Its all about how an application goes from “I would like to display X on a screen” to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It’s then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There’s a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that’s the general idea.

Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to “look at” what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn’t focussed).

Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we’re at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there’s still odd bits of software that either haven’t been ported, or that still rely on some features that don’t exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.

Its just the symbol The Register uses at the end of an article. Like how some papers use a filled in square.

Kotlin targets the JVM right? I think you’d need either a port of the runtime (dalvik?) Or an api translation later a la WINE.

But I don’t actually know anything, so don’t listen to me. Having a fully Foss phone with support for the android app ecosystem would be wonderful though

Machine learning is just gradient descent through a subset of algorithm-space

Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).

There’s a former apple designer on the team I think, which they’ve been leaning into hard to get the hype train rolling.

How bloody dare you!

Iirc microkernels have been the future since before Linux existed. There was a bit of a flame war between Linus and the guy who wrote the MINIX kernel about how being monolithic would be the death of Linux.

GNU Hurd also wanted to show the world how good microkernels could be, but sadly never got off the ground.

I’m not saying microkernels are bad, but I do wonder if there’s some reason we don’t see them out in the wild much.

Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.

By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously

This is… very smart actually. Any reason this is limited to Xwayland? (Is that XDG portal a thing yet?)

The point of Linux on phones isn’t to have a phone that requires you to constantly fix it with CLI tools. The point is to have a free and open software platform for a device that is increasingly necessary for daily life.

As a side effect, developing Linux for phones would probably help us eliminate the need to reach for the terminal on desktop Linux as well. I believe snaps (which laid the groundwork for flatpaks) were originally developed for Linux on “smart” devices. The whole ecosystem improves when we try to bring Linux into a new domain.

P.S. I use termux (a terminal for android complete with its own tiny Linux environment) from time to time when I need to access my server over SSH. It’s a bit clumsy, but super handy!

Best I’ve ever had was like 60mbps down. Might be a budget thing though, I refuse to pay more than £30/month for internet

I wish there was an option for an android style system where, when an application wants to use a permission for the first time, you get a pop up asking you to grant that permission.

Or, more generally, just some way to ensure that (a) a flatpak isn’t granted the permissions it wants automatically and (b) I can then manually grant those permissions as conveniently as possible

permission denied: /dev/display/3/349/1045

At the end there’s a little jab towards Wayland:

Today, the Wayland enthusiasts like to talk about how they are modernizing the Linux graphics stack. But Linux is a Unix, and in Unix, everything is meant to be a file. So any Wayland evangelists out there, tell us: where in the file system can I find the files describing a window on the screen under the Wayland protocol? What file holds the coordinates of the window, its place in the Z-order, its colour depth, its contents?

As far as I’m aware nobody has even considered extending the file metaphor to the graphics stack, and it sounds a bit ridiculous to me.

It also reminds me of this talk that suggests maybe trying to express everything as a file might not be the best idea…

Underrated comment.

I’d argue that ML is the more general term (that could even apply to computing a line of best fit, if you’re an extremist). But yeah, it’s just semantics at this point

That’s at least somebody’s idea of a good time…

I do wonder what percentage of Linux users reject the survey compared to Windows users. Not that it’s changed much, but every little helps right?

I’ve been having a lot of fun with scheme lately (specifically guile, but I don’t think it matters much). It’s a very stripped down language compared to common lisp, so I felt it was easier to get started with.