Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:26:06 + Nuno Magalhães nunomagalh...@eu.ipp.pt wrote: I'm here because i want choice and i like stuff to be modular and open, not closed and monolithic (unless we're talking about Clarke's 2001). Nuno, You've just almost completely described my intentions in one sentence. Very nice! I'd just add one thing: I'm also here because I demand trustworthy software vendors. SteveT Steve Litt* http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
Didn't know this thread was poll-ish. I use/administer/whatever 100 machines at the moment: 11 run linux, the other 1 (my laptop) runs windows while still in warranty (and because in a realistic world i have to deal with Microsoft Office, although i've heard its 2003 version runs well in WINE). Of the 11 linux boxes: * 1 is my desktop which currently runs Whezzy with care taken every time i issue an apt-get install. This machine's been mostly for testing as some of its drives don't play along with the mobo's BIOS so i'll have to postpone ZFS for the moment and stick to RAID5 once i replace those drives. Later it'll be my home server. * Another 1 is a VPS, running Debian stable. * The other 1 is my work laptop which soon will run some other linux instead of the current ubuntu (which i dislike). I've been a regular user for probably around 10 years, alergic to behemoth DEs, not alergic to CLI or compiling stuff from source when even Sid is way behind, considering Slackware, Gentoo and/or LFS to try out new stuff, learn stuff and find good replacements for Debian (i'm not a distro-hoper, but that will very likely change). Yes, Devuan will be on that list. :) I'm also considering OpenBSD and OpenIndiana, assuming i have time to tinker. I have a lot of curiosity and too little time, but i'll help if i can. I'm here because i want choice and i like stuff to be modular and open, not closed and monolithic (unless we're talking about Clarke's 2001). Cheers, Nuno ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
Le 17/02/2015 01:23, Isaac Dunham a écrit : But shell scripts can be written well, and writing a shell script to solve a problem beats writing a custom config to handle how one tool does it, and then not being able to apply that to another platform... or an older version of the same distro. And so I would rather use something that *expects* shell scripts than something that tolerates them for backwards compatability. And I'm certainly not interested in using a custom config because RedHat's employees can't understand how to write fast shell scripts. Why should I expect them to write efficient and safe C if they can't manage efficient and safe sh? The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. Thanks, Isaac Dunham Isaac, you already wrote that in another ML, and I agree with you so much that I now explicitely use this method: have as many command-line switches as necessary in the application and invoke it through a shell script which sets them all. Everybody reading the script understands what it is doing. It's more user-friendly than using a different configuration proto-language for every new application. Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
You dont have to be a server admin to be concerned about security. I'm a desktop user/developer and while customization is nice, security is paramount. Revelations about the NSA has really made me reconsider system security for my box and linux in general. Obviously, systemd has a fundamental design flaw: it has no design because it's completely ad hoc! I'm certain that if not already, sometime in the future a remotely exploitable bug will be found and will have the terrifying potential of being able to control any networked machine that is running it. So for the sake of the future, I'm working on a seamless security paradigm that will minimize the capabilities programs to minimize the damage in the event that they turn hostile. Don't hold your breath though, I'm still designing it. UNIX/POSIX has impressively robust security mechanisms, we just have to apply them properly. - Gravis On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. Macintosh is definitely for these guys, first of all because its VM works like a breeze. Forget dual-boot: it's a waste of time. Nate told us the other day that a majority of Debian developpers follow the Mac way; the more I think of it the more sense it makes to me, although it is not my way. Gnome and KDE are aiming to produce a free equivalent of the Mac. OK, they're dropping freedom in the way, but they will produce at least desktops you don't have to pay for. They may eventually pull the carpet under the feet of Apple some day ... or not. 2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and for wich free software arised. To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with slightly different motivations (I find myself in both): 1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop, 2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their desktop. This all comes from reading you guys during the past month, including Mr FUCK FUCK FUCK :-). But maybe I missed some people. Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
