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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I really don’t find the “chip makers don’t have to pay licence fees” a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.

    I imagine it’s likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn’t what’s holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.

    Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community’s focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I’d be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.


  • In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.

    If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system


  • Its all about how an application goes from “I would like to display X on a screen” to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It’s then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There’s a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that’s the general idea.

    Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to “look at” what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn’t focussed).

    Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we’re at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there’s still odd bits of software that either haven’t been ported, or that still rely on some features that don’t exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.





  • Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

    I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).






  • By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously

    This is… very smart actually. Any reason this is limited to Xwayland? (Is that XDG portal a thing yet?)