intrepid

When faced with a severe backlash, Google's response is always "We heard you. We've killed it. Here's an alternative" - and then proceeds to offer the same wine with minor changes in a new bottle.

This is what happened when FLoC was replaced with Topics. This is what's happening with WEI. They say that they will limit it to webview and embedded media! They talk as if they are doing us a favor! As if their stupid play protect and app geo-locking isn't causing widespread misery already!

Google - we weren't asking for a replacement. It wasn't a necessary functionality that was implemented badly. It was an evil functionality that shouldn't have been proposed in the first place! Of course you won't listen to us! You only took a small tactical step back due to the enormous hit you took to your image. But sure as hell, you consider your profits as more important than all the benefits of the web or the well being of billions of its users. You will get it by hook or crook - ethics and morality be damned!

If there's anyone who's still using chrome or one of its derivatives - ask yourself the reason for staying with it. You may have a hundred reasons. But at the end of the day, it will boil down to just two - convenience and laziness. You are not willing to part with even a small feature even after knowing that Chrome's creators are out to destroy the web for everyone except themselves. You forgot that freedom is not a right - it's something you have to fight for and earn. And in this battle, you laid down your weapons without a fight and let Google subject you and everyone else to their greed. Chrome's market share allows them to control the web standards and the web ecosystem. You are complicit in the damage the web is taking - because you chose convenience over principles.

Native encryption is when the filesystem driver does the decryption in addition to the regular decoding job. Dmcrypt is where encryption is done by a separate component that's part of the kernel. Dmcrypt decrypts the raw block device (partition) and creates an unencrypted virtual block device (usually in /dev/mapper/). The filesystem driver then decodes this virtual device to give the final data access. It's like having a filesystem within a filesystem.

Regular bootloaders like Grub can't decrypt anything. So the /boot device is usually on a separate unencrypted partition. You need the initramfs to be able to decrypt and decode the partition. That's not very complicated - most users don't even need to deal with it.

Dmcrypt is arguably more secure than native encryption, since you won't know the filesystem type until you decrypt the partition first. On the other hand, native encryption is likely to be faster and more flexible for complex filesystems like ZFS, Btrfs and BCachefs.

Forgot to mention stacked-git (stg). This is a tool to deal with patch stacks - much like the age old quilt tool often used by kernel hackers. Unlike quilt, stg uses git to manage a stack of patches. This tool was originally written in Python. It was recently rewritten in Rust by the same team.

Having used stg, it's like having multiple staging indexes in git. This allows you to craft a good commit history like the one you get from using interactive rebasing. Unlike interactive rebasing, you don't have to wait till finishing the feature, in order to achieve that result. If you are a git user and haven't given stg a try yet, I strongly recommend you do. It's a nice tool to have in your development tool chest.

Like many others, I don't replace old tools with new ones, simply because it is written in Rust. For example, fzf is a very novel and useful tool that's written in Go. (FYI: Fzf has a Rust alternative called skim). I'm going to restrict the rest of the post to the context of this thread - Rust CLI/TUI programs that I like. But by no means are they the only new ones I like, or always a replacement for the old ones.

fd and ripgrep (rg) have 2 things in common that give them edge over their older counterparts. First is that both are extremely fast compared to their predecessors. Second is that both support a modern (perl-compatible) version of regex syntax that many programming languages support.

Zellij is a terminal multiplexer like Tmux. However, Zellij IMO has one huge advantage over Tmux and screen - you don't need to take a tutorial or read a user guide just to get started. Everything is discoverable and intuitive. Zellij has the potential to replace TMux as the dominant terminal multiplexer in the near future.

You may find zoxide, atuin and starship as good extensions to your terminal experience, depending on your tastes. Zoxide is a smart directory changer (alt for cd) with good integration all around - with a lot of shells, alternatives (data import), editors (emacs, nvim, etc), file browsers (ranger, nnn, etc) and even mail client (aerc). Atuin replaces the history part of GNU Readline. But lately, it has started gaining features not found in readline, like encrypted history and cross-device history sync. Starship may be a bit fancy for shell prompts - but I find its configuration format to be simpler than the old method. It also supports several shells giving you a uniform experience across shells.

GPG-TUI is a TUI frontend to GnuPG. It's useful simply because the GnuPG UI is terrible. Meanwhile, Sequoia PGP is a tool that aims to replace GnuPG altogether. It has some lofty ambitions and has forced the OpenPGP ecosystem to advance a bit. Some of their innovations aim to solve the drawbacks of old OpenPGP - like lack of PKI (instead of just WoT) and Perfect forward secrecy in certain modes. Its defaults are also more sane and modern compared to GnuPG.

Git-UI (Rust) and LazyGit (Go) are TUI frontends for Git - they have no alternatives. I can recommend either of them if you are a heavy user of git - especially interactive staging and interactive rebasing. Meanwhile, git-interactive-rebase-tool is a tool specifically designed to manage interactive rebases.

