What happened to librem anyway? They used to be all the rage, now it’s nothing.

What is the battery situation like?

The older, cheaper devices are obviously, well, older and thus the battery degraded a bit. Linux isn’t exactly optimized for these things either. I would expect less than great battery life.

Even that is pretty temporary.

If you build a house, there’s a good chance, it will survive for decades or even centuries. The house I currently live in survived two world wars and heavy bombardment in one of them. I don’t think any software will manage that.

I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.

And most importantly for me personally: they seem to disregard people using multiple windows.

I rarely work in one window, and having a large screen for only one app is pretty stupid.

Gnome feels like it’s intended for small screen devices like tablets.

These patches do offer some benefits for cloud providers or in general orgs that host a bunch of different products on potentially the same machine.

I could see benefits in them, especially if the v3 or whatever addresses some of the issues.

I already thought about that, but never really could justify switching.

I would argue, though, that it’s not customization, but rather packages themselves changing over time and sometimes just break.

And sometimes you have crap like a full boot partition, because apt decided to keep all Linux versions for some reason.

The carelessness. Mac OS is far from perfect, but it just happily chugs along. Linux often creates problems by just existing for too long. It’s gotten much much better, but it’s still not good.

Because you don’t know what you’ll need that wrapper beforehand, that’s my entire point.

Unless you’re only doing trivial changes, the chances are very high that you won’t be able to design the class structure. Or, you end up essentially writing the code to be able to write the tests, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you have to ask “can’t you just” the answer is almost always no.

And who actually writes tests like that?

I mean, do you think tests do the calculations again? You simply have well defined input and known, static output. That’s it.

Tests first is only good in theory.

Unit tests typically test rather fine grained, but coming up with the structure of the grain is 80% of the work. Often enough you end up with code that’s structured differently than initially thought, because it turns out that this one class needs to be wrapped, and this annotation doesn’t play nice with the other one when used on the same class, etc etc.

Especially then I’d test the shit out of everything? I’m getting paid for writing correct software.

For local development, it should be super quick. However, I’m currently building a small project where a device (or rather the library using it) can’t really be used with a debugger. So 500 print()s it is.

Yes, but it’s not Unix. That’s literally part of GNU/Linux’ name.

Mac OS is more Unix than Linux.

And a lot of people would call that incapable.

This is a form of learned, or rather forced to internalize, helplessness. People don’t even want to understand things, even though they absolutely could and ought.

I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.

The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.

Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.

I find it extremely frustrating how weirdly wrong-density much documentation is. It’s extremely detailed in all the wrong places and often lacks examples for common use cases.

I learned a while ago that news articles are supposed to have increasing levels of detail from top to bottom. Each paragraph adds a bit more context, but the general picture should be contained in the first one. Hardly any documentation follows that pattern.