Gravis, Should we understand it's based on POSIX permissions and not on ad hoc daemon? I'll keep breezing, but a little faster :-) Didier Le 16/02/2015 16:55, Gravis a écrit : You dont have to be a server admin to be concerned about security. I'm a desktop user/developer and while customization is nice, security is paramount. Revelations about the NSA has really made me reconsider system security for my box and linux in general. Obviously, systemd has a fundamental design flaw: it has no design because it's completely ad hoc! I'm certain that if not already, sometime in the future a remotely exploitable bug will be found and will have the terrifying potential of being able to control any networked machine that is running it. So for the sake of the future, I'm working on a seamless security paradigm that will minimize the capabilities programs to minimize the damage in the event that they turn hostile. Don't hold your breath though, I'm still designing it. UNIX/POSIX has impressively robust security mechanisms, we just have to apply them properly. - Gravis On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. Macintosh is definitely for these guys, first of all because its VM works like a breeze. Forget dual-boot: it's a waste of time. Nate told us the other day that a majority of Debian developpers follow the Mac way; the more I think of it the more sense it makes to me, although it is not my way. Gnome and KDE are aiming to produce a free equivalent of the Mac. OK, they're dropping freedom in the way, but they will produce at least desktops you don't have to pay for. They may eventually pull the carpet under the feet of Apple some day ... or not. 2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and for wich free software arised. To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with slightly different motivations (I find myself in both): 1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop, 2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their desktop. This all comes from reading you guys during the past month, including Mr "FUCK FUCK FUCK" :-). But maybe I missed some people. Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
Hi Steve and Vince. I agree with you that the desktop must stay as slim as possible, which means not installing the stuff you don't ask for. However I seem to still need more than you. Let's start a list of guis: Xterm, Synaptic, spread-shit, presentations (eg. libre-office-impress) word processor, Lyx, Inkscape, gimp, decent mail client, full featured web browser, Xsane, scribus, openshot, vlc, ristretto, Skype, TeamSpeak, GoogleEarth. I did not list Emacs since I mostly use it inside xterm. For what concerns tweaking: I have never seen an X11 config to work out of the box after the install, before it used udev. And if you remove network-manager, like me, either you spend some time to configure your wpa friends once for all, or you spend time with all the needed CLI apps to start and stop it everytime you need it. Sure, in 1993 there was no wifi and we lived well :-). There is also the OpenDesktop feature which creates automatically a bunch of directories you don't want. It needs some editing to suppress them. Cups does not work properly out of the box; you must give it a list of your print servers if you are roaming, but this is also true for Mac; but I suspect it's easier on Mac. My conclusion is that, if you are looking for productivity on a Linux desktop, you still need to do yourself a few settings. There is one point on which we certainly all agree: do not install by default one million apps the user will never use and even never know they exist, which seems to be the trend of the Gnome and KDE maintaners on Debian. Didier Le 16/02/2015 17:36, Vince Mulhollon a écrit : On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. The root cause of a lot of the trouble has come from people rationalizing bad decisions, or distracting from bad decisions, as "well, the desktop needs it so we have to do (insert bad idea here)". Combined with co-opting the desktop to mean "really awful hyper obese GUI environments for tablets" or something. Nobody eats their own dogfood of those awful DEs so whatever the corporate is, goes, and it runs a little further off the rails every month, a little less usable, every step. The ideal linux desktop being chromium, emacs, urxvt, and a way to switch between them has been co-opted into a weapon of mass destruction, a product tying scheme to re-implement the whole unix paradigm in a giant software development inner platform anti-pattern. There shouldn't be any "tweaking" for a desktop. This whole bad idea comes from marketing at Microsoft where they figured they could make more license revenue by playing market segmentation games, so intentionally cripple a server kernel and call it a desktop became policy to increase revenue, because server ops can afford to pay more, typically. There is no technical basis behind any of it, although the crippling process does have minor technical curiosity, its an organized crime extortion racket, not a technological characteristic of "desktop-full-ness" with a slider you can tweak. I see no reason why the FOSS community has to play along with