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blog via finger

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  blog via finger Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> - 2026-06-08 18:00 -0700
    Re: blog via finger Daniel Cerqueira <dan.list@lispclub.com> - 2026-06-09 09:50 +0100
    Re: blog via finger gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) - 2026-06-09 09:31 +0000
    Re: blog via finger "Kurt Weiske" <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-5g5-this> - 2026-06-09 07:32 -0700
      Re: blog via finger Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> - 2026-06-09 12:02 -0700
        Re: blog via finger "Kurt Weiske" <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-vti-this> - 2026-06-10 06:58 -0700
          Re: blog via finger Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> - 2026-06-10 11:35 -0700
            Re: blog via finger Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-06-10 23:51 +0000
              Re: blog via finger gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) - 2026-06-11 11:09 +0000
                Re: blog via finger Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-06-11 19:02 +0000
                  Re: blog via finger Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> - 2026-06-12 13:44 -0400
                    Re: blog via finger Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-06-12 18:52 +0000
                      Re: blog via finger drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2026-06-12 19:54 +0000
                      Re: blog via finger Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-06-14 15:36 +0100
                    Re: blog via finger gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) - 2026-06-13 06:34 +0000
                      Re: blog via finger Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-06-14 15:39 +0100
                  Re: blog via finger Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-06-14 15:30 +0100
                Re: blog via finger Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-06-12 00:10 +0000
                  Re: blog via finger gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) - 2026-06-12 15:20 +0000
                    Re: blog via finger Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-06-12 23:50 +0000
                      Re: blog via finger scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2026-06-13 14:46 +0000
                        Re: blog via finger Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> - 2026-06-14 13:27 -0400
                          Re: blog via finger Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-06-14 23:48 +0000
                          Re: blog via finger "Kurt Weiske" <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-25-this> - 2026-06-15 07:10 -0700
                          Re: blog via finger John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2026-06-15 08:17 -0700
                    Re: blog via finger mechanicjay@sol.smbfc.net (Mechanicjay) - 2026-06-13 01:09 +0000
                      Re: blog via finger Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-06-14 15:52 +0100
                    Re: blog via finger Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-06-14 15:49 +0100
                      Re: blog via finger gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) - 2026-06-14 16:21 +0000
          Re: blog via finger Thomas Prufer <prufer.public@mnet-online.de.invalid> - 2026-06-11 07:50 +0200

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#234971 — blog via finger

I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
old phlog.

After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
my finger service.

If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too
similar I think.

Opinions?

--
Daniel
sysop  | air & wave bbs
finger | info@bbs.airandwave.net

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#234972

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> writes:


> I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
> old phlog.
>
> After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
> my finger service.

[...]

> Opinions?

I never heard a thing silliest.  Cheers for Freedom,

-- 
A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes
all the difference. ~ Alan Alexander Milne

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#234973

Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:
> After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
> my finger service.
> 
> If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too
> similar I think.

Reminds me a bit of Thimbl:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110203044006/http://www.thimbl.net/

Cheers,

Koen

-- 
Software architecture & engineering: https://www.sonologic.se/
Sci-fi: https://www.koenmartens.nl/
Retrocomputing videos: https://retroscandinavian.eu/

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#234974

  To: Daniel
-=> Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-

 Da> I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
 Da> old phlog.

 Bring it on - I'm enjoying seeing new Gopher content.

 Da> After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
 Da> my finger service.

 Da> If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too
 Da> similar I think.

 I have my old .plan file saved, and Synchronet BBS does support the
 finger protocol - but I don't know where you'd enter a .plan file?

         kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
                     | http://realitycheckbbs.org
                     | 1:218/700@fidonet


			



 
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Win32 NewsLink 1.2
 *  realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org

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#234975

"Kurt Weiske" <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-5g5-this> writes:

>  To: Daniel
> -=> Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
>
> Da> I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
> Da> old phlog.
>
> Bring it on - I'm enjoying seeing new Gopher content.
>
> Da> After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
> Da> my finger service.
>
> Da> If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too
> Da> similar I think.
>
> I have my old .plan file saved, and Synchronet BBS does support the
> finger protocol - but I don't know where you'd enter a .plan file?
>
>         kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
>                     | http://realitycheckbbs.org
>                     | 1:218/700@fidonet

I don't have a synchronet board so that's a good question. Meatlotion
folded in his finger server with his mystic board but I'm sure he's
using some bash scripts to do it.

