Coming out shortly.

oday the new statistics from statCounter should come out. Maybe hours from now. I am very interested in them. I am eager to see if there’s an upward trend in GNU/Linux usage as seen by the data they collect.

We’re going through an important transitionary period.

irc.linux.org

rowth of IRC space was noted earlier today in Techrights and I’ve joined the IRC network of linux.org.

Unlike the site linux.com, this one has nothing to do with the Linux Foundation and years ago in IRC I spoke to the person who ran linux.org.

The address for the network is irc.linux.org with default port numbers.

“Summer of the Linux desktop”

rowth of GNU/Linux has accelerated this summer and tomorrow at around 10AM statCounter will produce more evidence of that.

I plan to stay home around that time to check the latest data. I also to examine trends in Cloudflare Rader.

Since last reboot

oming up next week is a meaningful (to me anyway) milestone. It’ll be 1000 days of uptime on my laptop:

roy@bubi:~$ uptime
 06:37:35 up 990 days, 21:49,  3 users,  load average: 9.03, 8.29, 8.10

I’m tempted to do a reboot after 10000, but don’t quite see the point doing so.

HE good news of the day is, RMS is open to feedback – including to criticism – on systemd.

I myself am not a fan of systemd, I think it exists for business reasons rather than for purely technical reasons. Considering the core developers, it’s not a hobbyist or community project.

A friend said to me: “I am not in the mailing list to which RMS sent that message. RMS does not see the forest for the trees. While, yes, the licensing is free, the code is written in such a way that only dedicated (paid) coders with the both the time and the will to sort through the intertwined, uncommented, interdependent base can even consider modifying it. Thus it is able to violate the spirit of software freedom by providing code which is unmodifiable in practice.”

One can modify it, like Linux, but one won’t manage to keep up with further changes and future versions (releases) . With many CVEs to address, any fork of Linux would quickly become obsolete.

Linux is legally “free software”, but in practice it has been sort of monopolies by a collective of large companies. There must be some term to describe such software or phenomenon.

“The license is only the necessary first step,” the friend said. “The code has to be written in such a way that it is also in practice, 1. [usable or] compilable by any reasonably skilled practitioners; 2. readable by any reasonably skilled practitioners; 3. actually modifiable without an unreasonably high barrier to entry…”

“Microsoft’s Poettering’s systemd fails on all three points.”

Wayland has extensions-type abilities, but so does X. So it does not quite change the fact that Wayland can only be developed by few people in a cabal of large companies. Salaried by particular interests.

There are examples of the same further away from the kernel stack and in userspace.

As the friend put it: “Some of the containers and other systems (BigBlueButton) fail on point #1 as well. Point 1 is a prerequisite for Freedom 0, the freedom to run the program for any purpose. Point 2 is a prerequisite to Freedom 1, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so it meets one’s computing wishes.”

At the end, it is all about users controlling their computing and being able to tailor program or rely on others doing so.

Continuing the above: “Overly loquacious, convoluted, uncommented, and interconnected code / modules violate that quite clearly. If one only looks at the license and nothing more then systemd is Free software. However, if one looks at how (if) it fulfills the goals of software freedom then it fails on all fronts. Microsoft must not be allowed to continue to game the licensing.”

“However, I no longer have links to any of the above observations.”

hese days I use two media players to play my CDs (mostly 1990s albums and collections). One is KDE’s Dragon Player (because it’s based on Qt), the other is VLC. The latter has a lot more functionality but higher RAM footprint. In the past I used even leaner applications to achieve the same functionality. Those are no longer compatible with this setup (a lot changes in 20+ years in this sector).

I might write a detailed analysis about this some time in the future in a more Linux-centric site, but I need a unique and useful angle. I don’t have that at the moment.

This past weekend:

he northern part of America (Canada, US and the rest) is really keen on GNU/Linux, maybe for cultural and language reasons.

See above how GNU/Linux usage has grown there, set aside ChromeOS and Android, which also use Linux.