Does anyone here actually use awk for more than trivial operations? If I ever have to have to consider writing anything substantial with bash/awk/sed/etc, I just start writing a Python script. No hate to the classic tools, but Python is just really nice.

Sorry, mixed up the videos. It’s actually this one, from 2014:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

Edited link above

Gary Bernhardt called it in 2012

Not sure how ollama integration works in general, but these are two good libraries for RAG:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

https://pypi.org/project/chromadb/

Do you have any links to read up on him? I know this is a very contentious topic, but I haven’t heard much about him and I’m curious. What would you hold as his worst actions?

Canonical lives and dies by the BDFL model. It allowed them to do some great work early on in popularizing Linux with lots of polish. Canonical still does good work when forced to externally, like contributing upstream. The model falters when they have their own sandbox to play in, because the BDFL model means that any internal feedback like “actually this kind of sucks” just gets brushed aside. It doesn’t help that the BDFL in this case is the CEO, founder, and funder of the company and paying everyone working there. People generally don’t like to risk their job to say the emperor has no clothes and all that, it’s easier to just shrug your shoulders and let the internet do that for you.

Here are good examples of when the internal feedback failed and the whole internet had to chime in and say that the hiring process did indeed suck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

“markshuttle” in those threads is the owner/founder/CEO.

I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

Unfortunately there isn’t one easy source that I’ve found. This is based on reading the stuff you linked to, as well as discourse/matrix discussions linked to from those sources. I compare it mentally to Guido van Rossum as BDFL of Python (though not any longer). He did a much better job of communicating expectations, like here

It made some people unhappy that there was no Python 2.8, but everybody knew what was happening. The core Python team also wasn’t surprised by that announcement, unlike with stuff like Anduril or flakes for the nix devs.

There was also a failure to communicate with stuff like the PR that would switch to Meson. The PR author should have known if Eelco broadly agreed with it before opening it. If there was a process that the PR author just ignored, the PR should have been closed with “Follow this process and try again”. That process can be as simple as “See if Eelco likes it”, since he was BDFL, but the process needs to be very clear to everyone.

Exactly, thanks. “politicking” != US political issues

My take on it is that the creator of Nix was very good technically but was not a good BDFL, and that was the root of the problem. He didn’t do a good job of politicking, stepped down, and now Nix is going through a bit of interregnum. I don’t think it’s likely to fail overall though, nixpkgs is too valuable of a resource to just get abandoned. I expect the board seats will be filled by people that know how to politick, and things will continue on after that.

Lessons learned is being a BDFL is hard. IMO Eelco Dolstra failed because he had opinions about things like Anduril sponsorship and flakes, and didn’t just declare “This is the way things are going to be, take it or leave it”. People got really pissed off because there wasn’t a clear message or transparency, which resulted in lots of guessing.

They won’t open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO

That’s an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:

https://github.com/popey/unsnap

Thanks for the list. It’d be interesting to see something like the Are We X Yet sites for Mozilla/Rust projects that tracks this sort of thing

You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it’s like tmux with nice defaults

There’s some even older UI bits buried around in there:

I know it won’t happen, but it’d be nice if Linux switched to GPLv3. That would at least help somewhat here

VLC is the sort of software where if it can’t play it, I don’t know what else could. I guess I’d also try the ffmpeg command line tool to see if it can figure out what the video file even is, and maybe it could convert it to a regular format.

Also TBH such a video file would be interesting enough that you could probably post it here (if possible, or any metadata you can extract from it) and see if anyone knows how to play it.

Since Word documents are one of your bigger concerns, you can download LibreOffice on one of your current machines and try them out. That’s the same program you’d be using on Linux.

It’d have to be a pretty unusual video format to have issues. Similar to above, you can try VLC on Windows and see if there’s any issues.

Based on your description, I’d be surprised if you encountered any major issues. I’d recommend trying either Pop! OS if you’re OK with a slightly different UI from Windows, or Mint if you want something more comfortable. Note that you can create a LiveUSB stick of either of those, or any other distro. You can then boot your computer from it and take it for a spin to see if there’s any obvious issues.

Dunno what permissions issues you're hitting, but I organize everything with beets on my desktop and then sync everything using syncthing to the main Music folder on my phone and it all works nicely. I use an old app that I think isn't even available on the app store anymore named MortPlayer that uses the synced folder structure to organize things.

I don't use m3u files, but I imagine you could just sync them to the main Music directory next to the music files and have it work out, I guess depending on which app you use