Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 28, 2022
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=> [Rant] The broken capitalist web, yet another example
Don't worry, this post is not a ranting post about why the web as it is now is broken. All people reading content on gemini is fully aware of it I'm sure. This post is just highlighting yet another example that hit me while listening (against my will^^) to the latest TV ads of a well known company. The company is Carglass, but in the rest of the post it will be companyX because I don't want to repeat their name 10 times in this post :P. For those known familiar with this brand, it is known in France for their campaign for changing your car windshield and having a very annoying catch phrase (so marketing worked well). It is also known as Belron is other countries. Anyway enough about them.
[...]
Don't get me wrong, I really don't care about the brand and their ads, or the google ads paid by competitors to be "at the top", but I find it fascinating that search engine can't do their most basic work… What is it going to be next? Search engine are really in a shitty place right now, even for advanced users. I can't believe how harder it is now to find a response to a precise question without having to go through so much crapy results that are mostly just copies of other existing sites.
Also, it should be a good reminder that google is not a bookmark engine… It is a search engine making lots of money by allowing companies to "hack" the search results (not even talking about how they actually "play" with their ranking engine).
=> ytfzf - Youtube from the terminal
Because I can't stand ads and tracking, I was used to use FreeTube as a Youtube client. FreeTube is an electron application, so its massively bloated. But otherwise it has all the features I need. Unfortunately it only supports youtube-dl and that's very slow on my end so the videos buffer often.
Now I've found 'ytfzf', the "Youtube fuzzy finder". You can search videos on the terminal and watch them with mpv. It even displays thumbnails in the terminal with ueberzug!
What follows is like one of those food articles you find on the internet when you're trying just to find a simple apple pie recipe but instead you find a 20 minute article about someone's grandmother's special childhood apple pie and lots of unnecessary detail. Feel free to skip down to the parts that seem relevant to you, if any :)
[...]
I ran Debian on my Raspberry Pi's, but I never tried Debian unstable or testing repos previously. Earlier this year was announced Ubuntu Rolling Rhino, which is kind of a hack on top of Ubuntu to get these unstable rolling builds. But I've seen no longterm reports, so despite my interest, it seemed like I'd rather choose something that had more of a track record and community online if I get stuck.
As I spent more time working on Linux I began to understand better how distros differ. I found myself gravitating to certain preferences which included a large package repository. I also had certain interests in various kinds of computing minimalism, and over time became interested in trying out a distro that didn't use SystemD for its init system. I couldn't wrap my head around how Systemd worked, and I was interested in trying an init system that seemed more in keeping with the small interoperating Linux program philosophy.
[...]
I skipped Arch-derived Systemd-less distros like Artix just because I've already had an Arch experience. While I loved that any and all software was available in the aur community repos, things didn't always work for me and took numerous tinkering around when I used the Arch-derived distro previously. I'm sure with several more years of Linux experience now under my belt I could likely get things going a bit better, but I didn't necessarily feel a draw to 'the Arch way,' and the message boards and community around the distro don't particularly pull me in.
I also read reviews of Guix and Nix. These are rolling release and built around a package manager that makes it easier to reproduce your build systems and roll back upgrades if something breaks. But the reviews I read of both of these made it seem like they were fiddly and could use more refinement. I also read you can install nix as a secondary package manager on a Linux system, as a (better) alternative to snap or flatpack, so I could always install this on top of another distro if I so chose.
=> Notes on Installing Void Linux
This is part 2 on selecting, installing and running Void Linux. This is definitely only reading for a particular niche audience. You have been warned.
Part 1 contains info on my own entry and background in Linux and how I ended up getting to Void.
Several years ago I wanted to have a way to share short thoughts, and found items (links, images, and the like) on my website. Most of the website is made up of markdown files that render into HTML and while this isn't difficult to update on a real computer it is cumbersome on what passes for the state of the art in mobile operating systems these days so I wanted something that I could post to using a web browser. I ended up building the resulting microblog system out of several Microsoft Azure services, namely Functions, Storage Tables, and Storage Blobs. Later, when I built this Gemini capsule I wanted to bring that content across so I wrote a Python program that fetches the data from the API and renders it out to gemtext and an Atom feed.
=> Dependencies
Many people have become down on dependencies lately.
Here are the ways I see out of the current situation.
- Everyone starts reimplementing (or pasting) everything for themselves. 2. Libraries start getting a lot bigger, more feature complete, and better. 3. We make the distro system safer, signed, pinned, better, and find trusted maintainers to host and vet stuff.
I think the first is bad and the second is good, but whether we go with the first, the second, or both, the third is also going to be necessary, and if done well enough, it might be enough on its own.
I've been getting occasional pull requests from a Russian gentleman on my Vapad text editor. Not only has he provided Russian translations for the application and kept them up to date, but he has been helping with features as well. This has been a nice change from my usual workflow, as most of my projects are fairly special insterest and don't often get contributions more than just the very occasional drive by. Alex (my contributor) laid the groundwork for moving Vapad to using Libadwaita originally, and added the initial support for in application messaging using the Adwaita Toast system. Most recently, he sent me a pull request which replaced a few instances of the GtkMessageDialog widget with it's Adwaita equivalent, which helps keep things a little bit more visually consistent.
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