Aside from comparing two different things, as you correctly identify, I believe that even the author's original assertion just isn't true. Maybe for some exe files, but I doubt for all or even most.
I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down.
While Wine may indeed be quite stable and a good solution for running legacy Windows software. I think that any dynamically linked legacy software can cause issues, both on Windows and Linux. Kernel changes may be a problem too. While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary. Apparently, as my client found out the hard/expensive way.
> I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down.
I moved from Windows 11 to Linux for the same reason: I was using an old version of Office because it was faster than the included apps: the full Word started faster than Wordpad (it was even on par with Notepad!) The Outlook from an old Office used less ram and was more responsive than the one included with Windows!
When I got a new laptop, I had problems with the installation of each the old versions of Office I had around, and there were rumors old versions Office would be blocked.
I didn't want to take the risk, so I started my migration.
> While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary
It was perfectly backwards compatible: Windows was working fine with very old versions of everything until some versions of Windows 11 started playing tricks (even with a Pro license)
I really loved Windows (and AutoHotKey and many other things), but now I'm happy with Linux.
> I really loved Windows (and AutoHotKey and many other things)
oh, do you know - how can I configure e.g. Win+1, Win+2, etc to switch to related virtual desktops? And - how to disable this slow animation.. just switch instantly?
May be you have several ideas where I should search.
I'm use Linux as my OS for a long time, but now I need to use Windows at my job. So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.
> So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.
I see you were given an answer for the slow animation. For most UI tweaks, regedit is a good starting point.
You may also like the powertoys, but I suggest you take the time to create AHK scripts, for example if you want to make your workflow keyboard centric
> So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.
I did the opposite with the help of hyprland on arch, but it took me years to get close to how efficient I was on Windows, where there are many very polished tools to do absolutely anything you can think of.
There's no built-in way to set hotkeys to switch to a specific desktop. And my primary annoyance is that there's no way to set hotkeys to move a given window to a different desktop.
Well, there's always LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux. My experience has been that most of the time when older binaries fail to run, it's because they are linked against old versions of libraries, and when I obtain those library versions -- exactly the same as obtaining the DLLs for the Windows executable -- things usually work just fine.
I may be (legitimately) flagged for asking a question that may sound antagonizing ... but asked with sincerity: is at all smart to mention Firefox and transparency in the same sentence, at least at this particular moment in time?
While this no doubt is an overall win, at least for most and in most cases, afaik this isn't completely without problems of its own. I just hope it won't lead to a systemd-like situation, where a cadre of (opinionated) people with power get to decide what's right from wrong, based on their beliefs about what might only be a subset of reality (albeit their only/full one at that).
Not trying to be dismissive here. Just have genuine concerns and reservations. Even if mostly intuitively for now; no concrete ones yet. Maybe it's just a Pavlov-reaction, after reading the name Firefox. Honestly can't tell.
You’re spot on: You are reacting seemingly without understanding the fundamentals of what you are reacting to.
Certificate Transparency [1] is an important technology that improves TLS/HTTPS security, and the name was not invented by Mozilla to my knowledge.
If Firefox were to implement a hypothetical IETF standard called “private caching”, would you also be cynical about Firefox “doing something private at this point in time” without even reading up what the technology in question does?
> You’re spot on: You are reacting seemingly without understanding the fundamentals of what you are reacting to.
What if I did (understand)? What if I knew a thing or two about it, even some lesser known details and side-effects? Maybe including a controversy or two, or at least an odd limitation and potential hazard at that. But, you correctly do point out that Firefox isn't to blame for implementing somebody else's "standard". Responsible for any and all consequences? Nonetheless, certainly yes.
Aside from now probably not being the best of times for Firefox, my main (potential) concern still stands. However, it is hardly a Firefox-only one, I'll give it that.
> What if I knew a thing or two about it, even some lesser known details and side-effects?
Then you would explicitly mention them instead of alluding to them.
People who know what they are talking about actually bring up the things that they are concerned about. They don't just say, i know an issue but im not going to tell you what it is.
> is at all smart to mention Firefox and transparency in the same sentence, at least at this particular moment in time?
What are you expecting them to do? Rename the technology 1984 style?
> I just hope it won't lead to a systemd-like situation, where a cadre of (opinionated) people with power get to decide what's right from wrong, based on their beliefs about what might only be a subset of reality (albeit their only/full one at that).
