81–88 of 88 posts
I wish they didn’t just take the well established name of a principle and re use it in their distro-name. As much as I appreciate this initiative I think they should consider the importance of naming and branding. An original product should have an original name.
less is more? Please don't, I understand that "more" is simpler but I like the ability to scroll up.
I think if a distro replaced less with more I would be confused if it differs slightly. That’s pretty entertaining my first read of your comment I was confused took me a moment to let it sink in.
I wish they didn’t just take the well established name of a principle and re use it in their distro-name. As much as I appreciate this initiative I think they should consider the importance of naming and branding. An original product should have an original name.
Yeah, distributions often have really crap branding. Eg finding relevant resources for NixOS can be tough because "nix" is often used as a shorthand for the set of all Unix-like systems.
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These two measures are probably ended up conflated because they're two ends of the same metric. "How many people need to be hit by a bus", which for simplicity I'll call the "bus factor", measures unusually high levels of resilience, but it doesn't go lower than 0 so it can't measure how fragile a fragile project is. "How many people are indispensable", which for simplicity I'll call "inverse bus factor", measures un…
>same way zero is the center between positive and negative numbers. More like the way 1 is halfway between 0 and infinity. I think you're nearly there, and the answer to the dilemma is that fractional bus factors are possible. A bus factor of 0.5 means there are two indispensable people. We might disambiguate the two conflicting definitions by renaming them with suitably inverse words - "redundancy" and "fragility" p…
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I just wish there was better musl or static linking support in the Linux ecosystem for Alpine. A lot of one-off binaries in my experience were dynamically linked only for the latest Ubuntu's glibc.
Isn't that what things like Flatpak or Nix / Guix are for though?
Looks interesting, and generally always like to see how someone puts a new distro together, but “simple” here is a very specific definition of simple. This is not a trivial, easy, type of simple. Rather a raw and uncomplex simple. Not going to assume either is better, but somewhat curious which people default to assuming and/or preferring.
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I suppose the downvotes may be justified due to your comment being pretty out-of-place, but, just to add some perspective: I'd like to remind everyone that PHP originally used strlen() as a hashing function: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 It is (or at least originally was) certainly not the pinnacle of good design.
I don't think it's fair to use this fact as a data point -- since that same message you've linked says "This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use". PHP was released to the public 1995.
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"Simplicity" does imple trivial or easy though, at least to an extent.
Well, blame English. It sucks (and so do all other natural languages). In software, I'd say that "simple" has come to mean "lack of complexity" rather than "easy". Presumably, the distribution's target audience is software enthusiasts of some sort.
If someone gave me a "simple" API for say networking. I would expect the API to be easy to use. But by your definition, I could give you an API such as "write(byte[])" which just puts bytes on the ethernet wire or into on the wifi radio. It's simple! It's not complex, there's only one API method with only one argument!
But in reality, I'm just shifting complexity to the user. I only consider things simple if they truly reduce complexity rather than if they just shift the complexity to someone else.