Various projects. With C I wrote drivers and networking stacks for embedded systems, with C++ I worked for years on a the networking layers of a now long gone smartphone OS. With Rust I’ve been doing hobby projects like a library+application (win/linux/macos) for controlling WeMo switches on the LAN. Most recent is a Memory+CPU usage monitoring applet for the nascent COSMIC desktop environment.

I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can’t be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.

So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.

COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.

Yeah, GuildWars2, Valheim, Pathfinder WotR, etc. those sort of games… So I’m a bit niche, some gamers have more issues than I.

I got a gnome-session installed for games that have problems with COSMIC but fortunately haven’t needed it for a while now.

I started with Slackware in the nineties, have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed.

I could use anything really but these days my focus have moved; I kinda just want functional and well configured up front. Using Pop!_OS 24 alpha on my gaming/dev laptop, it works well/is well put together and I’m having fun writing COSMIC apps. I’m using Ubuntu on a few servers, I picked it many years ago and they’ve been through a number of painless upgrades.

GIMP 3.0 makes it a lot easier for devs to add functionality and they’re starting a UX working group.

But I find it usable, I’ve been using it weekly for a very long time. I’m happy to see development picking up though with more people joining.

It’s certainly safer though one can probably still do some damage in /etc, if determined.

There are some other differences, for example Pop!_OS while on a LTS base still gets regular updates of kernel, Mesa and Nvidia drivers which is nice.

I believe the EU redirected open source funding to LLM/“AI”. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund on the other hand had its budget increased.

You always have to consider the sources of such whispers, otherwise it means very little. The devs, who are few and works on evenings because they have day jobs, a well-know open source issue for many projects, were clear about when they started in earnest on getting 3.0 done, less than 3 years ago. Until then they’ve spent most of their time adding features to 2.10 and the 2.9 branch was more of a long lived testing ground with occational test releases that cause talk sometimes. The aim was RC primo or medio this year, they’re only slightly late.

But I get the feeling more devs are starting to contribute now it’s near 3.0, maybe because the new architecture actually makes it easier. So there’s hope a lot will start to happen. There’s even a UI working group.

I’m running the 2.9 nightly, it’s better in a multitude of little ways as well as having a number of new features.

Somewhere, I think it was here Carl mentions it might be early next year as he doesn’t want to pressure devs over Christmas.

I think they’ll release an Alpha update monthly until Beta.

Same, I’ve done C and C++ for several decades and I’ve spent too much time of that hunting obscure memory issus triggered by rare race conditions. No matter how hard we try to use safe patterns we are all too human. The most experienced C++ devs I know are the first to admit this.

In Rust once it compiles much less time is spent debugging and a whole big category of bugs are gone from the production code.

And C++ aient pretty but maybe that’s subjective.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.

And one less thing to waste time on for experienced users.

Yay! Something that isn’t proprietary and resembles Obsidian!

I’ve been using Joplin for many years, it looks like this, works on most platforms and has [optionally encrypted] cloud support.

For a while for me it took over from drawing rectangles on the desktop.

I dunno, a lot of CEO’s are probably laughing all the way to the bank.

Yeah, the author normally rarely misses an opportunity to complain about KDE being too complex in his articles - and COSMIC aims to fall in that sweet spot between the extremes that are GNOME and KDE, while adding features like optional but native tiling.

The applet concept where applets live in their own process and communicate via Wayland protocols (behind a COSMIC API) is also less likely to break than GNOME plugins that are horribly injected into its bowels.

Given the toolkit, organized development and UX decisions being up-front designed with figma sketches, etc. that are reviewed before implemented, and having both paid developers and community contributors it has a lot of potential.

This is a good thing, it is much needed for Snap and Flatpak and will make sandboxed applications less confusing for those who don’t grog flatseal/kde-settings/etc. and adds convenience for everyone.

Yeah Denmark is very relaxed about bodies and public nudity in general. Denmark was the world’s first country (in the modern world) to legalize porn. However, consent matters and consenting to one type of exposure doesn’t mean consenting to everything.

Greybeard here. I can use vi, emacs, nano, etc. and use whatever is available if it suits the job. For many years I did dev in emacs on my computers and on other systems used vi for quick edits. Currently on my own laptop I have micro as default term editor now. For Rust development - code, though I have hopes for Lapce.

They’re all just tools and so are people who get tribal about things.