My finger service is custom and there are no plan files. Feel free to
peruse. I spent many hours setting it up and even more hours thinking
about how I"d do it. It's been a blast.

Have you ever thought that you could look up wikipedia articles on a
finger? Or get local movie theater times? Or, even, lookup scientific
papers? Enjoy.

--
Daniel
sysop  | air & wave bbs
finger | info@bbs.airandwave.net

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#234977

  To: Daniel
-=> Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-

 Da> My finger service is custom and there are no plan files. Feel free to
 Da> peruse. I spent many hours setting it up and even more hours thinking
 Da> about how I"d do it. It's been a blast.

 Da> Have you ever thought that you could look up wikipedia articles on a
 Da> finger? Or get local movie theater times? Or, even, lookup scientific
 Da> papers? Enjoy.

 I love self-contained, lo-tech systems. I started using a 2-way pager
 for outage notification and had a lot of fun finding data that you
 could scrape and send via email, either on-demand or in cron. With a
 little twiddling, I was able to get my Outlook notes and address book
 on it as well.

 Being able to get random text via finger would have been interesting --
 Now, I think we should encourage people to post to finger!

         kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
                     | http://realitycheckbbs.org
                     | 1:218/700@fidonet
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Win32 NewsLink 1.2
 *  realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org

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#234978

"Kurt Weiske" <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-vti-this> writes:

>  To: Daniel
> -=> Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
>
> Da> My finger service is custom and there are no plan files. Feel free to
> Da> peruse. I spent many hours setting it up and even more hours thinking
> Da> about how I"d do it. It's been a blast.
>
> Da> Have you ever thought that you could look up wikipedia articles on a
> Da> finger? Or get local movie theater times? Or, even, lookup scientific
> Da> papers? Enjoy.
>
> I love self-contained, lo-tech systems. I started using a 2-way pager
> for outage notification and had a lot of fun finding data that you
> could scrape and send via email, either on-demand or in cron. With a
> little twiddling, I was able to get my Outlook notes and address book
> on it as well.
>
> Being able to get random text via finger would have been interesting --
> Now, I think we should encourage people to post to finger!

I'm trying to achieve a level of digital minimalism in my household. My
ideal setup would be to operate 90% of my daily tasks on an old timey
terminal.

I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old Tandy
terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something modern like
a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power consumption. I recently
read a term on another NG discussing permacomputing, and that sent me
down a rabbit hole.

I don't want to chase nasty tech issues on aging hardware. On top of
that, 80s retro hardware didn't have keyboard standards yet, so the key
configs are something I'd rather not form bad habits from.

I hope you enjoy using my finger service. I don't expect more than a
dozen hits a day, a bit too esoteric for most.

--
Daniel
sysop  | air & wave bbs
finger | info@bbs.airandwave.net

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#234980

On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:35:30 -0700, Daniel wrote:

> I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
> Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
> modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
> consumption.

The Raspberry Pi seems to be the most popular solution for this sort
of application: powerful enough to emulate any of those old machines
and their OSes, yet consuming much less power than any of them, and of
course better supported with more up-to-date tools and documentation.
And user/developer community!

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#234982

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:35:30 -0700, Daniel wrote:
>> I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
>> Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
>> modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
>> consumption.
> 
> The Raspberry Pi seems to be the most popular solution for this sort
> of application: powerful enough to emulate any of those old machines
> and their OSes, yet consuming much less power than any of them, and of
> course better supported with more up-to-date tools and documentation.
> And user/developer community!

A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all
the annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point
that no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks
all the time.

I mean, just this week I tried installing a game in steam that
I ran on my previous laptop on my new laptop. Worked fine,
except none of the workshop items loaded and after 4 hours of
trying various 'oh this fixed it for me' I gave up.

Or today, I updated immich and it became completely unresponsive
and unusable.

It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.

Nah, I prefer the RC2014 with CP/M.

Cheers,

Koen

-- 
Software architecture & engineering: https://www.sonologic.se/
Sci-fi: https://www.koenmartens.nl/
Retrocomputing videos: https://retroscandinavian.eu/

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#234984

On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:

> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.

    Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
      -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air

My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).

Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.

-- 
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  No artificial
\ /  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>      |  intelligence was
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  used in the creation
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |  of this post.

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#234988

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:

> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>
>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>
>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>
> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
>
> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.