those crooks in their own game. There is a tweaking subculture in FOSS that greatly enjoys maxing irrelevant metrics, and as long as they don't screw anything up for everyone else, they are harmless, but sometimes they really freak out about how the whole world has to change and revolve around them so their meaningless non-real world metric can increase 0.1% more than the other guy's meaningless non-real world metric. Sometimes they find a change that is a universal good for everyone, which is cool although rare. Combine the two awful ideas, of co-opting the desktop as a weapon, and what boils down to the tyranny of the marketing droids with a side dish of the tyranny of the minority, and you have the current state of "the linux desktop", which is best avoided. I use something totally different from "the official
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 02/16/2015 11:23 AM, Steve Litt wrote: On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:44:04 +0100 Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. I have used Unix and its derivatives since Bell Labs Version 7 and the original BSD from the Regents of California at Berkley port. I currently use Linux and have been doing so since V.1.13. Though I do compile my own customized kernel (3.4.105 on wheezy and elsewhere) as well as other application, I no longer desire to do too much of this. All my work stations are Linux. I run a LAN server for home which is currently freeBSD. In summary, my application software days are long past though I do write my own maintenance scripts. However, the last 10 years of work prior to retirement were in threat analysis (physical, logical) and embedded control systems design and coding (process control, weapons control systems). This experience along with many years in hardware abstraction coding for Unix kernels at Bell Labs and my education, gives me a very specific attitude towards code and design. At this juncture, I will either find a version of Linux that follows the Unix philosophy of KISS (keep it simple stupid) or return to my BSD roots. Best of luck with your endeavor. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iF4EAREIAAYFAlTiLU4ACgkQpY/BHpBmP2rALAD/VkzOhV9ea58Q3ASn9nEypgO1 ZYSP896hD+0eErVcQvYA/3vNt1gIkTFf9ioVbEbE3De/3i+E2N5lI8enMAPch9qJ =R5u4 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:44:04 +0100 Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. Hi Didier, I'll explain my motivations, and perhaps others are in my boat... My Daily Driver Desktop is currently Wheezy, soon to be either Manjaro minus systemd, PC-BSD or Devuan. Yes, I use servers, such as Dovecot, but primarily I create content. In my opinion, GNU/Linux is my OS, and my GUI is just a small component bolted onto my OS with a few standard bolts. I don't hold my GUI responsible for the likes of network connectivity: I have CLI software to do that. IMHO, my GUI is a guest of my OS: My OS tells the GUI my house, my rules, not the other way around. In other words, I can take any old server Linux, install Openbox, dmenu, and some office and authoring apps, and I'm all set. Furthermore, I want to be able to take an adjustable wrench and screwdriver and modify or repair my OS. I don't want to use scarce, complex, expensive specialized tools. I want my OS modular, with thin, well defined interaction between the parts. You know, like Linux ten years ago. So my position is this: I'm mainly a desktop guy, but give me a server OS with access to Openbox, spreadsheet, LaTeX, a good spreadsheet (I like Gnumeric, but who knows how long that will remain uncontaminated), Inkscape, some sort of pixel editor (was Gimp, but, ummm), Python, C, and I'll take care of the rest, without telling my distro to put in all sorts of handyisms for me. SteveT Steve Litt* http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. The root cause of a lot of the trouble has come from people rationalizing bad decisions, or distracting from bad decisions, as well, the desktop needs it so we have to do (insert bad idea here). Combined with co-opting the desktop to mean really awful hyper obese GUI environments for tablets or something. Nobody eats their own dogfood of those awful DEs so whatever the corporate is, goes, and it runs a little further off the rails every month, a little less usable, every step. The ideal linux desktop being chromium, emacs, urxvt, and a way to switch between them has been co-opted into a weapon of mass destruction, a product tying scheme to re-implement the whole unix paradigm in a giant software development inner platform anti-pattern. There shouldn't be any tweaking for a desktop. This whole bad idea comes from marketing at Microsoft where they figured they could make more license revenue by playing market segmentation games, so intentionally cripple a server kernel and call it a desktop became policy to increase revenue, because server ops can afford to pay more, typically. There is no technical basis behind any of it, although the crippling process does have minor technical curiosity, its an organized crime extortion racket, not a technological characteristic of desktop-full-ness with a slider you can tweak. I see no reason why the FOSS community has