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Comment Re:What's new here? (Score 1) 35

Docker on windows is usually done one of two ways - Docker for Desktop (a commercial product) which is basically using WSL2 as a backend and its own custom distro, or you install Ubuntu and install docker inside of it. Neither is particularly convenient if you just want to a container off the cuff for some reason and I assume Microsoft want to make it more easier, faster and more convenient for those use cases.

Comment Re:"could" (Score 1) 151

I don't have an objection to GMO per se, but I do to bullshit PR pieces that start off with an exaggerated benefit and then overlook the obvious issues that meaning that benefit will never happen. Aside from the GMO angle, if the contention is that food waste and emissions are a thing, then it would be far more effective to crack down on the way supermarkets sell stuff in quantities that people don't need, e.g. packaging & pricing certain kinds of fruit and veg including bananas in quantities that guarantee food waste.

Comment "could" (Score 2, Interesting) 151

I love press releases which are total bollocks. Such as announcing a genetically modified banana and hypothesizing the carbon savings if the entire world switched over to this banana when that is something that never happen. In fact I wonder how many plantations would be willing to switch over if they and consumers have to bear the cost of this presumably patented and controlled plant. And it's not like with some GMO products which can be produced for domestic consumption where approval is one regulatory hurdle - bananas are grown predominantly for export from tropical countries so there are multiple hurdles. And it's interesting they claim "British shoppers" will enjoy these bananas - since we all know how welcoming the UK and the EU are to genetically modified products.

Comment AI & PMCs s make handy scapegoats (Score 1) 285

As far as regimes opposed to the US are concerned, maybe they'll start poisoning AI and open source data with deliberately false and misleading information because the intelligence are too stupid to do some due diligence. Maybe that's what happened here, or the AI just hallucinated something. I doubt it would be hard to drop some poisoned information in the wild and have missiles hit targets with nothing of strategic value in them.

Comment Too expensive (Score 2) 55

I think ChromeOS is a good OS but it's suited to casual consumption and education. It should be running on cheap laptops running mobile processors.

Google also hasn't helped itself by having ChromeOS *and* Android and trying to mush them together so badly. I have no idea if "Googlebook" is where the two finally become the one, or not, but the company must have wasted hundreds of millions in development, customer confusion / dissatisfaction by having this disconnect.

Comment Re: Nothing of value was added (Score 1) 162

A search on "unsafe" in uutils shows about ~70 usages (excluding tests, logging) and they're mainly calls out to kernel / API via libc. e.g. calling libc::signal(). The exception is some calls to a rust lib that gets/sets environment variables whose functions are marked unsafe because they're process global, not thread safe.

Comment Still that kitchen sink mentality (Score 2) 82

KDE still hasn't figured out that sometimes less is more. It wants to be a Windows knockoff but throws more buttons and menus in the face of users, introduces too much unforgiving behaviour, lacks discoverability, has too many settings, has little consistency between core applications and expends little effort to ever to address these issues. It's a dog's dinner of a desktop.

And when you read KDE's human interface guidelines it becomes clear why it's such a mess. The HIG reads like a developer free-for-all. It points at existing apps as precedent, or mentions some class or another, or waffles into wordy sections. But what it doesn't do is layout a clear vision of what KDE UX should be including illustrative examples, usage patterns and so forth. Some of the HIG is hilariously stupid, such as explicitly refusing concepts like basic & advanced settings. No wonder its a kitchen sink.

Compare to the GNOME HIG if you want to see what a HIG should be. And no that doesn't mean KDE needs to "dumb down" to become GNOME but it needs to lay out its stall in a way that developers can follow and its UX needs to be designed on sound principles. e.g. KDE has Kirigami to produce modern usage patterns, so write the HIG around that. Make it fit for purpose and maybe some of that kitchen sink mentality will go away.

Comment Re: Nothing of value was added (Score 3) 162

This has to be one of the most idiotic statements I've read in some time. Every programmer, including you, writes bugs. It's the height of arrogance to pretend this is not true or that you can blame programmers because bugs are a fact in every piece of code ever written. The sane response would be to acknowledge that and the benefit of using a language not actively assisting in causing bugs.

Secondly, no Rust is not going to stop programmers making all bugs. But it will stop a whole raft of bugs caused by using C (and C++) that are easy to find in the CVE database. And nobody uses "unsafe" everywhere. But even if they did Rust's unsafe mode is still safer than C. The unsafe keyword unlocks some mutation and pointer functions but the compiler is still doing lifetime and borrowing checks. In fact, the only reason someone would use "unsafe" is interact with C, the OS or metal. There is literally no reason to use it when Rust is talking to Rust. It's a pain in the ass to use and very conspicuous which is the whole point.

Comment Re:Ok, but⦠(Score 1) 162

Busybox, Toybox and others. The vast majority of docker images running in the wild probably aren't even using coreutils because their aim is small containers with minimalist userland with some even going distroless. They don't even use glibc, using something like musl instead.

I think for a general purpose Linux dist you'd definitely need coreutils or a drop-in replacement. I think coreutils has a lot of very esoteric features, which uutils have copied so even so, there is merit in examining these and deprecating or entirely removing which no longer serve a purpose.

Comment Re: Nothing of value was added (Score 5, Interesting) 162

I think Ubuntu (and other's desire) to remove coreutils is precisely because coreutils is old, brittle and written in an unsafe language. So they've chosen to modernize the code base, attract new developers while still maintaining strict compatibility. And since uutils is MIT instead of GPLv3, and far more portable between operating systems it may encourage adoption elsewhere, e.g. Microsoft already have build for example.

That said, rewriting code always carries risk and uutils has its own set of bugs which have been uncovered and need fixing. There is a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mantra but I suppose it depends on the definition of broke - if development is moribund then that could be considered an issue too.

It's worth noting that coreutils have derived benefit from the exercise too. The extensive test suite for uutils has uncovered bugs in coreutils and improved the overall code coverage. So even if people don't want to switch (even though they're functionally interchangeable), the existing package has derived benefit too.

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