It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
site as well.  The modern web is a dumpster fire.

-- 
Regards,
Jonathan Lamothe
https://jlamothe.net - PGP: 9CF2CE03EBF08E8C8B66C3660198463E3CF3FFD1
I � Unicode

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#234989

On 2026-06-12, Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:

> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>
>> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>>
>>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>>
>>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>>
>> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
>> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
>> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
>> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
>> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
>>
>> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
>
> It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
> site as well.  The modern web is a dumpster fire.

Agreed.  Web sites could be lightning-fast if they weren't downloading
all sorts of additional cruft.  "But don't you want to have a rich
User Experience (UX)?" the devotees will ask me.  My reply: "NO!"

-- 
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  No artificial
\ /  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>      |  intelligence was
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  used in the creation
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |  of this post.

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#234990

 > Agreed.  Web sites could be lightning-fast if they weren't downloading
 > all sorts of additional cruft.  "But don't you want to have a rich
 > User Experience (UX)?" the devotees will ask me.  My reply: "NO!"

"No.  I don't want _ANYTHING_ you're pleased to call 'an experience'." :)

De

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#235009

On 2026-06-12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2026-06-12, Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:
>
>> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>>
>>> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>>>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>>>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>>>
>>>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>>>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>>>
>>> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
>>> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
>>> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
>>> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
>>> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
>>>
>>> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
>>
>> It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
>> site as well.  The modern web is a dumpster fire.
>
> Agreed.  Web sites could be lightning-fast if they weren't downloading
> all sorts of additional cruft.  "But don't you want to have a rich
> User Experience (UX)?" the devotees will ask me.  My reply: "NO!"

Remember the site which was serving hundreds of megabytes to users and
at the same time were somehow looking for compassion because sharing
links to their site on Mastodon was somehow hammering their servers?
(IIRC they had misconfigured caching too)

<https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/05/0241211/is-mastodons-link-previewing-overloading-servers>

-- 
Nuno Silva

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#234993

Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:
> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
> 
>> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>>
>>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>>
>>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>>
>> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
>> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
>> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
>> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
>> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
>>
>> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
> 
> It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
> site as well.  The modern web is a dumpster fire.

Absolutely. Up until recently all we had at my house was a crappy
4G uplink. The web was completely unusable with that. We now have
fiber, so I don't notice it too much anymore, except when the
laptop fan goes crazy on some particularly badly put together
site.

Thankfully, gopher is still around & active.

Cheers,

Koen

-- 
Software architecture & engineering: https://www.sonologic.se/
Sci-fi: https://www.koenmartens.nl/
Retrocomputing videos: https://retroscandinavian.eu/

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#235010

On 2026-06-13, Koen Martens wrote:

> Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:
>> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>> 
>>> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>>>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>>>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>>>
>>>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>>>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>>>
>>> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
>>> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
>>> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
>>> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
>>> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
>>>
>>> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
>> 
>> It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
>> site as well.  The modern web is a dumpster fire.
>
> Absolutely. Up until recently all we had at my house was a crappy
> 4G uplink. The web was completely unusable with that. We now have
> fiber, so I don't notice it too much anymore, except when the
> laptop fan goes crazy on some particularly badly put together
> site.
>
> Thankfully, gopher is still around & active.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Koen

This is all FUBAR. On GSM I've for some times in my life - even
including recently, thanks to the 3G shutdowns - had the pleasure to use
mobile data over 2G. It kind of tells when a site is just too bloated,
even if the networking could perform better, well designed pages will
load quite faster.

Some of this can have great applications, but some of it sometimes does
look like somebody invented a problem to have to invent a solution.

-- 
Nuno Silva

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#235008

On 2026-06-11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
>
>> It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
>> cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
>> LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
>
>     Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
>       -- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
>
> My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
> are hanging.  The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
> needs a new machine.  Not because there's anything wrong with
> it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
> (sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
--^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The way JS frameworks require newer browsers and sites in general are
full of automation and CSS features that far outweight any performance
improvements in e.g. Firefox architecture redesigns does come across as
something quite convenient to push against not-recent-enough hardware.

Perhaps even more than entities insisting you have Windows and/or can
deal with CDF or Office Open XML.

Even if it's non-intentional, it's far too often the case that something
lighter, and not forcing specific browsers, would also work on more
browsers and machines

> Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.

