sho_hn (u/sho_hn) - Readit News

sho_hn commented on Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video] youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTO... · Posted by u/joelkesler

sprash · a day ago

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude.

This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.

sho_hn · a day ago

FWIW, this just isn't true for KDE. We hit a rough patch with the KDE 4.x series - 17 years ago - that has been difficult to live down, but have done much in the way of making amends since, including learning from and avoiding the mistakes we made back then.

For example, we intentionally optimized Plasma 5 for low-powered devices (we used to have stacks of the Pinebook at dev sprints, essentially a RaspPi-class board in a laptop shell), shedding more than half the menory and compute requirements in just that generational advance.

We also have a good half-decade of QA focus behind us, including community-elected goals like a consistency campaign, much like what you asked for.

I'm confident Plasma 5 and 6 have iteratively gotten better on all four points.

It's certainly not perfect yet, and we have many areas to still improve about the product, some of them greatly. But we're certainly not enshittifying, and the momentum remains very high. Nearly all modern, popular new distros default to KDE (e.g. Bazzite, CachyOS, Asahi, Valve SteamOS) and our donation totals from low-paying individual donors - a decent proxy for user satisfaction - have multiplied. I've been around the commnunity for about 20 to 25 years and it's never been a more vibrant project than today.

Re the fantastic talk, thanks for the little KDE shout-out in the first two minutes!

sho_hn commented on CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

RodgerTheGreat · 2 days ago

He's a salesman pushing an entire industry who regularly receives special treatment and access from LLM vendors. The fact that he's open about getting these favors and subtle enough to sprinkle his salesmanship with a thin veneer of skepticism and plausible deniability doesn't make it any less of a grift.

sho_hn · 2 days ago

I'm obviously biased when it comes to FOSS foundations, but Simon is also a member of the board of the Python Software Foundation, which is not nothing in terms of looking after our craft.

The LLM stuff feels minor in comparison, even if it may be what HN knows him for. It's certainly not the same level of achievement as your average bargain bin AI rambler in your LinkedIn feed.

sho_hn commented on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment blog.system76.com/post/po... · Posted by u/onnnon

jorvi · 3 days ago

I really hate that at some point in the past, KDE developers decided that they hated how deeply intuitive virtual desktops are and deprecated them in favor of something deeply unintuitive (Activities). Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.

The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.

sho_hn · 3 days ago

> Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

I don't think this is true. Speaking as an upstream dev, we've never been very happy with Activities, either.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/35

Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.

sho_hn commented on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment blog.system76.com/post/po... · Posted by u/onnnon

phkahler · 3 days ago

I've often said OSes and DEs have stagnated, so web browsers started innovating in areas they shouldn't have needed to. Tabs is one such area. And now with Cosmic:

Stacks, snapping, and sticky windows

◦ Stack windows to combine them into tab groups like a browser

••• Right click on the header and choose Create Window Stack. Then drag another window to the stack.

••• When tiling windows, simply drag the window on top of another to create a stack.

Tabs are an interesting way to handle multiple instances of the same app (though this sounds like cosmic might mix them too). But in Windows for example, each app would have to do it's own implementation of muli-document handling. Browsers just brought us the tabs metaphor to manage them. I always thought that should be done at a higher level than the apps, and now it's here! I was thinking toolkit level, but go a level up to the DE and mix apps.

sho_hn · 3 days ago

FWIW, multiple KDE versions had similar group-windows-with-tabs implementations for many years, and the uptake wasn't particularly high.

Cf. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/kde44...

sho_hn commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul

mmooss · 5 days ago

People can learn Rust at any age. The reality is that experienced people often are more hesitant to learn new things.

I can think of possible reasons: Early in life, in school and early career, much of what you work on is inevitably new to you, and also authorities (professor, boss) compel you to learn whatever they choose. You become accustomed to and skilled at adapting new things. Later, when you have power to make the choice, you are less likely to make yourself change (and more likely to make the junior people change, when there's a trade-off). Power corrupts, even on that small scale.

There's also a good argument for being stubborn and jaded: You have 30 years perfecting the skills, tools, efficiencies, etc. of C++. For the new project, even if C++ isn't as good a fit as Rust, are you going to be more efficient using Rust? How about in a year? Two years? ... It might not be worth learning Rust at all; ROI might be higher continuing to invest in additional elite C++ skills. Certainly that has more appeal to someone who knows C++ intimately - continue to refine this beautiful machine, or bang your head against the wall?

For someone without that investment, Rust might have higher ROI; that's fine, let them learn it. We still need C++ developers. Morbid but true, to a degree: 'Progress happens one funeral at a time.'

sho_hn · 5 days ago

I still think you're off the mark. Again, most existing Rust developers are not "blank slate Rust developers". That they do not rush out to rewrite all of their past projects in C++ may be more about sunk costs, and wanting to solve new problems with from-scratch development.

sho_hn commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul

m00dy · 5 days ago

C++ devs are spinning in their graves now.

sho_hn · 5 days ago

Or installing Haiku!

sho_hn commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul

mmooss · 5 days ago

Before we ask if almost all things old will be rewritten in Rust, we should ask if almost all things new are being written in Rust or other memory-safe languages?

Obviously not. When will that happen? 15 years? Maybe it's generational: How long before developers 'born' into to memory-safe languages as serious choices will be substantially in charge of software development?

sho_hn · 5 days ago

I'm a bit wary if this is hiding an agist sentiment, though. I doubt most Rust developers were 'born into' the language, but instead adopted it on top of existing experience in other languages.

sho_hn commented on Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter reuters.com/lifestyle/cul... · Posted by u/NaOH

tokioyoyo · 5 days ago

I have a feeling that most people imagine this. But this doesn’t sound like on the ground reality for me? Here in Tokyo, most people I’ve seen just grab brewed coffee or the usual espresso drinks and go on with their lives. When I lives in Toronto/Vancouver, that’s what I experienced over there as well. Used to frequent one down the street as it was the cheapest brewed available coffee, and the regulars would always order their normal cups to go.

It’s interesting to see these type of generalizations that I never experience in life. I’m not saying there’s no truth to it, as girls in my circles often talk about “oh, it’s PSL season, I wanna go!”. But it’s hard to believe that all of their customers go for the special drinks.

sho_hn · 5 days ago

I've never seen this either. I'm just interpreting what I think OP meant.

I used to live in Seoul, and new special food or drink items definitely would cause fad waves and would appear on Instagram feeds (Seoul is notorious for this), but I doubt it was the major parts of Starbucks' business.

sho_hn commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul

arilotter · 5 days ago

This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"

sho_hn · 5 days ago

I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: Let's forgive.

sho_hn commented on Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain repebble.com/blog/meet-pe... · Posted by u/freshrap6

lurk2 · 5 days ago

> And buying the newest thing every year is kinda frowned upon here in the EU now.

Is there any evidence that Europeans aren’t buying new phones at the same rate that they used to?

sho_hn · 5 days ago

Some sources say so, e.g. "Declining Replacement Cycles Among Consumers" on https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/europe-sma...

And https://www.unibocconi.it/en/news/disposable-smartphones-tri... has replacement cycles in Italy going up.

Anecdotally, 2023/24 all media in Germany was full of ads for shops trading refurb phones. Most of those talked lower prices, but some mentioned sustainability.