to play along with those crooks in their own game. There is a tweaking subculture in FOSS that greatly enjoys maxing irrelevant metrics, and as long as they don't screw anything up for everyone else, they are harmless, but sometimes they really freak out about how the whole world has to change and revolve around them so their meaningless non-real world metric can increase 0.1% more than the other guy's meaningless non-real world metric. Sometimes they find a change that is a universal good for everyone, which is cool although rare. Combine the two awful ideas, of co-opting the desktop as a weapon, and what boils down to the tyranny of the marketing droids with a side dish of the tyranny of the minority, and you have the current state of the linux desktop, which is best avoided. I use something totally different from the official trademarked linux desktop which is a desktop that happens to run linux. All you need do for us desktop users is not intentionally cripple the system by active efforts to stop us. As long as X and xdm and xmonad and urxvt will run, I'll be fine, no worse off than I was in '93 when I fired up my first linux desktop (A SLS install off a local BBS, without X until I got a newer VGA video card, as I recall). Really what the world needs is a SDL graphics layer implementation of chromium. Given a decent unicode console font for emacs, I'm pretty happy. Apparently a browser called netsurf works pretty well in a console window. I could do entirely without X and be pretty happy if I have a workable web browser. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
Should we understand it's based on POSIX permissions and not on ad hoc daemon? yes. however, there is currently a problem with flooding the system with hundreds of new users and groups. i'm investigating the possibility of using extended file attributes. --Gravis On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Gravis, Should we understand it's based on POSIX permissions and not on ad hoc daemon? I'll keep breezing, but a little faster :-) Didier Le 16/02/2015 16:55, Gravis a écrit : You dont have to be a server admin to be concerned about security. I'm a desktop user/developer and while customization is nice, security is paramount. Revelations about the NSA has really made me reconsider system security for my box and linux in general. Obviously, systemd has a fundamental design flaw: it has no design because it's completely ad hoc! I'm certain that if not already, sometime in the future a remotely exploitable bug will be found and will have the terrifying potential of being able to control any networked machine that is running it. So for the sake of the future, I'm working on a seamless security paradigm that will minimize the capabilities programs to minimize the damage in the event that they turn hostile. Don't hold your breath though, I'm still designing it. UNIX/POSIX has impressively robust security mechanisms, we just have to apply them properly. - Gravis On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr wrote: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. Macintosh is definitely for these guys, first of all because its VM works like a breeze. Forget dual-boot: it's a waste of time. Nate told us the other day that a majority of Debian developpers follow the Mac way; the more I think of it the more sense it makes to me, although it is not my way. Gnome and KDE are aiming to produce a free equivalent of the Mac. OK, they're dropping freedom in the way, but they will produce at least desktops you don't have to pay for. They may eventually pull the carpet under the feet of Apple some day ... or not. 2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and for wich free software arised. To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with slightly different motivations (I find myself in both): 1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop, 2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their desktop. This all comes from reading you guys during the past month, including Mr FUCK FUCK FUCK :-). But maybe I missed some people. Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list...@lists.dyne.orghttps://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
- Original Message - From: Didier Kryn k...@in2p3.fr Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. For me, the line between desktop and server is very blurred. I use Debian in a home environment for myself and family members. I am responsible for the maintenance of 11 Debian machines. LXDE is the desktop of choice for most, since Gnome 3 was introduced on Wheezy and the long-term existence of Gnome Classic (or Gnome Fallback) is questionable. Myself, I use Fluxbox. Some of my machines are CLI only. Security is a top priority. I also appreciate the large number of packages that Debian provides. I followed the systemd debates carefully on debian-user and debian-devel. I now am of the opinion that a large number of Debian developers are not paranoid enough to be my OS provider. High-value software to me, in no particular order, includes: Libreoffice Firefox LXDE [2] Fluxbox Openbox Ardour Jack easytag flac pcmanfm xterm xcalc VLC mplayer MythTV (from deb-multimedia.org) Handbrake (from deb-multimedia.org) ssh nfs ldap iptables music player [1] 1: I like Rhythmbox, but the interface is getting worse and the transcode feature seems finicky. I have been mostly using Guayadeque recently. I have need for both a basic player, and for something to transcode flac files to ogg vorbis or mp3 when music is copied to a portable player or usb stick. On Jessie without systemd, it can no longer detect removable media, so its days on my system may be numbered. See my so-far unanswered bug report: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774871 2: Personally, I don't care if Devuan includes Gnome or not. I think Gnome is so committed to 1) not being optimized for desktops and 2) using systemd, that it would be fair to simply write it off as unusable in Devuan. As long as I have alternatives, I am fine with that. Their vision for their product does not impress me. I think the only reason they have survived the past several years is because they have been the default on so many distros for so long. But today I think there are better choices for default desktop. LXDE and XFCE seem good. But I honestly think most people would be well-served with something basic like Fluxbox or Openbox with a customized startup script which runs wicd, and maybe adding something like fbpanel. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 06:22:00PM +, Alberto Zuin - Liste wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 IMHO, an user who wants a very complete easy/ready to use desktop probably will go to Mac OS or to a distro specialized to be a desktop (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc.). I'd like a complete, easy-to-use desktop. But that doesn't mean every feature under the sun. It means just the packages I use, because every other package gets in my way by making the menus long. What I do want is to be able to install packages easily. aptitude does that just fine, once I have identified the package I want. What's needed on top of that is an index of available packages, which identifies them not by name (which is often meaningless), but by function and features. But the huge number of menu items I have on my xfce desktop on Debian testing right now is, well, just too much. And I think that even so, there's too much stuff on the screen, and too many desktop features that I'm not even aware of. Just one menu with the tools I choose to have is enough. Long ago I used a Unix workstation with X. Even the window manager ran on a different computer. And my applications ran elsewhare, too. It started up an xterm, and rest was up to me. I was happy with that. -- hendrik The most part of Devaun installation will be server, because avoiding systemd on it, is not only a philosophical purpose. The people who will use Devaun as desktop, will be power user so the only important thing is to let the user choose what packages wants to install and not create a complete DE as default at the moment of the installation (like Ubuntu/Mind/Fedora does). Ciao, Alberto P.S. I'm one of the firsts: I manage about 150 debian server installation without gui, but my two desktops are a MacBook Air with Mac OS, and an Arch Linux workstation with Gnome (and systemd, networkmanager, pulseaudio and all these horrible things). Franco, are you happy? ;-) Il 16/02/2015 1:44 pm, Didier Kryn ha scritto: Hi folks. Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is onboard, I mean the audience. 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. Macintosh is definitely for these guys, first of all because its VM works like a breeze. Forget dual-boot: it's a waste of time. Nate told us the other day that a majority of Debian developpers follow the Mac way; the more I think of it the more sense it makes to me, although it is not my way. Gnome and KDE are aiming to produce a free equivalent of the Mac. OK, they're dropping freedom in the way, but they will produce at least desktops you don't have to pay for. They may eventually pull the carpet under the feet of Apple some day ... or not. 2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and for wich free software arised. To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with slightly different motivations (I find myself in both): 1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop, 2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their desktop. This all comes from reading you guys during the past month, including Mr FUCK FUCK FUCK :-). But maybe I missed some people. Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJU4jVIAAoJEAzproFXfBTIaSgP/0WwWt/BfWMTXkO89rfYdGNE ZbCELma6UCd9PSLzBXJnc3kVLZOmxi03IyU1SlqnEZwU9NSP+TpXvkOVTrKBMedI z9TdXrRg+mZYHGL8Bri5JlY4VI+YYlZakwkIMFZBufjit7iqVaHUzn1GjrjHE2Ey Uuww4nEEmm648NVU9lxdVWMqcdoWkmResrG+YBmGJG30x9Bb7mIxWS7bUFEP9SlA R3LWlpwXSPVG37buMwPRFSVW8Tu5R58zWa2b2X48UyqkPAFvmDowP95jrIMWJflc wvupWqXyY7ucFGwt/SMQ+Jm8ubPH/hlZnP4MVTwTweEVKPwYaZUeZn/BzF1FStQl PtkBoi86CtialbvJHxTE8e/MtnGLso81/4DVlUmgE9elcCRF2RPl63zCAcqy1bdr yEw/a+mJduRaFPL3XpwIjF2Cl6At9Myw88cJzOnI5UfU4WVy2K4fWWbwXXBflFlw OaXHjRFflUt1E0+WsfbY8QeN5f4bPVD0d9BWSw25jcCNFgA1nvJDUxErPuneGsLx XuzOnOTGfqxZTrEC8yABAlW1hRN3J2PNwyPLRcmiVe+BT7ugdJY+hk7/uPab1kJL XaCZoo8wAVJMZ8IcQjEzbmhWvGBo/s4bEE7n8er6HbhuN9kxLJAXWFooFyCHL0Ne FrqxEqWLip2q0gHfPFlM =aPWT -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 02:44:04PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote: 1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly concerned with servers. 