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Comment 12-15 secs (Score 1) 137

Running Slackware-current, using kernel 6.18.13. With a SSD, I'm seeing regular boot times of 12-15 secs, from GRUB2 to SDDM login screen. After supplying credentials, add perhaps 3 seconds more to a fully functional KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop.

It should be noted that Slackware is a systemd-free distribution which uses a simple BSD-like init system. I point out this because early on in systemd's development, one of the selling points was that "it would enable you to have faster boot times".

Comment Re:This Is How It Starts (Score 1) 107

I will always recommend KDE Plasma as the best desktop environment ever, hands down.But I deeply regret this instance of systemd creep into it, excluding not only the xBSDs, but all other Unices and even systemd-clean distros such as Slackware (the oldest continously maintained Linux distribution). Even more so when it was some time ago where the KDE homepage asked the question: is UNIX ready for the desktop? and described itself as:

KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.

Well, no longer, it seems. One would have expected such systemd creep from the GNOME folks, not from KDE.

Comment Locking out onboard GPUs (Score 1) 85

Game studios spend increasingly more time and resources by providing extremely complex graphics that require a discrete GPU, but are unplayable on PCs with integrated GPUs. They spend more, while locking out a vast source of potential revenue.

If your latest game requires a dual RTX 9000 with a liquid nitrogen cooling system and 3 kW of power usage for the highest settings, be my guest, but do not lock out potential users of your game at the lower end. In doing so, you're saying to millions of would-be gamers "I don't need/want your money".

Comment Re: That's a lot of data (Score 1) 72

Buy and install a single game and you'll download more than 40GB. Didn't BG3 break 100GB on its install?

40 GB is too low an estimate. Newer games are hugely bloated. RDR2 with all DLC is over 100GB too. AC:Origins was originally 45 GB, but now an "update" puts it on 70 GB territory. AC: Valhalla, Borderlands 3, Death Stranding, Far Cry 6 (170 GB), Watch Dogs: Legion, The Last of Us (part I)... all of them are extremely bloated. Downlad a few of them and you're toast under T-Mobile's plan.

Comment What they could expect? (Score 2) 91

So this is a text-based social network with absolutely no web/desktop access, and they wonder why they are losing users? Seriously, what they could expect??

Typing on a mobile tactile keyboard is excruciatingly awful. As long as they don't provide a consistent desktop website from which the user could navigate and type threads, they will keep losing users.

Comment I really don't understand the WHO here (Score 2) 161

I really don't understand the WHO here. We're not talking about saccharin or cyclamate, we're talking about aspartame! Its formula is rather straightforward: a methyl ester of an aspartate-phenylalanine dipeptide. In acid medium (for example, human stomach) it is hydrolyized to methanol and the two individual aminoacids.

And it has some good drawbacks. It's poison to those with phenylketonuria. And, it's hydrolyzed to methanol, which again is incredibly toxic. So it would be toxic, especially in high quantities... but carcinogenic? Then we would stop eating proteins, because phenylalanine and aspartate are carcinogenic? Doesn't really make any sense to me.

Anyone who claims that aspartame is linked to cancer should offer at least a plausuble explanation of its alleged carcinogenicity.

Red Hat Software

Red Hat is Dropping Its Support for LibreOffice (lwn.net) 141

The Red Hat Package Managers for LibreOffice "have recently been orphaned," according to a post by Red Hat manager Matthias Clasen on the "LibreOffice packages" mailing list, "and I thought it would be good to explain the reasons behind this." The Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat's desktop efforts) has maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of our work to support LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what's needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community.

The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.

We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8 and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on the Red Hat website). As part of that, the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term.

Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMs [Red Hat Package Managers] in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.

Commenters on LWN.net are now debating its impact.

One pointed out that "You will still find it in GNOME Software, which will install a Flatpak from FlatHub rather than an RPM from the distro."

Comment Re:In person isn't guarantee of more humane cut (Score 1) 208

Sometimes email vetted by the lawyers is the better way to go.

Indeed. It's a horrible move, no doubt, but many executive officers are such narcissists/sociopaths that this awful procedure is better.

There are ways to do much, much worse. The CEO could pull a Vishal Garg, for example.

Comment Want old-school Linux? Use Slackware (Score 5, Informative) 62

If you want old school Linux, just use Slackware. Right now, the development version (current) has kernel 6.1.5, and you can have state of the art (Plasma 5.26.5) or spartan (fvwm 2.7.0, twm 1.0.12) desktops/window managers. And no systemd. This is the closest thing to a classic Unix setup.

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