raiguard

Factorio developer, certified Linux user, weeb, pianist, gamer.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@rfleury My favorite example: It literally took YEARS to decide whether or not Wayland windows can set their own icons. The consensus was that they can. But the members of Wayland who disagree with that are refusing to implement it in their compositors, so it only works sometimes!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@rfleury Linux as a kernel is so successful because Linus Torvalds is an absolute dictator over everything that goes into it. Meanwhile, the userspace is entirely designed by a committee of folks with diametrically opposed opinions on many simple things. It's maddening.

[Ryan Fleury @rfleury]

I have posted two updates about RADDBG on Linux, and all I can say is that, while the majority of responses have been very positive, the rest make it obvious why it has taken so long for the Linux ecosystem to provide a ~viable consumer desktop experience (for Windows to decay so much that there is not really any alternative).

There is no coherency in the design of the platform. There is no sane team calling the shots, so the user base spends their time bikeshedding over what should be trivialities. Everybody has an opinion about everything. Window managers (X11? Wayland? X11 on Wayland?), to package managers, to libc versions, to the right folder to use for X/Y/Z, to which shell interpreter to use, to how to ask the user for a file path (libportal? zenity?), to how to show the user a trivial message box, and so on. And this is just the beginning—the trivial stuff that most people reading this will get, without needing a ton of extra context.

If your users or developers are debating about any of this, YOU FAILED. The platform SUCKS. It will only succeed when centralized teams (e.g. shipping hardware using the Linux ecosystem) steer the ship and make decisions. Then, people write to that, and that becomes the actual standard.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@coredumps_ @shawnhatori @rfleury It is entirely possible to do that.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@coredumps_ @shawnhatori @rfleury What if the user doesn't have zenity installed? Then you get no message box. Having to call out to an external program for such basic behavior is insane.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@rfleury @__lostalien__ I guess my sarcasm wasn't obvious.

I think the linux kernel could survive, but the userspace stack sheparded by freedesktop is definitely beyond redemption.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@rfleury @__lostalien__ This sounds phenomenal. We should make a new distro which implements this and everyone will switch to it because it'll be perfect!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@SanderSkjegstad @Blick_Editor Same! The show the clip is from - Nichijou - is absolute gold, I highly recommend it!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

Having never used keyframe animation in a video editor before, I was able to pick up @Blick_Editor and make this "masterpiece" in about an hour. It was extremely intuitive!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@BrodieOnLinux That setting is in winecfg.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@BrodieOnLinux I've had decent luck getting it running in wine! You have to disable "allow the window manager to decorste the window" and use software rendering, but I was able to create a dumb meme without any crashes.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@Blick_Editor I'm a Linux user (btw), and while Blick's native Linux port isn't out yet, I was able to, with some fiddling, get it to run in Wine. And even with that fiddling, it was easier to install and use than DaVinci Resolve. :D
Looking forward to the native port!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@hivehead_ @EricLengyel The VODs haven't been released yet. :(

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@NearestCommit @vkrajacic Linux is on the roadmap, and they are actively working on it! In the meantime, I have had good luck getting it working through wine, albeit you have to change it to use software rendering instead of hardware for video exports.

[Rick Brewster @rickbrewPDN]

I GOT THE DOMAIN! I FINALLY GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!1 🥳🎉

Paint​.NET is now at https://t.co/ZJTUII4bVG!

Well, it will be just as soon as I push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects from getpaint​.net etc. For now it's just a "hey go here" redirect page.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@LoroHabou @Lab312_ @Bitwarden KeepassXC + Syncthing is the dream combination!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@valigo Pipewire absolutely hates the "line in" ports on both my and my brother's PCs. The audio is completely blown out and unusable. Different distros, different hardware, same issue!

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@gnukeith I recently started "self-hosting" my passwords by using KeePassXC and KeePassDX and using syncthing to keep the vault in sync across my devices. It has worked flawlessly so far!

[Nic Barker @nicbarkeragain]

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.

But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:

- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.

This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.

All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.

It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

[raiguard @raiguard_]

@geomathMEW @scottlincicome Try being self-employed sometime. That increases the complexity of taxes by an order of magnitude.