91–100 of 175 posts
Proprietary software with no competitors (Nikon Elements Cough) creates situations where you have to depend on very unstable and buggy software.
Trade offs in the form of hardware and software are what I constantly have to think of.
Unless your only platform is embedded software which this occurs less on, it’s impossible to realistically expect to never run unstable software. I’m going to guess most consumer computation is running hundreds if not thousands of JavaScript VMs on their devices every hour.
> For projects using SemVer, frequently changing major version numbers is an obvious red flag. Huh, I have the opposite impression, particularly if the project has a CHANGELOG of the breakages. Smaller releases are easier upgrades, and the changelog tends to indicate what call sites require investigation/changes prior to upgrading; projects with absolutely massive amounts of breaking changes that require rewriting ev…
As a corollary, badly designed software are more likely to require breaking changes.
Same applies to badly managed software, where compatibility is broken inconsiderately, wasting people's time.
> Upstream packages change fast
> Upstream support is typically short, shorter than the life-time of some LTS distributions
> SUSE (and others) maintain a large number of distribution variants that need to be updated regularly
> Upstream projects are getting larger and larger
> Using stable release and trying to back-port security fixes isn't safer than using the latest versions with all the security fixes
> The closer you are to upstream the better it is for everyone
> It's easier to work with upstream
> It's easier to contribute and submit patches
> Slow and conservative updates models don't work
> Slow update models are not more sustainable
> Slow update models undermine "Open Source"
> "Partially Slow" is "Totally Broken"
https://linuxreviews.org/Richard_Brown:_Regular_Releases_are...
I've been thinking about learning Crystal recently and using it for a personal project. However, now that I have lots of experience with Node.js, Golang and others, I'm torn between the "use what's mature" and "learn a new language" decision. Sure, I'm using Crystal now to learn a new language, but what if this becomes a serious project? Anyhow, I agree with this blog post somewhat but it's always good to expand your…
Why not learn a stable technology instead? For example, instead of Crystal, you could try something like Common Lisp or Haskell, both of which are really, really stable. I would even put Rust into the "stable" category... they value backwards compatibility very highly, while allowing breaking changes to happen in newer "editions" of the language (without breaking code written for previous "editions"). Stable does not…
If anything I'd be interested in Rust, but it's a bit too low-level for most of the things that I need.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a flaw in Linux Desktops' choice of application management paradigms, which insists that everything be tightly coupled and managed. It is entirely possible and reasonable to have a stable set of base system libraries everyone can depend on and otherwise applications must bring their own.
Agreed whole-heartedly, and one of the reasons I love the FreeBSD model. My ideal Linux distro would be the inverse of Debian k/FreeBSD – a Linux kernel with FreeBSD kernel interfaces provided by loadable module and a FreeBSD-style userland. Might be possible soon, now that building Linux with clang is supported.
Edit: Oh, and Darling runs Darwin binaries on Linux, which isn't quite a BSD but is non-Linux
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the same experience, my linux experience (as an user) improved by an order of magnitude when switching to Arch which has the same bleeding edge philosophy.
I feel like there's a balancing point though. I've used Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS. I've found the most stable and least problematic distro to be Gentoo. After that was Arch and then the rest basically sorting by average package age. I think there needs to be a trade-off between bleeding edge and stability and I find that Gentoo tends to hit it on the head. I've yet to have the syste…
Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…
Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…
So local visualization ala docker, vagrant have been a godsend with their isolated environments