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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#381

Post by mullikine »

Let's pray for RMS:

    Father God in Heaven,
    Please heal Richard Stallman of the cancer afflicting his
    body, and give him a strong will to endure all of this to the end.
    Let him keep his health through this period of his life here on Earth, LORD.
    And let both him and his legacy continue shine the light of freedom and
    transparency and human decency in this world, which is getting so dark.
    And keep him healthy through his chemo, please God. And give him the joy of Your
    salvation through Jesus Christ, and the hope of life eternal.
    Save his soul, please God. And if it is Your will, even make him a saint in the
    church of Jesus Christ, Your Son. Heaven wont be the same without him.
    In Jesus Christ's name I ask,
    Amen.
I will continue to pray this for you RMS.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#382

Post by throwaway5Am1k »

Pannoniae wrote: post #329
lima wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktop is more viable than ever. Zigbee/Matter/... are widely adopted open standards without vendor lock in. Things like Home Assistant are getting serious attention and funding. Could be much worse.

The Linux desktop is better than ever (in fact, I am switching to it the first time in a few days! I just need to setup some things first) Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome) Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because vie…

>enshittification

This is the 2nd time this word has been used to describe the Linux desktop in this thread, and it's disingenuous. FOSS doesn't do any of the things described with enshitification article: it doesn't sit between buyers and sellers and screw each of them in turn. That's not what's been happening. Maybe the software goes shit, but it is not "enshitification". At every turn there's been alternatives (GNOME3 -> Unity/Xfce, KDE4 -> Trinity, Pulseaudio -> Pulsewire, systemd -> upstart, Debian -> Devuian, etc)

Stop misusing the word, you're discrediting the good work of FOSS.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#383

Post by tilsammans »

Pannoniae wrote: post #329
lima wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktop is more viable than ever. Zigbee/Matter/... are widely adopted open standards without vendor lock in. Things like Home Assistant are getting serious attention and funding. Could be much worse.

The Linux desktop is better than ever (in fact, I am switching to it the first time in a few days! I just need to setup some things first) Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome) Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because vie…

I agree completely! I ditched Ubuntu for this very fact. GNOME and snaps are deal breakers for me. I switched to Fedora KDE a year ago and I use it every day. And not just for coding. It's a real treat and stuff just works and gets out of my way.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#384

Post by bonoboTP »

orthoxerox wrote: post #371
bonoboTP wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols As a Hungarian, this is just not true. The Western view of communism has been imported and the more time goes on, the more the younger generations base their views on what's cool in the West vs what their old and uncool grandparents blabber on about. With the Internet and media and travel options and exchange semester…

Che shirts - yes, "1956: best year of my life" shirts - not so much.

Sure, because 1956 is quite Hungary-specific. The more our media globalizes (eg TikTok trends in sync all over the world, not even a week delay in the newest fad), the less people relate these things to their local history. People use international cultural references and only see the Hungary-specific local view in school where they are bored anyway.

1956 is also interesting as it became relevant politically again with the war in Ukraine. And it is my impression that many people in Hungary look at this not as something happening in a bordering country but as if trying to see it through Western European/North American eyes. A bit like vampire Transylvania, which might as well be a totally different entity than Erdély. So is "Ukraine whose flag the celebs put on their profile pics" a separate entity from Ukraine, east from Nyíregyháza and Mátészalka, where the cheap cigarettes come from etc. A very different set of connotations.

Similarly, the communism that's cool is mentally compartmentalized away from historic reality like 1956, Rákosi, Kádár etc.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#385

Post by Clubber »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #284
jll29 wrote: post #187

I wish RMS all the best for his health, a long and happy life. I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software. He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other…

> I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode This is the setup that RMS described using well over a decade ago. Is there any reason to believe he is still using it?

I believe he didn't upgrade because the newer Intel chips had a backdoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#386

Post by nailer »

newscracker wrote: post #270

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is…

That was a beautiful comment, but I want to make an important point:

> While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”

The OSD is very much compatible with the FSFs list of freedoms.

“Source available” is a new name for “shared source” and is fake open source proprietary trash.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#387

Post by oblio »

op00to wrote: post #340
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's also been the victim of some pretty vile smear campaigns and is still going on. I know if I was the target of the crap he got, I wouldn't want to continue doing anything anymore.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#388

Post by jraph »

Pannoniae wrote: post #373
jraph wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Gnome so much, but enshittification is quite a strong word to qualify it. I'd prefer we reserved this word for when stuff gets worse because of money / investors, with incentives at odds with the user needs. I don't believe Gnome suffers from decisions that are bad because of financial incentives.

Well, I am open to changing my mind. What do you think, what's the reason then? From an outsider perspective, 10 years ago I've seen all those beautiful, perfectly usable UIs, and they have almost all disappeared by today. What happened? Why do you think GNOME does that?

I believe its maintainers truly believe they are taking the right decisions that are good for the project.

They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.

They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.

That's what I think.

I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.

I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.

So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#389

Post by systemtest »

op00to wrote: post #338
bitmadness wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does he have a reputation for poor hygiene?

Years and years ago he talked at my university lug. I picked him up in my car from the train. The BO smell remained in my car for WEEKS. Dude had a serious aroma.

A lot of people would pay good money to have their car smell like Stallman for weeks.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#390

Post by leidenfrost »

dEnigma wrote: post #346
newscracker wrote: post #270

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is…

I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.

It's a lot more understandable if you consider the state of computing he experienced while growing up:

Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution.

It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that.

I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.

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