or for” the public sector. It was made by a company in the US. And yet lots of computers used by people employed by governments across the world are using Windows. I know that in the UK at least (and probably a lot of other countries), pretty much all the computers in hospitals run on Windows, and I don’t think that would violate this law.

They might pass more laws to phase out Windows and other proprietary software on government computers, but as it stands it seems like that only actually applies if the Swiss government want to make software. Most software they would need for handling databases and things already exists.

They did also talk about how the law would make certain data have to be publicly accessible. I dunno whether you would have to specifically request that data from their government by filling out a form or something (ideally not I suppose), but if they want the data to be in a proper open file format instead of something like .xlsx, a lot of government offices might start using Libreoffice and similar, but that’s somewhat unrelated from the first part of the law.