2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and for wich free software arised. To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with slightly different motivations (I find myself in both): 1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop, 2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their desktop. I suppose I fit in #2; I've used Linux since 2006, which is by now over a third of my life, with my first Linux system being a secondhand Thinkpad running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. Getting that to work nicely in 64 megabytes of RAM took a bit of work, but it paid off: it ran more nicely than the DEs I've tried on my current netbook. Since that point, I've built an LFS-ish system with an alternate libc. I can knock out a sysv-style init script (apart from the LSB headers) in a matter of minutes, without looking at the documentation. Yes, I know C well enough to write smallish tools, and if I wanted to I could probably get an overview of how systemd works internally-- after spending several weeks reading through it. ;) But shell scripts can be written well, and writing a shell script to solve a problem beats writing a custom config to handle how one tool does it, and then not being able to apply that to another platform... or an older version of the same distro. And so I would rather use something that *expects* shell scripts than something that tolerates them for backwards compatability. And I'm certainly not interested in using a custom config because RedHat's employees can't understand how to write fast shell scripts. Why should I expect them to write efficient and safe C if they can't manage efficient and safe sh? The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. Thanks, Isaac Dunham ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 06:41:06PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote: On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:36:19 -0600 Vince Mulhollon vi...@mulhollon.com wrote: There shouldn't be any tweaking for a desktop. This whole bad idea comes from marketing at Microsoft Whoaaa, wait a minute. Another word for tweaking is choice, kind of like the reason we revolted and overthrew Debian. I don't think he was talking about choosing and adjusting the desktop to suit you. I think he was talking about changing the underlying infrastructure so it inexorably leads the way to a desktop, making other desktops difficult, and making traaditional nondesktop awkward. -- hendrik ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:36:19 -0600 Vince Mulhollon vi...@mulhollon.com wrote: There shouldn't be any tweaking for a desktop. This whole bad idea comes from marketing at Microsoft Whoaaa, wait a minute. Another word for tweaking is choice, kind of like the reason we revolted and overthrew Debian. On a more practical plane, I use and love Openbox. But fact is, as it comes from the factory, Openbox sucks. Few hotkeys, wrong mouse movements, no margin. As it comes from the factory, it's a continual stream of frustrating stumbling blocks. Not to worry. I installed dmenu for lightning fast program instantiation. I changed a bunch of hotkeys and added a lot of hotkeys to accommodate a touch-typist. I have an ultra-easy (for me) key combo to run dmenu. I put a 6px margin on the left side of the screen so there's always a part of the desktop I can click for root menu or list of open windows. My hotkey for dmenu is Ctrl+Shift+semicolon. I bet most of you would hate that. Perhaps you'd prefer it be a simple function key. Fortunately, you can tweak Openbox to make the hotkey the function key of your choice. If I didn't want to tweak, I'd be using Windows, and let Microsoft tell me how to organize my workflow and work habits. SteveT Steve Litt* http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
On February 16, 2015 at 10:55 AM Gravis rin...@adaptivetime.com wrote: You dont have to be a server admin to be concerned about security. I'm a desktop user/developer and while customization is nice, security is paramount. Revelations about the NSA has really made me reconsider system security for my box and linux in general. Obviously, systemd has a fundamental design flaw: it has no design because it's completely ad hoc! I'm certain that if not already, sometime in the future a remotely exploitable bug will be found and will have the terrifying potential of being able to control any networked machine that is running it. Perhaps computer scientists should read spy novels. The best security seems to rely on compartmentalization. No individual cell (service, feature) depends on how the others work except at the direct interface, so the system itself resists damage and systematic attack. Well, don't read too much literally into this except to note that we all know that systemd subverts this. It's not just the Unix way, it's the reliability way. Peter Olson ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
