Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run? • Hacker News Board

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#251

Post by Twirrim » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

cameronfraser wrote: post #159

Twirrim wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the large majority of commits to the Linux kernel are done by people employed by companies to work on it, your starting premise couldn't be further from the truth, let alone the conclusions you draw from it.

Given that they said most open source contributors I think they are right. Most contributors are not contributing to the Linux kernel. Most are contributing to ( https://githut.info/ ) JavaScript packages

I think that's being somewhat generous of an interpretation given the thread of the conversation, which is specifically about drivers. For it to be talking about Open Source developers in general would be a serious pivot.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#252

Post by seba_dos1 » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

jeffhuys wrote: post #191

recrof wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when you want speed and precision. the area of touchpad is far greater and it shows when you want to draw something, or move cursor between edges of the screen. that's the same as playing first person shooter on console controller vs the mouse.

Not even talking about the haptic feedback, pressure sensitivity (fun for drawing, handy for quicklook and dozens of other things). Precision? Oh yes. Moving per pixel is bliss. It might sound elitist, but if someone tells me they have a better input interface than one of apple's trackpad, my mind goes somewhere else. I even replaced the mouse at my work with their trackpad. I remember when I was big at CSGO and want…

Most touchpads have just as good precision - well, unless you count really crappy low end ones of course. Haptic feedback is a nice thing and it's the reason why I own a Magic Trackpad 2 (I have even hacked the kernel driver to get it more quiet than what macOS allows), but that's pretty much its only differentiating factor.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#253

Post by seba_dos1 » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #102

seba_dos1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macbooks do literally nothing, it's macOS that does. And with a bit of effort and understanding of the input stack, you can get it pretty close on GNU/Linux anyway - at least close enough for really comfortable usage. I haven't been using mice for years now and I'm not a Macbook user.

You’re missing the forest for the trees. Nobody saying this can’t be replicated. But Apple does it out of the box, and better than any alternative I’ve tried. That’s why people buy Macs. Time is money.

...but that's a completely different argument to make. I was answering the question about what does the hardware do differently, and the correct answer is: nothing (well, aside of haptic feedback to be exact, but unless you care about silent clicks it's just a gimmick).

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#254

Post by m0xte » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #51

INTPenis wrote: post #30

This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse ma…

Around 1995 I had my own PC but only my dads PC had internet access. Every other day I had half an hour of internet to download stuff. Then lots of time playing around on my PC. I did Linux from Scratch back then, for example.

Ugh bad times. I had to relay Debian buzz on floppies from a dialup. I sooo got owned when he got that phone bill.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#255

Post by IggleSniggle » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

Legogris wrote: post #220

IggleSniggle wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, for me in the late 90s, it was learning the ins and outs of how to modify Win95 UI. Turns out a whole lot of those skills were total dead-ends. But I can help you make your Win95 look and feel however you like! Need your cursor to be animated but change animations depending on what you're doing? You got it! Find that editing .ini files lacks a certain flair? No problem! Prefer a fuchsia screen of death, or a "…

I recall that custom animated bootup screen was something that had a different variation of the quirky hack in different subversions through 95-98. Also made a point of reskinning every last pixel. I still get a similar feeling tweaking my Linux environment (albeit stronger focus on productivity these days). Some inspiration in /r/unixporn, maybe you can relive that again ;)

I don't care to admit how much time I spent on fzf, autocompletions, and zstyles today.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#256

Post by kapilvt » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

mvdwoord wrote: post #11

dloss wrote: post #9

Reminds me of David Beazley's talk about being locked in a hidden vault to analyse 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code. No tools or internet connection, but a Python interpreter. https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html

This remains one of my favorite talks of all time. Amazing story, well told. Anyone who hasn't seen this yet... highly recommended.

DavidB is generally awesome, that said I just watched this its kinda of meh, maybe 5-9m of good stuff, if haven't seen his other talks, I'd recommend them first, unless you have particular interest in patent legal suits, and indexing code for basic patterns via a library of functions (grep/glob/etc), ie its basically using stdlib collections w/ files to build a vfs grep/stats lib, w/ py 2.3 while coding on a desert island so to speak. his other talks cover a wide range of subjects, their probably all better imo.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#257

Post by romes » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

It'd be very interesting to see an actual "starter kit" :I

The original idea could even be adapted to more than one degree of difficulty... I love the idea, it's, at least, a fascinating concept

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#258

Post by Jenz » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

ccmcarey wrote: post #43

s3arch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not use IRC at all. But still curious, do people use it?

Yes, some communities are still huge (Freenode).

Freenode is actually growing I’ve heard.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#259

Post by iwalton3 » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #89

>" About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it. There are no editors and noth…

If you have bash you could use the /dev/tcp feature to download files: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/more-using-bashs-built-...

The trick would be finding a download that is still served over http.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#260

Post by sdenton4 » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

darrmit wrote: post #239

sdenton4 wrote: post #200

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

I had this same thought. I had to print out the install guides because I had no WiFi at the time. I failed at the chroot process at one point and ended up nuking a whole install. I learned so much then though that has paid off in my career. Good times.

This was pretty much my experience exactly... I was dual booting, though, so also had a lot of downloaded docs that I could read on the other drive partition... And then reboot to go back to trying to get things running on the gentoo side. And inevitably have to wait to go into the university computer labs on Monday to look for answers in the forums.

Incidentally, I had actually picked gentoo because the forums looked fantastic... My first linux attempt was with suse, but all the "interesting" answers were in German. So next time I tried the one with the liveliest forums. Turns out the forums were lively for a some of the wrong reasons (everything was hard), but the people were the right combination of friendly and incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. I learned a huge amount from the process and the people. Though, indeed, the whole from source distro thing was foolish, in retrospect.

Gentoo will forever be my "uphill through the snow both ways" story.