This is a non sensical statement. I mean that literally. It does not make sense.
I guess this is a good lesson on what the reasoning one would typically (and unfortunately) bring to a mainstream political thread results in when met with a topic from another area of life instead, particularly a technical one.
Especially this:
> where a cadre of (opinionated) people with power get to decide what's right from wrong, based on their beliefs about what might only be a subset of reality (albeit their only/full one at that).
This is always true. There's no arrangement where you can outsource reasoning and decisionmaking (by choice or by coercion) but also not. That's a contradiction.
> This is always true. There's no arrangement where you entrust someone else with decisionmaking (by choice or not nonwithstanding) but then they're somehow not the ones performing the decisionmaking afterwards.
I'm well aware of that. On itself there isn't a problem with it, in principle at least. Right until it leads to bad decisions being pushed through, and more often in ignorance rather than malice. I personally only have a real problem with it when people or tech ends up harmed or even destroyed, just because of ignorance rather than deliberate arbitrary choices (after consideration, hopefully).
To be clear, I'm not saying that any of that is the case here. But lets just say that browser vendors in general, and Mozilla as of lately in particular, aren't on my "I trust you blindly at making the right decisions" list.
I do see pretty massive problems with it, such as those you list off, but the unfortunate truth is that one cannot know or do everything themselves. So usually it's not even a choice but a coercive scenario.
For example, say I want to ensure my food is safe to eat. That would require farmland where I can grow my own food. Say I buy some, but then do I have the knowledge and the means to figure out whether the food I grew is actually safe to eat? After all, I just bought some random plot of farmland, how would I know what was in it? Maybe it wasn't even the land that's contaminated but instead the wind brought over some chance contamination? And so on.
I can't speak much in detail, but maybe the following will paint you a picture.
I did contract work for a large international financial institution, known for being "one of the big N" (N<5). Lots of data/backend/db work, in several languages/stacks. Then a new style/naming convention for databases got pushed, by middle/higher management. It included identifiers in both camel-case and pascal-case. It was clearly "designed" by somebody with a programming background in languages that use similar conventions.
I noticed how there would be trouble ahead, because databases have (often implicit) naming conventions of their own. Not without reason. They have been adopted (or "discovered") by more seasoned database engineers, usually first and foremost as for causing the least chance of interoperability issues. Often it is technically possible to deviate from them (your db vendor XYZ might support it), but the trouble typically doesn't emerge on the database level itself. Instead it is tooling and programming languages/frameworks on top of it, where things start to fall apart when deviating from the conventional wisdom of database naming conventions.
That also happened with that client. Turned out that the two major languages/frameworks/stacks they used for all their in-house projects (as well as many external product/services), fell apart on incompatibility with the new styling/naming conventions. All internal issues, with undocumented details (lots of low-level debugging to even find the issues). I already had predicted it beforehand, saw it coming, reported it, but got ignored. Not long after, I was "let go". Maybe because of tightened budgets, maybe because several projects hit a wall (not going anywhere, in large part because of the above mentioned f#-up). I'm sure the person who original caused the situation still got royally paid, bonuses included, regardless.
Anyways, the moral of the story here is this: even if you technically could deviate from well established database naming conventions, you can get yourself in a world of hurt if you do. Also if it appears to resolve naming inconsistencies with programming languages of choice.
I don't know who are on Godot Foundation's board, but as I've mentioned elsewhere: these people might want to lawyer up. This situation may very well have legal ramification, including for them.
Particularly if this was indeed their (only) response, to the events so far. Their attempt to distance themselves for the actions of Xananax, characterized as unofficial and an individual not sanctioned by them, means little if that person was effectively able to exclude access to Gotdot sources (as I’ve read from several sources) and/or at least a substantial part of its community. If the Godot Foundation made this possible by somehow by giving away the keys to their castle, then that's on them; they can (and will) carry the consequences. Even more so if they had any power to at least “freeze” the situation and somehow failed to do so.
Either way ... the tone, character and message of these two tweets sound pretty clear to me. Sad to see Godot go down this road. I always did see plenty of potential in Godot, albeit in need of a lot of work (of which I even considered actively participating at some point).
After this, I think no serious business could/should risk doing business based on Godot. Not after such a lackluster and “it wasn’t us”-style of response. Personally, that was about as dumb a move they could make; also precisely what I hoped they would not do. Two major rules of any successful sustainable business: all ultimately comes down to relationships of trust, where trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback. Godot could just as well have pointed this proverbial gun to their face instead of the foot.
