• 0 Posts
  • 90 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 20th, 2024

help-circle





  • The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…

    And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…

    I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…


  • I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.

    It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.

    In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.

    But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?

    Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …

    It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”


  • Then i don’t know what you’re doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are “awesome and just work on linux” somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.

    I’ve got some nice linux servers running that i’m really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it’s just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I’m more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux “just works” is delusional…

    Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that’ll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things “that just work”, just don’t. For example, i’ve got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it’s amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton “running windows games on linux just works”. If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that’s a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn’t. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it’ll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you’re on your own.

    And that’s its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like “it’s free, so accept it the way it is” when someone dares to ask questions or … even… (do i dare say it?)… complain… Doesn’t make for the most constructive environment…

    Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you’re willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it’s a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There’s no other way to put it.


  • Is it worthless to say “(the current iteration of) AI won’t be a huge revolution”. For sure, it might be, the next decade will determine that.

    Is it worhtless to say that many companies are throwing massive amounts of money at it, and taking huge risks on it, while it clearly won’t deliver for them? I would say no, that is useful.

    And in the end, that’s what this complaint seems like for me. The issue isn’t “AI might be the next big thing”, but “We need to do everything with AI right now”, and then in a couple of years when they see how bad the results are, and how it negatively impacted them, noone will have seen it coming…


  • This topic was about the larger power market, so big industrial things. But even for people putting solar panels at home. Make it more expensive than getting regular power and see how that progresses… There are of course always some fanatics who will want it for the cause, but most people do it because it’s also economically advantageous for them.

    I’ve been trying to find how much % of (renewable) power generated these days is from home solar installations, but it seems hard to find…

    But try to follow the topic a bit, we were talking about the big players on the grid, not small home solar installations that don’t take part in the system discussed here.



  • My premise of how things currently work, so what the current incentives are for more renewable energy is completely flawed?

    Sure, make renewable energy not profitable and see what happens…

    I get what you WANT the world to be like, but it ISN’T like that right now, and it’s good to have aspirations on how it should be. But can we just accept what it is, and what implications that has for how things work?

    If you can get your dream up & running overnight, go for it. Until then making sure green energy is profitable is the way forward for it, whether we like it or not.




  • That’s also a pretty naive take on it.

    First of all, you can indeed shut of the renewables easily. But that means that adding renewables to the grid is even less profitable, making renewables less desired to be built.

    Hence in for example Germany a law was passed that prevented renewables being shut down in favor of worse energy sources, but that then leads to the issue we mention here.

    It’s a tricky situation with renewables. But on the other hand, society is slowly adapting to using them & improving the infrastructure to handle such issues, so we’ll get there eventually :).


  • I get that the lemmings here are enthousiastic about linux, but even as a developer, every time i work with linux, i end up facing the most annoying user hostile problems >_<…

    Since this is gaming related, and i just faced one today: I bought a Legion Go (steamdeck like device), and put bazzite on it (steamos like os). And was trying to run visual pinball on it, which actually has a linux build. Try to run the linux build: shared library libbz2.so.1.0 not found… Google around a bit: a yes, because that’s a fedora distro, unlike most other distros, they named it libbz2.so.1 . But many apps assume libbz2.so.1.0 also exists so try to use that. Fair enough, i’ll add a link with that name. Ah yes, this is a distro with a readonly filesystem. Lucklily as a dev i realized i can probably put the link in the folder of the program itself, and that indeed worked.

    But ffs linux world, why do you fuck up such basic things like just agreeing on how you name basic shared dll’s (googling for it i found people struggling with this when using python, so it’s not something that rarely happens)…

    I love the control linux offers, and got NAS and a little server running linux, and for the handheld it’ll probably give me more battery life or performance too, so linux for sure has some benefits.

    But if you have to be an expert just to get things f’ing made for linux to run due to stupid stuff like this… whyyyyyy???