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Cool but obscure X11 tools

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Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#161

Post by Accacin »

big_chungus wrote: post #111
scrollaway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying…

> Code which, for most people, does work. That doesn't mean other stuff couldn't have been better. Here's the problem the systemd argument: it's motte-and-bailey. Systemd is a huge collection of tools, not just an init system: it's got resolved, journald, logind, tmpfiles, bootctl, networkd, and more. However, whenever it's criticized, proponents fall back on "but it's a great init system!" I agree that the unit file…

> Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one.

Wow, are we insulting people like we're twelve now?

Again, I have to ask. Why are you not writing a replacement for systemd? Again, another person in this thread seems to think they know everything yet don't seem to have any code to show for it.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#162

Post by joezydeco »

drivers99 wrote: post #140
libria wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rendering on that 42s is close enough that I can almost feel the buttons. Never thought I'd describe a calculator as sensual, but HP's of that era had such a distinct look and feel.

This is a great find. I used a 42S heavily through high school and college. I was surprised at how some of the muscle memory of how I did certain things came back. Seeing the dot matrix answer after doing some calculations brought back the feeling of being bored in math class, when I would just play with all the functions and write little programs. I didn't have a phone or even a laptop to turn to in those days. Even…

I felt the same way. And once you're comfortable with RPN, it's really hard to go back. Painful, even.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#163

Post by Accacin »

CameronNemo wrote: post #151
Accacin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is the solution more complex than the problem domain? So, where's your solution? If it's so simple, where is your contribution? The fact is, he did it. You haven't. I can't even begin to imagine how much crap Lennart gets everyday by people who think they know everything and yet never actually seem to write any code. Have some respect for the guy even if you disagree with the way he works, because you know.. hi…

openrc, runit, s6, upstart* dmix, jack, pipewire * now maintained at https://gitlab.com/chinstrap/startup

I mean, if anything your list proves my point. They're not used at all. Also, I was asking parent for his implementation - I'm assuming he hasn't written any actual code though.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#164

Post by liability »

Avamander wrote: post #152
liability wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should take a lead from Drew DeVault. Drew frequently says things people (including myself) disagree with and is working on software a lot of people (including myself) are very skeptical of. Yet if you try to interact with him (as I have), he's a totally reasonable and pleasant dude.

Not everyone has a thick enough skin to deal with situations the best way. The community should take lead as well.

The "community" in this case is in fact not a community at all, merely a loose set of people who's only common characteristic is having an opinion on systemd. A reasonable user of SystemD, like myself, has no power to coerce a complete stranger who sees fit to email Lennart a death threat.

The "community" cannot stop this. Either Lennart should work on how he handles such criticism/abuse, or Red Hat/IBM should hire a communications professional to insulate him from the outside world. Or he can keep the course and suffer the inevitable...

It's not right that he receives death threats, but the response to that unfortunate state of affairs needs to be realistic.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#165

Post by acdha »

arendtio wrote: post #73
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid. So I can understand that there were quite a few people angry at him and the way he was doing things. In addition, he is someone who can dish out to others too (I remember a (badly prepared) talk he attended and completely sabotaged by asking questions and make the speaker look like a total…

> Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid.

Think about your second sentence a bit, and why it's true: major Linux distributions adopted systemd. Did they do that because it really caused a bunch of trouble or because a deliberative review process showed that it solved a number of hard problems?

A small percentage of people having very loud emotional reactions doesn't mean that it actually caused large numbers of problems and at least in the enterprise space it's been really useful for cleaning up long-running reliability and security problems by removing thousands of lines of SysV kludge and manual work recovering from problems.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#166

Post by Pete_D »

gmueckl wrote: post #33
reirob wrote: post #7

As well DDD the X11 front-end for GDB [1]. Helped me quite a lot around 2003. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

I still miss a good debugging GUI with useful data visualizations. Sometimes staring at pointers and (multidimensional) arrays of numbers just isn't enough.

For data visualizations I use gdb's Python API. For simple things that can be just adding pretty printers, for hairy things it can be a custom command that prints extra information or dumps it to a graphviz script.

https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#167

Post by zlynx »

CameronNemo wrote: post #153
derefr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex. Are you suggesting that the alternative is to choose to just not support these features at all? (Which isn't implausible as a suggestion ; OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth at all, for example. But in an ecosystem where everyone is building software to scratch their own itch, and then adopting the software…

I do not know about the person you are responding to, but I particularly take issue with how PA abstracts the hardware and does not allow low latency applications or servers such as Ardour, JACK, or other professional audio recording software to access it in an efficient manner. So you end up with this weird situation where pulseaudio reroutes itself when JACK appears and no longer takes control of the sound card. Wh…

Just how loudly do you think people would complain if PulseAudio decided to link in JACK and replace it, instead of getting out of the way (and becoming a JACK client itself, I believe).

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#168

Post by bonzini »

CameronNemo wrote: post #151
Accacin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is the solution more complex than the problem domain? So, where's your solution? If it's so simple, where is your contribution? The fact is, he did it. You haven't. I can't even begin to imagine how much crap Lennart gets everyday by people who think they know everything and yet never actually seem to write any code. Have some respect for the guy even if you disagree with the way he works, because you know.. hi…

openrc, runit, s6, upstart* dmix, jack, pipewire * now maintained at https://gitlab.com/chinstrap/startup

Jack does not overlap with PulseAudio. Pipewire does, but it came later and has the explicit purpose of unifying Jack and PulseAudio.

Upstart is decidedly inferior to systemd; the event-based architecture is much harder to understand and apply than the target/dependency architecture of systemd. And systemd is in use in distros ranging from embedded (LibreELEC) to enterprise server, it must be doing _something_ right...

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#169

Post by bonzini »

big_chungus wrote: post #111
scrollaway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying…

> Code which, for most people, does work. That doesn't mean other stuff couldn't have been better. Here's the problem the systemd argument: it's motte-and-bailey. Systemd is a huge collection of tools, not just an init system: it's got resolved, journald, logind, tmpfiles, bootctl, networkd, and more. However, whenever it's criticized, proponents fall back on "but it's a great init system!" I agree that the unit file…

Wait, people are replacing so many components but systemd didn't do a great job at modularity?

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#170

Post by zlynx »

nguoi wrote: post #57
raverbashing wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply used to disable PulseAudio in favour of Alsa until it started working properly Out of the Box in a distro (which took, what, 3, 4, years?) Not saying it wasn't needed, but it was anything but stable or efficient at the beginning (and given said person's behaviour in dealing with bugs and vulnerabilities in systemd, it is not hard to see why)

Well Fedora users are the beta testers, right?

And somehow Fedora always seemed to do systemd and pulseaudio correctly. It's Debian and Ubuntu who somehow manage to make it into garbage. Is it intentional? Is it just because they use ancient, old versions? If indeed they want to be "stable" you'd think they'd update to incorporate the bug fixes.
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