Ferk

Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.

You mean usability? it's the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.

The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking.. as opposed to being your own tastes the ones molding to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion or workflow.

So the bad thing is the off chance that he would benefit?

Because that's a very different thing. Then this should not be about judging morals related to the thing they made, but executing punishment for a completely separate thing they did.

Then it's not a disagreement of morals, it's a disagreement on the approach you are taking to execute that punishment.

I’d be very wary of using any of his breakthroughs

Ah, but will you still use them? will you promote his breakthroughs if they help people? what if his scientific work leads to the cure for cancer?

Punish the nazi political work, promote the scientific work.

The more people learn to drive, the bigger the chance they'll get a private car, the more accidents, the more people will die. Thus: let's recommend everyone to not learn to drive.

I feel this path is sort of a baby-sitting approach to recommendations. Not only do I have to know if the software if good before recommending it, I also have to research if there's a chance that whoever I'm recommending it to might find a community somewhere for which they might lack enough critical thinking to judge on by themselves?

How about we recommend good software when it's good while at the same time recommending good ideals / good thoughts when they are good?

It's morally wrong to promote bad things, and morally good to promote good things.

Just because I admire the theories Isaac Newton came up with and I encourage others to learn about them does not mean I support everything Isaac Newton did, said or thought.

All of our society is built on the shoulders of giants who did a lot of "good" despite being, in most cases, "bad people".

"Super" is the one modifier key that you can rely on overwriting without interfering with normal app shortcuts, so I'd personally rather prefer if applications don't start trying to use the Super key for their own things.

I have set up Super key shortcuts for all kinds of desktop management operations, opening the launcher/terminal/browser, switching workspaces/windows, closing windows, move/resize, switch tiling mode, audio control, make my package manager install updates, switch between a set of resolutions, activate my password manager, etc.

That said, Copy/Paste is a general/global enough operation that I would not mind having Super+C/V send to the current active app the Copy/Paste keycode (I might do that actually, now that I know that there's a code apps are starting to support!). But I think it should be the desktop environment the one configuring "Super" shortcuts, not the app.

It makes sense for each application to have their own interpretation of what does each control character (or Control shortcut) do. It's not like all control characters have a very reliable meaning to begin with.. I mean, the backspace character (Control+H) was originally meant to move a character backwards without deleting it, but most screen terminals didn't do that. If what you mean is alternate characters from Unicode and so, then the "Alt" key would be more suitable for that. And in ISO keyboards, "AltGr" is a very common way to have combinations that insert alternate symbols.

Let’s indeed hope that they back it up with action. Better late than never. Though, I wonder what “guarantee” you’re referring to.

Any "action" that does not result in guarantees isn't helpful to solve this. So again, what I care about is guarantees.

For example, one way to "guarantee" that there's no code that's unaccounted for would be to achieve reproducible builds that can be rebuilt and obtain always the same binary bit-by-bit. So if the binary blob resulting from compiling from clean source matches the one offered then that's proof that the distributed binary was built cleanly and there was no malware being slipped through.

The issue is that this wouldn't just be a Ventoy problem, but also an upstream problem, since all projects Ventoy depends on would need to be, themselves, reproducible. So this wouldn't be an easy task, or even a task that Ventoy should do on their own, imho.

FWIW, slightly over a month ago, someone started working on a solution.

I definitely wouldn't trust that either until there's guarantees. Again, I only care about what guarantees are offered. It's not about who is the one managing the github account and/or what subjective reputation that random anonymous person might have.

The problem isn't the existence of precompiled binary blobs either, so removing the binaries is not solving the issue. The problem is in the traceability and what guarantees we have that the final collection of compiled binary blobs that ultimately is offered for download (and we do need binary blobs for download ultimately) is actually corresponding to libre/open source releases without potentially malicious code.

~~The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think this is related to the return of Ventoy’s maintainer. But I digress…~~

I don't think the maintainer went away. I've seen successfully maintained projects with much slower pace than this, specially projects for which stability is important. Last Bash commit was in 2024 and I wouldn't say it's unmaintained. Ventoy had a release 3 months ago.

Also, would it be bad if that was what triggered the interest to work on it? I mean, the post straight away mentions the github issue where that fork was advertised, and it implies that it's in that issue where they noticed that people have started to care about the blobs. So it could well be that they saw there's people who care enough to spend their time working for it (ie. they even made a fork), so why not open the doors for them? It does not have to always be drama.

To me, what matters is what guarantees they offer and/or plan to offer, not some subjective and fleeting idea of people online having expectation of at what speed things need to be done.

Can someone do it faster? then do it (and do it in the open, so anyway Ventoy can benefit too and essentially you'll be contributing!).. but if you jump and start using a fork that has not done already the work and given the guarantees Ventoy is planning to give, then you are placing your trust in a much much worse and shaky ground. I'm sure a lot of people would use your malware if you presented it as a WIP Ventoy fork marketed as safer when it really isn't.

it may as well be a system managed folder at that point.

In a way it is. But user-level system, as opposed to root-level system.

I’m not sure why you’re bringing the XDG or systemd “standard” into this.

Probably because in their "basedir" specification they do recommend ~/.local/bin to be in $PATH. I'm sure there's more than one distro following that spec, whether we'd want to consider it standard or not. I also believe there's some software (like flatpak) that may place scripts there too, when configured to offer commands for user-level instalations.

Here's a quote from the spec:

User-specific executable files may be stored in $HOME/.local/bin. Distributions should ensure this directory shows up in the UNIX $PATH environment variable, at an appropriate place.

Ok, there are no numbers from 2024 yet in the source.

I think the solar capacity in 2023 for China was 525GW.

So a 277 GW increase in solar means it increased by (277 / 525) 52.76% (that's great!)

That same percentage increase over the current value in terms of production would not make it rise past Australia per capita yet, but nobody can deny that's an impressive pace.

Also, considering that the trend in population numbers for China is slowly starting to decrease, that could also contribute to an increase in the per capita numbers in the future.

Doesn't that table show Australia has double the consumption? also that consumption number is in total primary energy, regardless if the energy comes from solar or not.

I believe that to see how much of the TPES for each country comes from solar we would need to divide the solar production per capita by the total consumption per capita:

- Australia: 1774 kWh / 63257 kWh = 2.80%
- China:      410 kWh / 33267 kWh = 1.23%

Sources: the 2023 numbers from his link, and the 2023 numbers from the source in your wikipedia link.

The article is talking about storage space, not about access to files in any particular filesystem.

Previous versions of Android 15 Terminal app only allowed 16GB of space to be used by the guest system. The article mentions it.

So even if you had 128GB in your phone, previously you could only use 16GB of them in the environment Google set up for the Linux Terminal subsystem, which made it very limiting. What the article says is that now they are removing that limitation.