I use Linux for 20 years and I study programming for 10 years, bought 100 programming books, so a linux distribution is basically a programming language container. Slackware was for lisp. Now instead of kiss its simple ain’t easy with clojure. Debian is very tightly tied to perl with both communities bent on reproducibility. (Tho rust is replacing perl). Red hat and ibm is a Java shop. Centos is a scala platform at cern. Ubuntu and Python is a data science platform. Sure is a better Debian like ruby is a better Perl. And here we come to arch, when 10 years ago after a brief stunt with Perl basics I started learning c# the first thing I did is try to run the excercises on the raspberry pi. But because of some hard float soft float something they didn’t work. So I had to jailbreak the raspberry pi and run this new distro on it, the arch Linux. Where it just worked. You see ethics of ai and maybe like data science require the system to be fsf endorsed free system that’s what Debian gnu linux reason detre is. And Debian as Steve Jobs with Java were like against mono, you shall not pass. But for a gaming platform that’s a little bit different. Ex red had ceo now works at unity this mono fork. Ms bought blizzard, they want into this gaming thing badly. So that’s why steam os is arch now, less strict than Debian on the Libre side of things. The rest is history. :D
I love that channel and many documentaries on that channel,
But when I translated this python video with yandex and reuoded it I called it python drama and Perl advertisement.
Maybe somewhat off topic but my GitHub app on an iPhone haven’t been updating the feed for a few months now, so no have relogged earlier but still the same.
Edit: could it have something to do with lockdown mode or how is it called now.
May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so.
Thx
Agreed, it is not that stable/usable.
I tested it on M1 Pro and was hopeful, but after some years I realized it is not viable for daily use. Many things still don't work and I doubt that they will any time soon.
Last year I was given M4 Pro at work and it is not supported at all.
Looking at the drama and people stepping down, I don't think MacBooks will be properly supported on Linux in this decade.
On the other hand, I have an M2 Air and it's stable, fast, and I haven't thrown anything at it that it doesn't handle perfectly. But the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
(The M3/M4 are in progress but not supported. That's public on the project's compatibility chart.)
The biggest deal breaker for me was no support for external displays (through DP alt mode/thunderbolt).
Also the infrequent random OS crashes were annoying. And sometimes WiFi would stop working after sleep (wold not show any access points) and would require a reboot.
M1 is 5 years old already and is still not fully stable and lacks features. It seems like the overall development effort started slowing down a couple years ago and while we did get the amazing audio daemon and graphics driver, development of other things seem to be stuck.
If I remember correctly, there were also some comments from Marcan (?) on social media about issues with supporting newer chips (M3/M4), hinting that M3 and M4 are vastly different and require significant effort to add Linux support.
So if M3, M4 and other future versions are too different to get supported in decent time frame, then that means that Asahi is all about supporting years old hardware. That reduces interest by Linux users looking to buy a laptop now, and thus potentially reducing available donations, developer pool, interest, etc.
I love what Marcan, Alyssa, James and others have achieved and how they have pushed Linux further. I think that their contributions will stay relevant and be useful for other hardware for many years to come.
Sorry but I just can let it, I bought a Microsoft dev kit 2023 just to test hundreds of gigabytes of windows software I’m responsible for would deploy on it with the system center :D
If that software would also Work ofcourse is another thing. :D
Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.
I was recently thinking that object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object I mean ofcourse didn’t pan out that good.
Haven’t googled yet what people had to say about that already before.
P.s. big fan of ur comments.
> object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object
That is why I love Plan 9. 9P serves you a tree of named objects that can be byte addressed. Those objects are on the other end of an RPC server that can run anywhere, on any machine, thanks to 9p being architecture agnostic. Those named objects could be memory, hardware devices, actual on-disk files, etc. Very flexible and simple architecture.
I rather pick Inferno, as it improved on top of Plan 9 learnings, like the safe userspace in form of Limbo, after conclusion throwing away Alef wasn't that great in the end.
Inferno was a commercial attempt at competing with Sun's Java. The plan 9 folks had to shift gears so they took Plan 9 and built a smaller portable version of it in about a year. Both the Plan 9 kernel and Inferno kernel share a lot of code and build system so moving code between them is pretty simple.
The real interesting magic behind Plan 9 is 9P and its VFS design so that leaves Inferno with one thing going for it: Dis, its user space VM. However, Dis does not protect memory as it was developed for mmu-less embedded use. It implicitly trusts the programmer not to clobber other programs memory. It is also hopelessly stuck in 32bit land.
These days Inferno is not actively maintained by anyone. There are a few forks in various states and a few attempts to make inferno 64 bit but so far no one has succeeded. You can check: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno
Alef was abandoned because they needed to build a compiler for each arch and they already had a full C compiler suite. So they took the ideas from Alef and made the thread(2) C library. If you're curious about the history of Alef and how it influenced thread(2), Limbo and Go: https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
These days Plan 9 is still alive and well in the form of 9front, an actively developed fork. I know a lot of the devs and some of them daily drive their work via 9front running on actual hardware. I also daily drive 9front via drawterm to a physical CPU sever that also serves DNS and DHCP so my network is managed via ndb. Super simple to setup vs other clunky operating systems.
And lastly, I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.
> I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.
Doesn't Wasm/WASI provide these same features already? That doesn't seem like "a lot of work", it's basically there already. Does dis add anything compelling when compared to that existing technology stack?
Inferno was initially released in 1996, 21 years before WASM existed.
An inferno built using WASM would be interesting. Though WASI would likely be supplanted by a Plan 9/Inferno interface possibly with WASI compatibility. Instead of a hacked up hyper text viewer you start with a real portable virtual OS that can run hosted or native. Then you build whatever you'd like on top like HTML renderers, JS interpreters, media players/codecs, etc. You profile is a user account so you get security for free using the OS mechanisms. Would make a very interesting platform.
I am well aware of that. My point is a web browser, originally a hypertext viewer, is now a clunky runtime for all sorts of ad-hoc standards including a WASM VM. So instead, start with a portable WASM VM that is a light weight OS that you build a browser inside of composed of individual components like Lego. You get all the benefits of having a real OS including process isolation, memory management, file system, security, and tooling. WASI is a POSIX like ABI/API that does not fit the Plan 9/Inferno design as they thankfully aren't Unix.
The WASI folks are accepting new API proposals. If the existing API does not fit an Inferno-like design, you can propose tweaked APIs in order to improve that fit.
All of that prose doesn't change the fact that at the time Inferno was built, it was an improvement over Plan 9, taking its experience into consideration for improvements.
I know pretty well the history, I was around at the time after all, and Plan 9 gets more attention these days, exactly because most UNIX heads usually ignore Inferno.
"We 've painted a dim picture of what it takes to bring IPEs to UNIX. The problems of locating. user interfaces. system seamlessness. and incrementality are hard to solve for current UNIXes--but not impossible. One of the reasons so little attention has been paid to the needs of IPEs in UNIX is that
UNIX had not had good examples of IPEs for inspiration. This is changing: for instance. one of this article's authors has helped to develop the Small talk IPE for UNIX (see the adjacent story). and two others of us are working to make the Cedar IPE available on UNIX.
What's more. new UNIX facilities. such as shared memory and lightweight processes (threads). go a long way toward enabling seamless integration. Of course. these features don't themselves deliver integration: that takes UNIX programmers shaping UNIX as they always have--in the context of a friendly and cooperative community. As more UNIX programmers come to know IPEs and their
power. UNIX itself will inevitably evolve toward being a full IPE. And then UNIX programmers can have what Lisp and Small talk and Cedar programmers have had for many years: a truly comfortable place to program."
