nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 2 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Oh they’re pretty awesome and about 5 mins away. DVDs, music, academic journal access, seed exchange, and several streaming services, free to library patrons.

    There are a number of reasons that the far-right and corpos hate libraries. The number of services that the provide to the community (in the US) is a major part of it. Libraries in bigger cities even tend to have social workers on staff to help patrons who are homeless or have other needs. They are one of the few places that anyone is allowed to exist during daylight hours without paying.




  • Seasoned Linux users i don’t even recommend it unless they have basic programming skills.

    I’ve been using Linux about a decade and a half, and programming for almost twice that. I really just don’t like the Nix language (or DSLs altogether). I also had a poor experience with my first test of NixOS, by the docs, having not configured my networking stack, in making it impossible to fix without booting back to the live USB.

    For people that do like the syntax and don’t mind DSLs, it’s pretty great and it’s excellent that the ideas have been propagating elsewhere. I love the concepts but not the implementation.



  • I’d say, from my experience with Ansible, that it can absolutely do all of that. Might be able to use a single task for the package install, if the distro supports the generic package module. There’s also a pamd module that would likely cover your needs there. If not, it would still be possible with a custom module or some Xinfile fuckery (if it can be fine programmatically, it can be done in Ansible, more niche things may require writing code, however).

    It would not be as terse though. Really wish there was a good middle ground.









  • I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

    I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.


  • It’s not free and open source. And it’s contrary to the F(L)OSS movement philosophy (cost should never be a barrier for one to use technology). Conceptually, it’s nice to try to get corpos to compensate devs but that’s not what this would do. Small businesses and individuals would be impacted while corpos can work around it.

    Additionally, it seems a bit ethically questionable to try to forcibly extract fees from end users when, increasingly, they’re feeling economic strain from the continued wealth hoarding and impending recession/depression.





  • You can indeed buy better hardware for many purposes for cheaper.

    Want a gaming laptop? Or a runs Linux out of the box laptop? FW is not even close to the best value there.

    Want a laptop with well-documented physical specs, including CAD drawings to make readily modifiable and upgradeable, potentially being the last laptop chassis that one needs to buy? Nothing else comes close to touching FW.

    I avoid ads, so, maybe they’re inappropriately marketing as gaming laptops. I’d not call that a scam but would say that it’s ethically questionable, at best. FW is a laptop for people prioritizing long-term repairability and tinkering over everything else.