Addendum:
On another level, not just related to Godot and more to all politically/ideologically driven dramas that have done harm to Open Source in general over the last decade or so: It looks like most of these incidents center around geographical regions/cultures (maybe covert commercial interests too), that apparently deem such incidents acceptable (or even weaponized them). Apparently even believing (or at least acting like) people should just move on, without the damage-causing entities facing substantial/material punishment nor be held accountable for the damage done.
This is not about censorship, political/ideological oppression, or what-not in that “department”. This is about people doing damage, yet typically walking away with near-impunity. Many of which having “freedom of speech” as their only excuse, while their actions clearly go way beyond speech. Also, since when did the right not to never be persecuted for speech became a license for saying anything without any consequences?
Most of the push-back against that kind immunity has time and again been framed as just politically/ideologically-driven responses themselves, even if they were obviously not. Unsurprisingly, mostly by those who use politics/ideology as their weapons of choice. Still, why is such framing even accepted in the first place? Since when is doing harm considered acceptable, no matter what kind of political/ideological excuse it’s packaged in? If that fundamental flaw isn’t fixes, on a cultural level, then many people may eventually see increasingly more Open Source (development) moving towards regions/cultures where playing such games isn't (politically/culturally/legally) tolerated. Not because of politics; simply because of business and even societal needs.
Probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, until a whole geographical region gets cut off. Maybe only because too many abuses kept coming from there: arbitrage mitigation and unfortunate guilty-by-association. No doubt sounds like a wild idea now. Would not count on it staying that way.
I guess it will take some time for the dust to settle and assess the damage and full course of events.
Regardless, from the looks of it so far, this Community Manager should probably be placed on forced leave and be stripped of all privileges, pending a thorough investigation. A psychiatric evaluation might also be warranted. Not because of any political ideology, but simply to assess if this person could and should be held accountable, legally and maybe even financially, for the inflicted damage to Godot as a project/product.
So far, it doesn't look good. Many years of hard work (maybe not so much code development but pretty much everything else) may have been irreparably damaged if not evaporated in mere days. Personally, I've been several times in a position where I considered Godot as the basis for application development. In hindsight I am now relieved I did not, for this drama would have turned that into a serious business liability. I can only imagine the (financial) implications for other companies who did pick Godot as a tech to build part of their business upon. While that may be considered collateral and "just the price of doing business", I'd would certainly hold this individual personally responsible for that damage. While a fork may mitigate some of the damage already done, it is not going to fix what went sideways here.
Based on just a cursory observation from what happened here, there is no doubt in my mind that (regardless of motivation or justification) this individual should never wield this much power, ever again. If Godot leadership does not take these actions back (into their own hands), it may find itself held accountable for the results of this situation. They may want to go find an experienced law firm too. I doubt this will be the end of this drama for them. While Open Source licenses may divert/absolve legal liability for technical/functionality/code-quality aspects, the same might not be true for liability as the result of harm-inducing behavior of individual people (like the kind that appears to have happened here).
If nothing else, let this episode be a lesson for doing proper vetting of people in a position of (potential) power. As most serious businesses know all too well, having anyone with opinions on the extremities of any ideological/political spectrum in a position of power, is typically not a bright idea. Though in this case I’d personally argue it’s a lot worse and appears to involve a mentally unhinged individual. Any reasonable person would have considered and reconsidered the implications of the actions so far taken .. and even then still waited for a considerable body of group consensus would have approved these actions before pressing the red button.
What are you even talking about? Damage? Legal issues?! It’s an open source project, not a licensed engine. What effect would any of this have on your business? Even if you get banned from the repo, just pull the code using another account and you’re good to go. You’re expending a whole lot of effort to rant about something that is essentially meaningless (and invisible) to the vast majority of current and potential Godot users, unless they have a comically large political axe to grind.
Unnecessary drama is (unfortunately) a time-honored tradition of the open source community. But, e.g., Linus Torvalds’ antics never curtailed the adoption of Linux.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the product.
FOSS dramas we knew from the past were around technical topics mostly where devs have differing views (to system-d or to not to system-d, GNOME file picker, etc) while Godot's drama is anything but technical, but only around the world views and identity politics of the CM.
> VSCode is pretty good, but not good enough to stop me migrating off the second a more viable editor arrived.
