A good thing in general, maybe this will help improve compatibility with old stuff and its old bugs, cause it’ll be simpler to emulate those bugs with cleaner code.

BTW, has anyone managed to run Rogue Squadron 3D under Wine? I’m just interested, I’m having that menu input bug not allowing to do anything.

FVWM.

Well, what this article says is relevant for a small subset of “geeks” when ICQ (or AIM etc) was dying, but many people still used it and similar services, so a simple IM of this kind was still accepted as normal, thus XMPP as the alternative.

Normies (like me) were mostly on Skype or between ICQ (or AIM etc) and Skype. That is, that move to Skype was often spearheaded by “geeks”, after it was mostly over the more conservative people were “geeks” too, as it always happens.

Frankly I’d say what hurt XMPP most was its adoption by various social networks being advertised as a selling point. Like “look, it’s a universal protocol, Google has it, Facebook has it, even ICQ had an undocumented XMPP endpoint for some periods of time when they were playing with it, … <I can add 2 Russian search and email providers and 1 social network to this list, and possibly plenty others> …”.

So when those big proprietary services just decided they don’t want it, what’s described in the article happened. Basically XMPP enthusiasts made their bed and had to sleep in it. Only it shouldn’t have. Many “geeks” of that time were uncritically in awe of Google and Facebook etc, we seem to start forgetting this. People would defend dropping XMPP by them, would hope that these companies together would make some other universal protocol, make up all sorts of unbelievable bullshit to believe that all these companies are cool and big and making future.

I am sad for XMPP, but Google and others adopting it and then shutting down their services were not the reason.

Skype is. It was proprietary, but so good that using anything else just didn’t make sense.

I still remember using the old Skype as something unearthly easy and pleasant.

It was as lightweight as some lean XMPP or ICQ client, but without (or at least I don’t remember them) text encoding problems, with fast file transfers, VoIP usable on bad channels, convenient GUI, user directory (just like ICQ, only XMPP didn’t have that feature).

Now, it was a centralized service, but this was happening simultaneously to ICQ dying due to lame attempts at banning alternative clients, so the morale of depending on such a thing didn’t quite settle in people’s heads.

I mean, ICQ (or AIM, or whatever) UINs (or IDs, or whatever) were for many people their main ID in the Internet, a bit like mobile phone number. It all seemed eternal.

EDIT: Though the general idea of not federating with big proprietary services which do not behave well is solid. Sort of like many of Usenet servers do. Ah, well, Usenet itself is not that much alive.

Void user here, the feeling is similar to looking out of the window on a good day to look at some minor road incident.

Agree about SUSE, it’s really amazing.

Yes, Debian and also Gentoo. Slackware may not be dead, but out of race in the sense of being a stabilizer as one of the “main” (culturally, not in numbers) distributions, and Arch has lost most of sanity it had (not much to begin with).

Same as any ports system. Though yes, for Linux the alternatives may seem less convenient like Portage or less extensive like Pkgsrc.

So sad for Sun. Just touching their products as they were before getting eaten by Oracle is an amazing experience.

Also very nice artistic language in visual design, I know this is not the most important thing.

I mean, RH became dominant by not initially being a bag of dicks.

So if SUSE becomes the main enterprise vendor (to more precisely address RH’s role, one can say “root enterprise vendor”), then its enshittification is just a matter of time.

Other than that, I like Tumbleweed, it just works, and, unlike Fedora, without bullshit.

Still the whole corporate atmosphere makes me wary. SUSE is good, we just shouldn’t put all our eggs into one basket (and should fix that with RH).

I just listen to the “Enclave Sublevel” track (more rarely others) from KotOR II OST, or sometimes “Bastila Shan” track (more rarely others) from KotOR OST, or “Polyhedrons” track (same) from Disco Elysium OST, or theme 2 (same) from Ascendancy OST,

For a company building bloody airplanes - yes, I totally agree.

I’d expect it to be about the same, with 737 MAX, yes, on one side and too many examples on the other.

“Would” happen? That’s literally what initially happened. They just hoped for something impossible.

From what I can tell, the rebuilders are not adding any kind of value to the situation.

They are adding popularity. Enterprise is slow to change in some ways, but I can totally see the trend of moving to Debian. RH seems to have forgotten their own history and how they’ve started with one Red Hat Linux, with paid support for those who wanted it, and that’s what gave them the popularity to be profitable.

They don’t seem to want to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, just to stop actively spending money making it easier when that work doesn’t return any money for the effort. Which is… Totally fair.

They are, in fact, going to reduce their revenue. Which is the main criterion for a business, no?

I mean, just like humans wither and die with time, so do companies.

Nobody and nothing living forever is one of the reasons centralization is bad. But humans sadly like to flock.

RH is approaching the end of its life cycle. First they were hackers. Then they became a useful and aspiring business. Then RPM-based distributions were what made Linux not marginal anymore (though probably this also has something to do with Mandrake’s success). Then they became something in the center of things, connected to everything happening with Linux and other Unix-like systems (at least on desktop). Then they realized that and started milking that slowly. Then they became arrogant.

No, it’s a different OS not intended as an alternative to Windows in any other sense that it’s a desktop OS too.

But it won’t be hard if you start with something common, like openSUSE or Debian.

You mean that RH hates ergonomics? Agreed here.

About the function of systemd (or docker, or pulseaudio, or gnome 3, or wayland) - well, I don’t need it, but I understand the usual arguments of its proponents. It does solve problems other init systems don’t. Only it’s such a PITA to use that I’m a Void Linux user.

Especially sad considering that this was entirely different in the Gnome 2 times.

That’s to be free of discrimination by the state, which usually will treat your obligations independently of your rights.

While private discrimination is always something in the grey area. By private discrimination I mean both a banner saying “<any grouping at all> are not welcome here” and having face control (something quite normal for night clubs, and you’ll also pick your tenants if you rent out).

RH is the maintainer\developer of great many things. Of course it’d be nice for them to have good competition (like what Canonical was), so that they wouldn’t use that power for evil.

Still them becoming weaker is not a case for optimism.

I’d really like something like Gentoo with official binary packages (and relevant tree), so that building from source would be an option and installing a binary package the usual way. Well, also simpler installation maybe.

I mean, Calculate Linux does that, but I think it’s a Russian small-business oriented distribution, so not exactly my use case.

The whole idea of some things being protected and some not is very wrong. Rights should be a wildcard. That’s the right of private discrimination as ancaps see it.