Ramin Honary

Never tried it, but everyone I know who has tried it says its the most stable rolling release OS ever. That is pretty cool. Btrfs support is cool too, copy-on-write, deduplication, and whole-disk snapshot and rollback capability, its great for keeping your data safe.

I don't care about rolling releases, I get my stability from Debian, or sometimes Mint. If I want the latest software I’ll install Guix packages or FlatPaks. And I can still use Btrfs on Debian.

I can explain the difference between X11 and Xorg with an analogy to the web and web browsers: X11 is like HTTP, Xorg is like the Chrome browser. X11 is the protocol, Xorg is software that implements that protocol.

X11 is old, it was designed back in the 1980s and includes messages for drawing lines and circles and fonts on the screen. Also, back then there were a lot of “thin clients”, computers that were basically nothing but a browser, since graphics were computationally expensive and could not be done on the client computer, graphics rendering was done server side. There are lots of messages in the protocol for handling screen updates over a computer network.

Nowadays, all personal computers are powerful enough to render their own graphics, and no one needs the display server to draw individual lines or circles on screen. Vector graphics and fonts are done at the application level, not over the network. So these these messages specified in the X11 protocol are hardly ever used. Really, most of X11 (let’s say 90% of it) is not used at all, only the parts where the keyboard and mouse are defined, and how you can allocate memory to buffer a graphic and copy that buffer to the display. But you still need to maintain the Xorg software to handle everything that X11 specifies, and this is just a waste of code, and a waste of time for the code maintainers.

So basically, they decided about 10-15 years ago that since no one uses most of X11, let’s just define a new protocol (called Wayland) that only has the parts of X11 that everyone still uses, and get rid of the 90% of it that no one ever uses. Also, the protocol design takes into account the fact that most modern computers do all of their own rendering rather than calling out to a server to render for them. Also the Wayland protocol design takes into account that a lot of computers have graphics cards for accelerated graphics rendering.

Since the Wayland protocol is much simpler, it is easier for anyone to write their own software which implements the protocol, these software are called “compositors.” Finally, 10 years after some of the first implementations of Wayland, the protocol and compositors are becoming mature enough that they can be used in ordinary consumer PCs.

Emacs.

Emacs is an app platform in and of itself, and the vanilla installation comes with dozens of its own apps pre-installed. Like how web apps are all programmed in JavaScript, Emacs apps are all programmed in Lisp. All Emacs apps are scriptable and composable in Lisp. Unlike on the web, Emacs encourages you to script your apps to automate things yourself.

Emacs apps are all text based, so they all work equally well in both the GUI and the terminal.

Emacs comes with the following apps pre-installed:

• a text editor for both prose and computer code
• note taking and organizer called Org-mode (sort of like Obsidian, or Logseq)
• a file browser and batch file renamer called Dired
• a CLI console and terminal emulator
• a terminal multiplexer (sort-of like “Tmux”)
• a process manager (sort-of like “Htop”)
• a simple HTML-only web browser
• man-page and info page browser
• a wrapper around the Grep and Find CLI tools
• a wrapper around SSH called “Tramp”
• e-mail client
• IRC client
• revion control system, including a Git porcelain called “Magit”
• a “diff” tool
• ASCII art drawing program
• keystroke recorder and playback

Some apps that I install into Emacs include:

• “Mastodon.el” Mastodon client
• “Elfeed” RSS feed reader
• “consult” app launcher (sort-of like “Dmenu”)

Steps are being made toward Guile Emacs integration. The work is mostly being done by Robin Templeton, who (last I heard) works at the Spritely Institute. And as I understand, there are other people pushing on the Guile in Emacs front as well, so you may not have to wait long.

Have you considered trying to setup Kakoune bindings in Emacs? For example like this: https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

That looks like artwork from The Lispy Gopher Show. I love it!

EDIT: yep, artwork by Tomas Prahou a.k.a. @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org .

@Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone when humans have their basic needs all satisfied, and they feel secure and mostly content with life, they naturally become very creative and innovative.

Think about it: if you were not worried about paying rent every month, not worried about medical bills, not worried about where your next meal is coming from, and the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week, what would you do with your abundant free time? You might have kids and devote your life to them, and that is really helpful for perpetuating society. You might be happy to just play video games and watch TV and movies and maybe read fictional novels in all of your free time, and that would be totally OK too.

But a lot of people would get antsy, they would want to find tasks for themselves to perform. They may devote themselves to sport, and become the best players in the world. They may devote themselves to art, and without a free market to satisfy, without a business case to defend the art you make, the art you make would be truly free and likely very innovative. Even in engineering and science, in which some creativity is required to come up with innovative solutions to problems, if you don’t have to worry about making things that are marketable, you just want to make things that you think are cool and useful for yourself, it may turn out to be useful for millions of other people.

Yes! Emacs has already taken over most of my desktop environment apps with the exception of the web browser and a few apps like Blender and Gimp. I haven’t gone as far as you, getting each Emacs buffer to display in its own frame in is own WM-level window, but that would make for a more immersive experience. Also, your color scheme is similar to the one I use now. I love it.

I can’t wait for the day when software written in Lisp takes over my window manager, then my panel, then my session manager, then my whole operating system kernel.

Why are you trying to distract from that?

I am not trying to distract from that, I thought I made myself clear:

this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful

But if Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL is defending the genocide of Palestinians, that is some pretty important context. If there happens anything in the report about pro-Palestine protests being equated with neo-Nazis, you need to take those parts with an extra few grains of salt.

Poisoning the well

Yeah, that seems to be the M.O. of the Anti-Defamation League with regard to anti-zionism: poison the well against anyone who might feel empathy with the Palestinian people before they have a chance to speak, by equating them with antisemitism and Nazis.

Ironically, the Palestinian people are technically Semitic people also, but their wells are being literally poisoned by white Phosphorus bombs “made with [white] pride in the USA,” and dropped by different Semitic people who have the privilege to do that.

This is why white supremacy is so evil, it is so arbitrary. Who gets counted as “white” and that dividing line between enjoying privilege and being a victim of mass murder changes from day to day, and place to place. Zionism just happens to include Jews in that definition of white (while also excluding Palestinians), where as antisimitism excludes Jews, but both are white supremacy.

Until the ADL gets rid of their pro-genocide leadership and spokespeople, I can’t take any of their reports seriously. Its a shame, since this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful. They have really damaged their own reputation this past half year by equating support of Palestinian victims of genocide with antisemitism.