If you're interested, there is VSCodium (VCCode without the Microsoft/proprietary parts). There's also Theia, if you want to take things a step further away from Microsoft.
> I guess C# isn’t horrible? It’s far from a language I want to use, but it’s not teams level of atrocious, so they’ve got that going for them I guess.
No clue if this is true for other companies, but I know a company that does big outsourcing project and most of them in C#/.NET and Angular. I've seen plenty of that code. My impression was/is that most of the C# code was extremely basic and mostly just tying together all ready-made libraries/features/frameworks/services (which Microsoft provides on their platforms/products) that actually made up the apps/services. C# itself just isn't all that much. Apart from maybe a gateway to guaranteed vendor lock-in. Maybe that is why they made sure to not mess that one up ;)
@monax
Since you're the maintainer, I'll assume you no doubt will know more about it than me. But from what I (vaguely) recall, it's worse than that.
Not at liberty to elaborate on exact details, but not so long ago I had to deal with wkhtmltopdf, when it turned out to be the (still preferred/recommended) PDF rendering solution as part of a major popular web middle-ware framework, at a large corporate client. I was rather shocked to see a top-tear prestigious international institution working with such outdated tech (albeit certainly in ignorance), but never mind that.
What struck me most was the nature of the bugs I encountered. Probably one of the most baffling: seemingly randomly changing formatting of the output. In the end it turned out to be a Windows specific problem, where multiple administrators logged onto the Windows Server hosting the web application. Because of different workstation display geometries on their end, they effectively kept changing the display DPI settings of that server (a headless machine, only accessed through RDP). That in turn affected the rendering internals of wkhtmltopdf. Rather hilarious when I finally figured it out. That's when I learned it best never again use wkhtmltopdf on any Windows system (if anywhere at all, for that matter).
Wasn't the WebKit core even older than 2014? Maybe something about it being older but then just maintained independently until 2014 .. or something like that? Or maybe my memory is just messed up and failing me.
Either way, what I do remember is my amazement about seeing this (at best) 10 year old code (arguably of questionable quality to start with and certainly outdated by now) still in use as a go-to solution for rendering PDF from HTML. Ended up replaced it with a puppeteer-based solution. Arguably with its own problems, but less of a black hole than wkhtmltopdf. Especially considering it was (also) rendering user-supplied data. What could ever go wrong, right?
It seems you have more information about this situation than I do, as I recently took on the role of project maintainer and wasn't involved from the start.
I find the bug you mentioned interesting, and I'll promptly investigate to determine if it still exists. If I remember correctly, there's a --dpi option that may have already resolved this issue.
I share your concern about the code's state; it's problematic as it's currently leaking file descriptors and memory all over the place. We experimented with Puppeteer as an alternative, but its speed and memory usage were too high for our specific use case, so we're currently stuck with the current wkhtmltopdf.
Just to clarify, I'm not bashing wkhtmltopdf. I think it is a great tool (or at least it was), for what it was initially designed for. I've used it myself several times, to great effect. Albeit mostly long ago (about a decade or so).
I'm not even concerned all that much about the code's state itself, rather that it still shows up today. In situations it was probably never designed for. Adding to that, it now often appears wrapped inside some interfacing layer/code, binding it to whatever other software it is embedded in. But then only exposing part of wkhtmltopdf. Case in point, the --dpi option you mentioned (which indeed might fix the mentioned bug), was simply inaccessible through how the framework interfaced with wkhtmltopdf (which was a design cluster-F# in its own right).
However, the bigger elephant in the room for me is that the HTML/CSS support has changed considerably over the last decade, with wkhtmltopdf pretty much stuck in time. It's just pretty much a random hit or miss when it comes to rendering any modern web content. Only for carefully crafted (legacy) content does it still make a good use case.
I won't blame wkhtmltopdf for that though, but I sure haves questions for those who apparently still consider it a valid tool for integration into modern web frameworks. I guess part of that comes down to unintentional ignorance, not knowing what they are actually integrating. Another reason might be that I've not seen much of a better sort-of-drop-in replacement for wkhtmltopdf, so people stick to it far a lack of a proper alternative. Maybe some of the people who integrated wkhtmltopdf elsewhere are even very well aware of all the limitations/dangers. Still, little use of that if that knowledge is lost on those who subsequently end up using it, primarily just as consumers.
