Us seniors are gonna have so much work a few years down the road. ☺️

I’m dying 🤣

Goddamn!

Yeah, that’s all there’s to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I’ve written code under Apache 2 because it was “more free.” Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn’t trivial. People certainly aren’t born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.

Yeah, I’m in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) in Canada. There’s 40+ nodes on the map that I’ve discovered by sitting on my balcony and 70+ nodes altogether:

I expected way fewer than that!

Yup. There are people occasionally writing in LongFast.

I know, I kid, but yes, I just got it because it’s cheap enough to try. In reality the only use case I envision right now is have a couple of units in the drawer for emergency scenarios.

Stop attacking me. 😂

But yeah, no use case other than - checking if it works. I’ll probably setup a standalone node on my balcony and leave it be to strengthen the network.

I just got a unit couple of days ago and it… just works. It’s quite impressive.

A bit more useful, puts the different parent distros to scale:

High-res source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions?wprov=sfla1

On desktop, yeah. Unity > GNOME, upstart > systems, snap. I don’t fuck with snap, I just use it as intended, I don’t try to remove it. I think I started actively using it in 2016. As a software developer I understand that only the happy path is reasonably tested so I try not to go too far out of it. 😂

I typically wait for the LTS point release before upgrading. I check the release notes. I check if anything is broken after the upgrade, fix as needed. I’m sure I’ve done some stuff when the migration to GNOME happened. But that’s to be expected when a major component change occurs. If you had some non-default config or workflow, it might require rework. E.g. some custom PulseAudio config broke on my laptop with the migration to Pipewire in 24.04. But on that legendary desktop install, the only unexpected breakage was during an upgrade when the power went out. Luckily upgrades are just apt operations so I was able to recover and finish the upgrade manually.

I think a friend is running a 2012 or 2010 install. 🥲

And I’ve also swapped multiple hardware platforms on this install. 😂 Went AMD > Intel > AMD > more AMD. Swapped SSDs, went single to mirror, increased in size.

I mean… once you kick the Windows-brain reinstall habit and you learn enough, the automatic instinct upon something unexpected becomes to investigate and fix it. Reinstall is just so much more laborious on a customized machine.

Interesting. We use it for work since 2016 (high hundreds of workstations) and I’ve used it since 2005 on variety of machines and use cases without significant issues. We’ve also used it to operate a couple of datacenters (OpenStack private clouds) with good results. That said I’ve been using LTS exclusively since 2014 and don’t use PPAs since 2018-20 and it’s been solid. My main machine hasn’t been reinstalled since the initial install in 2014.

Debian stable. It’s been here for 30 years, it’s the largest community OS, it’ll likely be here in 30 years (or until we destroy ourselves). Any derivative is subject to higher probability of additional issues, stoppage of development in the long run, etc.

If you’re extra lazy, Ubuntu LTS with Ubuntu Pro (free) enabled. You could use that for 10 years (or until Canonical cancels it) before you need to upgrade. Ubuntu is the least risky alternative for boring operation since it’s used in the enterprise and Canonical is profitable. The risk there is Canonical doing an IPO and Ubuntu going the way of tightening access like Red Hat did.

I’m writing here to give my sincere applause to this effort.

The machine that was last installed in 2014 is Ubuntu LTS. It’s been upgraded through all the LTS releases since then. Currently on 22.04 with the free Ubuntu Pro enabled. I use a mix of Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable on other machines. For example my laptop is on Debian 12. Debian has been the most reliable OS and community for over 30 years and I believe it’ll still be around 30 years from now, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves. 😂

Yeah, it seems counterproductive to ditch FOSS in the name of self-sufficiency. If it were about that, assembling an army of software people to learn and contribute to important FOSS codebases would be much more productive in my opinion. It feels like Harmony Next is about something else. Perhaps some wholesale insurance. Or someone’s plans grandeur.

That kinda makes sense at this stage. If you spend time understanding what those commands do, you’d understand how the system works, and most importantly how to not fuck it up. Keep in mind there’s a lot of misinformation and bad practices in guides out there. People who bare know more than you feel confident to share snippets without warning. Ten or twenty years ago much fewer people had experience with Linux and most people confident enough to write were technical people that knew what they were talking about. Destructive misinformation was less.

But yeah when you learn, the need or urge to reinstall disappears. I stopped reinstalling in 2014. Took me 9 years to unfuck my Windows brain and understand enough to not shoot myself in the feet. Main machine hasn’t been reinstalled since then. That’s with replacing multiple main boards, switching AMD > Intel > AMD, changing SSDs, going from single SSD to mdraid, increasing in size over time, etc.

Yeah I have no hope for an American FOSS design.

Perhaps an EU-backed one might appear at some point.

Recently I stumbled upon a Chinese team working on a FOSS pair of cores, with source in GitHub. I think they were aiming at competing with A76 and N2. Supposedly they’re well underway.

Found it

If these guys (or any others) tape out a competitive FOSE chip, it’ll change the world. If it’s a decent project, everyone and their mother will fork it. And we’ll get chips that cost just a bit over the silicon and packaging cost.

Sir this is Linux.

A high performance RISC-V CPU core.