I find it ironic that Linus’s explanation for ENOENT being invalid for an ioctl given its meaning of “No such file or directory”, while simultaneously ioctl can return ENOTTY when using a mismatched device fd despite the error meaning “Not a typewriter.”

Right? Most of the time when I build linux I’m not using GNU because of its burdensome license. Realistically you usually don’t need most of the binaries anyway, and those you do like echo and ls are trivial to reimplement, at least for their common functionality.

Honestly by the time I decide to retire an old machine, it’s because I’ve developed so much animosity towards it that I’m much more likely to have an attitude of “good riddance” than “farewell old friend”.

Is boot time that much of an issue besides for arbitrary competitive reasons? I haven’t tried any optimizations and boot time on my headless server is less than two seconds.

Least helpful debugging duck.

Where my 4.19 gang at?

I subscribe to M365 because my kids’ schools all distribute their assignments as Word docs. And they apparently use the most obscure formatting features, so the only way to get them to render and print properly is to use full Office desktop. Not even the web apps show them properly, and LibreOffice / google docs import totally mangle them.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.

I’ll just leave this here: https://lemmy.world/post/2735721

curl totallysafescripts.com | sudo sh

If it “just works” with linux it’s probably using a standard protocol like LPR that you can just as easily use on MacOS without a driver. The driver is usually just for non-standard functionality like color level monitoring or scanner/AIO integration that you won’t get on Linux anyway.

“Backwards compatibility” is a totally different thing from “cross compatibility”. Of course proprietary software is going to be less cross-compatible.

never break user code

That’s a fine mantra to have but is rarely true in practice. I’ve seen way to many needlessly breaking changes in open-source libs that are explained away with “users can just pin the old version until they update their code”.

To be clear, the linux kernel itself is almost never the cause of the breakage per se, but some other library often implementing one of the APIs it defines. Often the reason for the breakage is under-specification of the original API, for example including a uint32 flags field that is not checked against a known set of valid flags, and inevitably ends up populated with vendor-specific (and often conflicting) usages.

As much as API design is about exposing the functionality you want, it also involves avoiding exposing functionality you dont’t want to expose. Open-source software often omits that critical design consideration, waving it away under the false virtue of “openness”.

Yep, as of Windows 10 there’s no longer a 30-day activation timer. You can run Windows for free indefinitely with only a couple minor inconveniences like the inability to change the desktop background.

It probably has. XP usage was almost entirely pirated copies in China. Then PUBG came out and the entire country upgraded to pirated copies of Windows 7 to play it because XP wasn’t supported.

amdgpu: segfault in gem_free

Science fiction spacecraft - Enterprise, Nostromo, Tardis, Falcon, etc.

I spend 95% of my day on Debian but I don’t like it. Definitely “Tech Normie” according to this guide.