Puppeteer is a very different beast in its own right, regardless which engine/browser you end up using. But if more modern html/css features are required, it can be a valid replacement (regardless of numerous downsides nonetheless). Still, I (also) doubt that it will work as a good replacement for all of wkhtmltopdf's use cases.
If nothing else, I got some free entertainment out of it all .. watching the shocked expression on the faces of top-level suits, when I explained to them what they had been blissfully unaware of. They had good reasons to be worried, because this exposure should have been caught by their rigorous technology-review procedures. However, it had been an ad-hock dependencies that was introduced as part of a legit feature request. The dev had probably never even noticed, because it appeared as a native framework functionality (hiding any obvious reference to using wkhtmltopdf under the hood). Anyways, wkhtmltopdf is certainly not to be blamed for that.
Still, it does illustrate the dangers of modern-day software integration. I think especially in (web) frameworks, where the name of the game often appears to have turned towards a popularity contest (with competing frameworks) and "making things as simple as possible". Something about a road paved with good intentions.
Monopoly abuse by any other name is still just that.
Microsoft never did change, nor will it, no mater how many they manage to fool, manipulate or bribe. It remains a criminal enterprise that should be cut down. But that will never happen, as long as the government(s) controlling this company are made of the same DNA.
Good luck to those who have the luxury of a choice to avoid this company (and similar ones). Even more if they still choose not to. Most of all, good luck for those who don't even have a choice, for they most likely will need luck more than anyone else.
Microsoft shouldn't rely on this too much honestly. They still have mass, money and maybe an edge but the rest of the world changed, and is potentially ready to pick up the pieces if need be.
I thought recent efforts of MS were a sign of wisdom somehow.
Oracle basically rebuilds RHEL. It's not a tiny feat, but it was done by small teams for CentOS, Scientific Linux and other RHEL rebuilds. Real distribution work is done by RHEL/IBM.
> Call me when you can run real drivers in DOSBox-X.
That's exactly what i don't want.
>And, still, XDOSemu+FreeDOS runs circles over DOSBox and DOSBox-x.
No, not really have you even installed FreeDOS once? BTW the FreeDOS developers will perfectly tell you that they have no interest in being dos game focused...and you can feel that 50% of all games just refuse to run...that's not the case with MSDOS 5.22.
I don't think that ProtonMail complying with the law here is in any way the problem. They simply have to.
However, in this case just as in a few other ones before this one, it has become pretty clear to me that ProtonMail's marketing is deceptive at best an in a few cases some of their claims just blatantly not true.
What surprised me most is that when I pointed this out in the past, I was immediately attacked by what appeared to be like Apple-style fanboys, whole would not stand by anyone criticizing ProtonMail.
To this day I'm not so sure if that was just the genuinely zealous behavior of a few deranged individuals, or if it might have been a concerted commercial effort at damage control.
Either way, to me ProtonMail certainly is not what it claims to be (if not explicitly than at least implied). To me it's just another commercial entity trying to make a profit by tapping a relative niche market while convincing gullible people they are something they actually are not, in any way that will make them a bigger profit. Nothing really shocking about that, and mostly just standard behavior for any other modern commercial entity operating within a capitalistic economy.
Since when can they not refuse a NSA backdoor? Where does the mandate come from, with which the NSA supposedly can instruct commercial/private entities to integrate technological back doors? Does it even have such a legal mandate. I'm sure the NSA will argue that they do, but that doesn't mean they actually have it.
Some of the ways are already known: your company can be denied lucrative government contracts if you deny. Or you might learn you can't export your products due to export restrictions. Other ways are known to exist, but details are not available yet - go read about National Security Letters, or kangaroo "secret courts".
Courts that aren’t adversarial are just interpreting law. Secrecy makes it worse by eliminating accountability by the petitioner and judge.
For a non-secret example, look at the Social Security “fair hearings”, where an administrative law judge basically listens to a petition and makes a decision. The standards vary significantly by locale.
Government buyers that are less important (e.g. state level tollways) would be mandated to buy the backdoored algorithm by having the federal government cook it into a specification of how to buy tollway equipment, for example. Once the backdoored algorithm is in the product suite, it can be put to work on a more tactical level.
I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down.
While Wine may indeed be quite stable and a good solution for running legacy Windows software. I think that any dynamically linked legacy software can cause issues, both on Windows and Linux. Kernel changes may be a problem too. While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary. Apparently, as my client found out the hard/expensive way.