If you are into coding, you may find Tokei useful. It is tool for counting Lines of code (LoC) in your projects, segregated by language. Hyperfine, from the developer of fd, is used to benchmark applications over several runs, with a lot of configuration options. Bat is a terminal pager, again from the developer of fd. It supports syntax highlighting. I often find uses for that. I'm not aware of another tool with the exact same functionality.

Finally, nushell is showing a lot of promise as a shell with more modern features. It extends the structured data paradigm from powershell.

Compared to btrfs, it has native encryption too - though it's said to be unaudited at the moment. Btrfs needs dmcrypt for encryption support.

It's going to be a while before 6.7 is released.

Since I know that most of the younger open source folks are obsessed with MIT for some reason

The bigtech actively peddled the idea that copyleft licenses are somehow evil and less free than permissive licenses. Their intention was of course to encourage free labor that they could exploit. Unfortunately, many in the community supported that idea due to vested interests, or uncritically bought into the propaganda.

I really don't want Linux to be a remote desktop on the cloud. That's already possible easily with Linux. But OS as a service is another attempt by companies like MS to pry the control of the system and data away from their customers. Worst of all, we have to pay a monthly subscription even after we buy hardware. To put it simply, it's rent seeking. Linux on the other hand, is good at making the best of even mediocre or low-end hardware.

Don't overthink it. Just publish. And as for entitled users, remember that you don't owe them. If anyone insists on a feature, tell them that you can prioritize them for the right fee.

Free software should be able to be replaced by anything - by the owner. There is no technical reason the device can't still be locked to prevent modification by someone else. There are already free software that allows you (the owner) to remotely screen-lock the device.

So, are Red Hat violating the GPL? No.

But what about this business of cancelling subscriptions? Isn’t that a restriction in violation of the GPL? Not in my view.

You are just repeating the exact narrow definition that Redhat/IBM's lawyer leeches found to justify what they did. Yes it's legal - but by no means in the spirit of GPL or any FSF or OSI approved license.

Starting with the FSF definition, ANY software from OUTSIDE that RH builds on (this includes the kernel and numerous other parts) comes to them with 4 assured freedoms. One of them is the freedom to distribute the software or the modified forms of it. To put it in short, what RH says is - "You're still free to exercise the freedom - but we will stop doing business with you if you do". While this is not against the letter of the license, this is most certainly AGAINST the INTENT of the license.

One might ask, if that's the intent of the license, why does the license allow such a loophole? To put it simply, the creators of the license created it based on certain guidelines. But they couldn't foresee all the ways in which the license would be twisted, violating its intent. This happens from time to time - causing the licenses to undergo revisions. For example, GPLv3 was created due to what FSF calls Tivoization - a practice that violates the intent without violating the license. Hell, this is against even OSI's intent.

However, just because there are loop holes in the license to violate its intent, doesn't mean that it's ethical or moral to take advantage of it. When some company does so, it's nothing short of parasitism. In this case, RH managed to suppress GPL after profiteering for decades from it.

In my view, the “community” reaction was terrible.

Clearly, your view is heavily colored. Remember that the community's reaction was only a response to what RH did. You clearly are not seeing the possibility that what RH did is way way worse and extremely damaging towards the community and FOSS principles.

If you give away the results of Red Hat’s hard work to productize CentOS Stream into RHEL,

This is a very myopic, one-sided and biased take. A lot of people who are complaining are contributors to the work RH uses. This isn't just about some bit of work. This is about trust that forms the foundations of the FOSS movement. People will be hesitant to contribute to any project that RH may take and profit like this. RH is using their code in a way that they were not expecting. What RH did is to fundamentally exploit that trust and then betray it.

Nothing has been taken from you except access to FUTURE Red Hat product ( other than totally for free via CentOS Stream of course ).

The same narrow definitions to justify the malicious intent. Remember that distributing the recipe for 'FUTURE Red Hat product' wouldn't be wrong in any way if RH hadn't created the new clause - that they will stop supplying if you did. They had to invent a way to override the intent of FOSS.

So, Red Hat is going quite above and beyond the licensing by providing their subscribers code to the entire distribution. Yes, beyond.

They don't have a business if they didn't distribute the source code. There are numerous other offerings that give you the same services without the source code. They are doing nothing beyond what it takes for them to make money. So, their moral superiority arguments are based on false premises.

I'm honestly very tired of people shilling the false arguments of corporates that exploit regular folks to make money. The stories of how RH damaged the entire Linux ecosystem for supporting their business is too long for me to even get into. For now, I will just say that RH's entire business model has been to make the Linux ecosystem too complicated for anyone else to reasonably manage or modify. So, please stop giving this greedy corporation more credit than what it's worth and stop demonizing the people who complained when their reasonable expectations were violated.

Talking about ingredient X, why was there a huge glass flask full of it right above the tank for the professor to accidentally break it?