Open source software and nice hardware

The Fellowship of the Ring movie is almost 25 years old

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:55:12 +0100

+++ Saturday 13 December 2025 +++

The Fellowship of the Ring movie is almost 25 years old
=======================================================


"The Fellowship of the Ring" movie, the first of the
"Lord of the Rings" trilogy, is almost 25 years old. It
was released in December 2001.

Time surely flies.

At the time it was a big event for us. With a group of
friends, all fans of the three Lord of the Rings books,
we went to see the movie in the opening week.

The movie didn't disappoint, although in your head the
characters look differently, of course.

With the same group we made an event of seeing the next
parts.

The second episode, "The Two Towers", followed about a
year later. With the same group, we first watched the
DVD of "The Fellowship", and went to the cinema
directly afterward.

When the third episode, "The Return of the King" was
released, we did the same. First watch the DVDs of the
first two episodes, and went to the cinema to watch the
third and final part.


It is amazing that this is already so long ago.
Time to see if the movies are still on some disk, and
do a new LOTR-marathon. Maybe somewhere between
X-mas and New Years Eve ...


Last edited: $Date: 2025/12/13 18:55:12 $

All I want for X-mas is a system without Rust

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:25:22 +0100

+++ Monday  8 December 2025 +++

All I want for X-mas is a system without Rust
=============================================

The web page at rust-lang.org starts with a nice credo:

    A language empowering everyone to build reliable
    and efficient software.

Rust has the reputation of being a safe language, that helps to
prevent nasty vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and so on. Some
organizations even promote to write software that converts C-code
into Rust-code.

All around the world software developers are embracing Rust, with
the result that our systems get more and more infiltrated by
dependencies on Rust. This even starts to touch elements of the
kernel.

Using Rust sounds very cool, but have you ever tried to install Rust
and Cargo from source? This requires quite a beefy computer. Don't
expect to be able to do that on a simple system with, say 4 GB RAM
or less. Which raises some questions about the words 'everyone' and
'efficient' in the Rust credo.

Developers should use crappy systems
------------------------------------
If you are looking for a show case to exhibit why developers should
not work on shiny, state of the art hardware, with super fast
processors and 128 GB RAM or more, and Gigabit network connections,
than look no further than Rust.

The result of developers working in such environments can be
experienced daily on the web. Web pages build with the most fancy
framework first takes ages to download and then lock up your system
with all the computations needed to render the page.

Developers should experience what it means to download, build, and
use their stuff on every day systems. This experience will help them
to discover the importance of keeping systems small and light weight.
It lays bare the elements of their products that need improvement on
these aspects.

Smol computers
--------------
Computers with a less powerful system, with an older generation CPU
and somewhere around 4 to 8 GB RAM, are still very useful. Certainly
when run with a less demanding operating system like a BSD, and a
non-bloated desktop. There is no need to buy a brand new system
every three years, including all the environmental consequences that
comes with that.

Of course, this is common knowledge among the Gopher enthusiasts. We
all like such systems, run our favorite OS on them, and just keep
on using them. Compiling the lang/rust port on such a system is
very hard, if not impossible.

Currently it is still possible, by carefully selecting ports, to
build and run a system without Rust. Please, keep it that way.


Last edited: $Date: 2025/12/08 17:25:22 $

KDE going all-in on a Wayland future

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:46:53 +0100

+++ Wednesday 26 November 2025 +++

KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
====================================

Another important desktop environment is leaving away from X11.

Today KDE announced that the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be
Wayland-exclusive [1].


Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland,
and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

May you live in interesting times ...


[1]: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/

Last edited: $Date: 2025/11/26 15:46:53 $

Shutdown the ZNC server

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:06:06 +0100

+++ Wednesday 26 November 2025 +++

Shutdown the ZNC server
=======================

The last few months I have been not as much on IRC as I used to.

ZNC server
----------
I used to have a ZNC server running as an IRC bouncer.

This server gave me a 24x7 presence on IRC, and cached the
messages in a few channels.

The caching became less useful, as the ZNC server only caches
so much messages, and then starts flushing (first in, first out).
By the time I logged in, most messages were flushed already.

Also, the 24x7 presence gives the wrong impression.

So I decided to shut the ZNC server down. I didn't uninstall the
software, so when things change, I can always fire it up again.


Last edited: $Date: 2025/11/26 15:06:06 $

More scary thoughts on the future of open source desktops

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:39:58 +0100

+++ Saturday 22 November 2025 +++

More scary thoughts on the future of open source desktops
=========================================================

In my last years phlog "Scary thoughts on the future of the open
source desktop" [1] I explained that the domination of Linux in
the open source world constitutes a growing risk.

Today I read Joe Brockmeier's post [3], in which he points to the
blog post that Adrian Vovk -a GNOME contributor and member of its
release team- wrote last summer. This blog post is titled
"Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd" [2].

It states:

   GNOME is about to gain a few strong dependencies on systemd, and
   this will make running GNOME harder in environments that don't have
   systemd available.

I don't use GNOME, but many people do. GNOME also affects lots of
applications.

This development, the growing dependencies of GNOME on systemd, is
not unique. More and more components of the Linux environment are
either being replaced by systemd or become more dependent on it.

Which is bad news for the other open source platforms, like the BSDs.

Scary thoughts indeed.

[1] gopher://box.matto.nl/0/scary-thoughts-on-the-future-of-the-open-source-desktop.txt
[2] https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/1025560/



Last edited: $Date: 2025/11/22 09:39:58 $