“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue.

    This is 100% true, but the efforts are negligible and not even worth consideration.

    • Xorg maintainers are doing just that: maintaining it (and, for the most part, begrudgingly). It will continue to exist for a long time, but that’s the only remarkable thing about it.
    • XLibre is made by some anti-vaxx conspiracy dipshit who thinks ^ is an exponentiation operator in C and who got kicked off Xorg for being a moron who did functionally nothing of any importance while carelessly breaking things like the ABI. Enormous quantity but zero quality to speak of. It will go nowhere and only has any crumb of relevance because of the maintainer’s virtue signaling.
    • Phoenix basically just started, yet Linux outlets are tripping over themselves to report on it, showing there’s very little real work to speak of in this space. It’s a nothingburger of a story. It doesn’t even do basically the only thing X11 is even good for anymore, which is support legacy applications.

    As GNOME and KDE drop X11 and DEs like Cinnamon adopt Wayland, more and more actively maintained applications will stop giving a shit about X11. Even if they don’t explicitly not support it, none of the developers will be using it, and most of the userbase won’t either; thus, applications’ support for X11 will just rot away if it isn’t outright deprecated. Obviously X11 will always have a base of legacy applications, but you’re going to be seriously hard-pressed even two years from now to find someone who would use X11 over Wayland – except for specific and severely outdated hardware, conspiracy nutjobs, and the rare case where XWayland doesn’t properly support a legacy application.










  • I would add that making ignorance of the law a valid excuse would be a logistical farce. Mens rea is a real thing that’s examined during a criminal trial. The defendant’s state of mind can absolutely factor into their sentence or even whether they’re convicted at all; “ignorance of the law is not an excuse”, ignorantia juris non excusat, even has some exceptions under US law. But you could not possibly for every crime burden the prosecution with proving that the defendant 1) committed the act 2) intended to commit the act, and now 3) knew the act they were committing was a crime. Mens rea, while necessary in a fair system, is hard enough; condition (3) would make it functionally impossible to convict anyone who didn’t a) explicitly refer to what they were doing as a crime, b) receive a formal education in the relevant area of law, or c) commit a crime literally everyone is expected to know like murder or armed robbery.








  • I mean use of the CLI on Linux generally. I used “terminal” vaguely because the original comment used it vaguely. “Down pat” is to say that I’m perfectly comfortable with it, namely that the course taught me:

    • How to execute programs from the shell (and interrupt execution/kill processes).
    • How to navigate and alter the filesystem, search for files and their contents, etc.
    • How to install, remove, and configure software.
    • How to set aliases.
    • How to write shell scripts.
    • How to edit files (although 99% of the time this is useless; I’ll just use something like Kate instead).
    • How to parse and interpret program output.
    • How to read man pages.
    • Generally how to do anything I couldn’t/wouldn’t prefer to do from a GUI instead.

    I use the shell vastly more than 99.99% of people and haven’t had a problem with or changed how I interact with it since that course; that to me is “down pat” for the terminal itself. I don’t care if I don’t know every application and flag ever made, because that’s not the point – like knowing how to use a GUI doesn’t mean you’ve memorized all GUI software, just that you know how to interpret the design language of and successfully use new GUI software. If I need to do something my current tools can’t, I can just search for the right program and use the man page to quickly write a command.

    Meanwhile, with something like LibreOffice Calc, which I understand is much less feature-rich than the industry standard Excel, I don’t just learn about new functions like CORREL(), akin to what I said before about learning new CLI applications; I fundamentally learn how to create and edit spreadsheets more quickly. In Impress, I still learn how to make presentations more appealing, more readable, etc. Basically things that aren’t just rote memorization of gadgets that I could look up at any time. That’s what sets it apart to me – the fact that anything I don’t already know about the Linux terminal is present in readily available reference material and better off not memorized.