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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

    You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

    When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.




  • I like that more behaves like cat when there’s less than a page of output rather than requiring you to press q to get back to the prompt even when it would just fit.

    There’s probably a way to make less do that too, but more already does it without configuration. Overall I use less most of the time but I like having the option.


  • I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

    Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

    You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.







  • The BDFL model, as it’s called, is what allows large projects to continue to have focused vision rather than devolving into design-by-committee. The kernel is actually already well beyond pure BDFL, but my point is having a single point of overall leadership can be a huge boon for the organization of large and complex projects. FOSS philosophy has literally nothing to do with management structure; it’s entirely about the rights of the end user.

    BDFL is not without its own risks. WordPress is a good counterexample these days. But, when someone originates a project and sticks around to steer it, it would be silly to reject their proven successful leadership for such a vague reason as you have presented.

    When things do go sideways, people are free to fork the project. That is what FOSS is.



  • You’re absolutely right, you could take any binary that runs under an OS and set up a bootloader to execute it directly without an OS.

    The problem is that all programs, even ones in C, rely invisibly and enormously on the OS abstracting away hardware for them. The python interpreter doesn’t know the first thing about how to parse the raw bytes on a hard drive to find the location of the bytes that belong to a given file path. Files and filesystems are ‘fake’ when you get down to it, and the OS creates that fiction so each program doesn’t have to be customized per PC setup.

    So, ironically, to be able to truly kernel hack in python like you want would require writing tons of C to replace all OS hooks (like fopen to interact with a file, e.g.) with code that knows how to directly manipulate your hardware (speaking PCIe/NVMe to get to the disk, speaking GPT to find the partition on the disk, speaking ext4 to find the file in the partition, e.g.).

    OSes are complex as hell for a reason, and by retrofitting python to run on bare metal like that would require recreating that complexity in the interpreter.


  • The networking aspect will likely be the trickiest, but if you’re already interested in administrating a VPS you can absolutely do it.

    1. Have an ISP that doesn’t block inbound connections. So far both Comcast and Verizon have been cool to me in that regard.
    2. Configure your router to always give your host machine the same internal-network IP address.
    3. Configure your router to forward any relevant ports (TCP/80 for insecure HTTP, e.g.) to the internal address you assigned to your host.
    4. Go to ifconfig.me or similar to ascertain your public Internet IP address.
    5. Buy a domain (Namecheap has been good to me for a decade) and change its A record to point to that address!

    Not hard, but not exactly uncomplicated either.