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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlRecommend me a scripting language
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    24 days ago

    What about Lua/Luajit?

    In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

    IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.


  • I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

    I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

    I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

    An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

    If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.


  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlCoreboot: Pros and Cons
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    1 month ago

    So generally the pro of coreboot is that it is open source, but the con is that it is open source.

    What I mean by that, you can fix any issues yourself, however, if you are unable to do it yourself, you have to wait until someone does it for you and often what features are available and stable are a hit and miss.

    Compared to proprietary bioses, the company has some kind of standardized process for developing the bios. So you often get want you would expect. However, if the money flow from the pc vendor to the bios vendor drys up, you, or the community of owners. will not be able to fix any issues.

    Linux support should be the same, regardless if you choose proprietary or open source bios. But that depends on how well the coreboot was ported to the platform. So officially supported coreboot bioses are likely better than others.

    Personally, if all other attributes are equal, would go with coreboot, because I like to support vendors that offer that choice, and IMO a open source solution, that you can review and build yourself is intrinsically more secure than a binary blob, where you have to blindly trust some corporation. But other security minded people might disagree, which is fine.




  • Yes. Meat is expensive, and should be expensive.

    However meat replacement products cost even more, but they should be cheaper, because they are cheaper to produce.

    Diary free ice cream is more expensive. Cow milk is cheaper than oat milk.

    This isn’t just about not eating meat or animal products, this is the whole “vegan lifestyle” food that is unreasonable more expensive.

    Like buying more expensive vegan salt or sugar instead of normal one.

    And if you don’t do that, you are not a “true vegan™”. And the vegan police will come and get you!

    “Oh, the pepper you just ate was fertilized by pig manure, sorry you aren’t vegan anymore. You should have bought the more expensive vegan pepper.”


  • You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice.

    No, people don’t dislike vegans or vegetarians because of their choices, they dislike them because they lord their, what they think “better” choice over others. And create in- and out- groups via labeling.

    Being vegan or vegetarian means that you have to spend more money in the store to buy food, because meat is heavily subsidized compared to vegetarian options. Also, because being vegan/vegetarian is not the default, many products are overpriced.

    Another point is that a healthy and varied diet using only vegan or vegetarian food doesn’t come so natural, so you have to research this more, which means you have to spend time, which again is a commodity.

    So it is not just about good or bad, it is also about privilege and class. So people should not go around making statements about other people making “worse” choices.


  • Currently being vegan or vegetarian is a choice of privilege. An healthy and varied diet becomes more difficult and expensive, when you start removing dishes from your pallet.

    So it becomes coupled with a status symbol, instead of being the default way. As long as people call themselves “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of their choice (people being vegan or vegetarian because of mental or medical issues, is different case), they highlight that status over “normal” people.

    If people are just not eating meat or animal products for whatever reason, without trying to use labels like “vegan” or “vegetarian” to highlight their status, then that is fine and a personal choice.

    Creating societal change, to make vegan or vegetarian the default position, will also lessen the status of the vegans and vegetarians, that use those labels as such. So they have incentives to not produce a political or societal change.

    Vegans & vegetarians should go on protests and lobby to make vegan food cheaper and easier than meat, so that it becomes the default. If they don’t do that, and still call themselves vegan/vegetarian then that might imply that it is all about showing their status, and people don’t like that.

    Consumer choice is a privilege and not about creating an effective societal/political movement. They should not be used as a status symbol.

    (Disclaimer: I eat meat and animal products very infrequently, only when my body demands it. I am also thankful for all vegans and vegetarians, because they gave us more interesting options in stores and restaurants.)


  • Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.

    Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.

    Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.

    Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …


  • As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

    If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

    For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

    There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.


  • Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

    If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

    I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

    If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.


  • It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

    • migration of issues
    • migration of pull requests
    • migration of all review comments etc
    • migration of the wiki
    • migration of the pages
    • convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
    • changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
    • forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
    • change the ci and release process
    • because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

  • You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

    What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

    IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

    The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.