• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: May 31st, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

    Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

    You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.






  • The BDFL model, as it’s called, is what allows large projects to continue to have focused vision rather than devolving into design-by-committee. The kernel is actually already well beyond pure BDFL, but my point is having a single point of overall leadership can be a huge boon for the organization of large and complex projects. FOSS philosophy has literally nothing to do with management structure; it’s entirely about the rights of the end user.

    BDFL is not without its own risks. WordPress is a good counterexample these days. But, when someone originates a project and sticks around to steer it, it would be silly to reject their proven successful leadership for such a vague reason as you have presented.

    When things do go sideways, people are free to fork the project. That is what FOSS is.



  • You’re absolutely right, you could take any binary that runs under an OS and set up a bootloader to execute it directly without an OS.

    The problem is that all programs, even ones in C, rely invisibly and enormously on the OS abstracting away hardware for them. The python interpreter doesn’t know the first thing about how to parse the raw bytes on a hard drive to find the location of the bytes that belong to a given file path. Files and filesystems are ‘fake’ when you get down to it, and the OS creates that fiction so each program doesn’t have to be customized per PC setup.

    So, ironically, to be able to truly kernel hack in python like you want would require writing tons of C to replace all OS hooks (like fopen to interact with a file, e.g.) with code that knows how to directly manipulate your hardware (speaking PCIe/NVMe to get to the disk, speaking GPT to find the partition on the disk, speaking ext4 to find the file in the partition, e.g.).

    OSes are complex as hell for a reason, and by retrofitting python to run on bare metal like that would require recreating that complexity in the interpreter.




  • Binary speed is really the least reason to do it. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to the individual, but there are a lot of little reasons Gentoo is uniquely powerful.

    Benefits specific to compiling:

    • fine-grained control of features and dependencies with USE flags
    • very easy package maintenance (writing ebuilds)
      • much simpler to add your own custom local packages when you need them
      • less workload on the gentoo team which is good for repository health and breadth
    • control of compile flags (yes speed, but more practically hardening for secure systems)
    • the same gentoo is available on way more platforms and architectures than any binary distro




  • ‘Toy’ feels strange to me here. It’s more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it’s not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.

    You’re absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.





  • Yeah, being a niche product without the economies of scale elsewhere in gaming makes the price really awkward. My hope is that will improve over time if the install base keeps growing.

    I use mine just about every day, I’ve been fully obsessed with a game on multiple occasions, and I’m excited every time there are new things in the catalog. Easily worth full game-console price for the joy I’ve gotten out of it. But, that doesn’t really help anybody else, I know.

    It really is a lot less of a gimmick than it might seem. The final game of the first season is a shockingly polished gameboy-zelda-style adventure that I’ve played start-to-finish more than once.