Except that’s not all it is.

Go read the bill, particularly section 1798.501.b, 1798.502.a and b. Every developer of every application that can be downloaded from every package system MUST request your age bracket every time it is downloaded. And possibly every time it is launched. Basic utilities like ‘ls’ and ‘cat’, that pong example I pushed as a test two weeks ago, everything.

Why are you even accepting this something like this should exist? What is the threat model that this is protecting against? How would it offer any protection against that threat? Why should everyone who is making any program need to ask about the age of their possible users?

In addition, the law requires that every developer of every application, commercial, FOSS, student, hobbiest, professional, or whatever verify the age bracket of every person who downloads and runs their program every time. Every time it is downloaded, every time it is run. Yes an API for this would be trivial to implement, but that’s not the point. The point is why the fuck should I have to face a $2500-$7500 fine every time some kid downloads my pong demo? Why the fuck should PyPI, GitHub, or crates.io have to get the age bracket of every user? Why should every apt request include an age flag? Because that is what the bill requires.

Personal: DOS -> Win3.1/95 -> BeOS -> WinXP -> MacOS -> Win10 -> Ubuntu -> Debian

There was definitely some dual booting in there, particularly in the BeOS (to Windows for Games) and Win10 (to Ubuntu for work) eras.

Professional: Debian -> RHEL -> WinXP -> Win7 -> Ubuntu -> gLinux/ChromeOS -> Ubuntu -> MacOS -> Ubuntu -> MacOS/Ubuntu

I had a college professor that I worked for who was basically the Emacs Enthusiast. So I gave it a try, learned about a half dozen commands and never really moved past that. Later, I was told to give vi a try, so I did and had basically the same experience. Built-in discoverability is/was non-existent for them and I never had a real need to pick up any more or spend hours reading man pages to figure them out. Time past, I went through a few different phases of GUI text editors/IDEs but could always pull out just enough vi or emacs commands when I needed. I did see my colleagues and friends who were all in on vim/emacs with 1000 line configs and thought they looked pretty cool, but I just didn’t have the time or inclination when I could be doing other things.

Then in the last year I needed to go all in on a text mode editor for a variety of reasons. I looked around, gave Helix a try, and loved it from the beginning. My few vi commands worked, there is actual discoverability built in, and the select->action grammar makes way more sense to me than the others I’ve tried.

Helix is not as extremely customizable or configurable as vi or emacs (yet, plugin system coming soon™ ) but it has a good default out-of-the-box configuration, enough configuration options for what I want, good lsp support, and discoverability.

Phones have always been locked down, all the way back to when you could only use a phone that AT&T sold you attached to a landline.

Basic cell phones were generally very locked down, or at least there was no documentation on how anything worked. I do remember using a photo and contact syncing tool that had the protocols for a bunch of “feature” phones reverse engineered. IIRC the dev gave up because he kept getting sued because the phone manufacturers and carriers made money off of charging for that.

When smartphones came around, Android was actually very open. My first Droid was completely open, no need to even unlock anything. Applications could be installed and run from anywhere, including the SD card. Custom ROMs were common and easy to install.

But the carriers were not happy, due to the proliferation of malware running on their networks and a general fear of hackers. Plus the “Hey, we want to charge for that like we do on the feature phones!” Back then, the carriers were all powerful because they could and would kick out any device they wanted. Users were also pretty unhappy due to the lack of security and malware. So they started by adding a boot loader lock and eventually locked down more and more.

The iPhone was locked down from the beginning. It was seen as more of an iPod or other accessory device by most people, so no one really cared.

And, that’s basically been it.

Really, the fact that PCs are as open as they are is pretty amazing and mostly due to different companies reverse engineering each other and a lot of court decisions. I’m sure looking back that IBM really wishes that their cases had gone differently.

I think I managed to skip the ndiswrapper era. I was using Ethernet on desktops and my laptops were Macs. Nowadays my desktop has both wifi and Ethernet, and my laptops run Linux but nmtui just works.

I definitely remember having to futz with audio a looooong time ago, but honestly getting xf86config to work with my video card and monitor was much more difficult.

Hey! I’m not 50 yet!

Though not far off TBF.

The Haiku one should be the yellow one.

Is that an ASCII version of the praying hands emoji?!?

I’m really curious as to what those features would be?

I’m pretty sure working with software is the other.

I’m a busy dad of two kids, so my play time is often fragmented and sporadic. There is a definite theme to mine.

Red Dead Redemption 2. There is so much I really love about it, but there are just too many systems to deal with. Hygeine, hunger, fashion, crafting, camp chores, random ambush attacks by too many enemies, stealth, tracking, etc. If it was a bit more streamlined I’d probably love it.

New Vegas. It’s the only Fallout I’ve played and I love it, up until inventory management takes more time than actually playing the game. I’ve made it to about the same point fiveish hours in three times.

Skyrim. I really want to love this one as well, but has both the inventory management issues that New Vegas does, and the controls are just wonky enough that I have to relearn them when I get back to it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I really enjoyed it, up until I spent a precious uninterrupted hour and a half on a mission, only to die to something stupid just before the next save point. I know that it being Teh SupEr HaRdCorE is supposed to be part of the appeal, but I don’t have time for that shit.

Ah! Thank you for the detailed explanation so I can properly enjoy this joke.

I once heard someone say that Debian is like the sound Dads make when getting off the couch. I’ve never felt so seen.

(I absolutely run Debian, lol)

Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.

Here, here!

Even with the explanation, I still don’t get it either. I have some questions:

1. What is a boy kisser meme?
2. What is good or bad about being called out in reference to one?
3. Who was doing the calling out or being called? Was OP called out by Krita, Krita by OP, or some third party calling out one or the other? Or maybe a third party was called out by Krita?
4. What does this image have to do with Krita or the other OSS projects in the background?

Feel free to assume that I am old and not hip to what kids are doing these days.

That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.

Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.

Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.

Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.