-- 
Nuno Silva

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#234985

On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:09:51 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:

> Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:35:30 -0700, Daniel wrote:
>>>
>>> I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
>>> Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
>>> modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
>>> consumption.
>>
>> The Raspberry Pi seems to be the most popular solution for this
>> sort of application: powerful enough to emulate any of those old
>> machines and their OSes, yet consuming much less power than any of
>> them, and of course better supported with more up-to-date tools and
>> documentation. And user/developer community!
>
> A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all the
> annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
> abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point that
> no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks all the time.

It’s not a Windows system -- it’s not a black box, so don’t treat it
like one. Linux has inbuilt tools so you can diagnose problems and fix
them -- there is no big sticker across the cover saying “NO
USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE”. It’s designed for tinkering. If you’re
a retrocomputing enthusiast, you’re probably already a hardware
tinkerer, but perhaps you’re not accustomed to thinking of software
the same way?

Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.

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#234987

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:09:51 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:
>> A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all the
>> annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
>> abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point that
>> no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks all the time.
> 
> It’s not a Windows system -- it’s not a black box, so don’t treat it
> like one. Linux has inbuilt tools so you can diagnose problems and fix
> them -- there is no big sticker across the cover saying “NO
> USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE”. It’s designed for tinkering. If you’re
> a retrocomputing enthusiast, you’re probably already a hardware
> tinkerer, but perhaps you’re not accustomed to thinking of software
> the same way?

I've been using Linux since the nineties, never used MS Windows
otherwise than at gunpoint for customers that refused to let me use
a Linux or BSD machine. My servers, at home and in the datacenter,
are mostly FreeBSD with some Linux VMs here and there. Throw in
some IlluminOS, NetBSD and OpenBSD for fun as well. Yes, I'm
pretty much a 'software tinkerer', thank you.

Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly documented
daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck. With competing
audio standards that all fight for access to the underlying ALSA sound
device, sometimes emulating each other, sometimes not. Wayland that
makes screen capture involve at least 3 daemons, of which many variants
exist and you need the exact right combination for it to work, and
that makes your screen flicker constantly. And if you file a bug report,
everyone's pointing to the other project.

And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated desktop
management systems and their associated GUI libraries and plethora
of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic of graphical
applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running for all of the
variants if you use a decent selection of applications). Oh, and they
all have their own equivalent of what is known as 'the registry' in
windows, and to change something silly like a font or DPI scaling,
you need to make sure all those registries agree.

I still use Linux on the desktop (various distros on different
machines). It's just the least bad of the lot, but only marginally.

> Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
> money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.

I prefer the simplicity of CP/M on the RC2014 over the pain of
managing a modern Linux install on a Raspberry PI. Also, RC2014 is not
old authentic hardware, it's brand new. But even old authentic hardware
takes a lot less effort to keep running than modern Linux. And I have
ample experience of both.

Cheers,

Koen

-- 
Software architecture & engineering: https://www.sonologic.se/
Sci-fi: https://www.koenmartens.nl/
Retrocomputing videos: https://retroscandinavian.eu/

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#234991

On Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:20:45 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:

> Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly
> documented daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck.

What daemon would would that be?

> With competing audio standards that all fight for access to the
> underlying ALSA sound device, sometimes emulating each other,
> sometimes not.

The Linux desktop world standardized on PulseAudio years ago. That is
now being superseded by PipeWire, which includes all the Audio and
MIDI support of PulseAudio and extends the patchbay-style architecture
to video as well.

> Wayland that makes screen capture involve at least 3 daemons, of
> which many variants exist and you need the exact right combination
> for it to work ...

I mainly do screen snapshots, which work easily enough. If a single
frame is easy, why should a sequence of frames be any harder?

> And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated
> desktop management systems and their associated GUI libraries and
> plethora of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic
> of graphical applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running
> for all of the variants if you use a decent selection of
> applications).

Not really. You run one choice of GUI desktop. Any apps that use
different GUI toolkits will simply load them on demand. That’s how
it’s always worked.

> Oh, and they all have their own equivalent of what is known as 'the
> registry' in windows, and to change something silly like a font or
> DPI scaling, you need to make sure all those registries agree.

*NONE* of them have the equivalent of “'the registry' in windows”.
There is no corruption-prone systemwide binary database, that requires
reboots after making changes, and that accumulates cruft that makes
your system run slower and slower and less and less reliably.

> I still use Linux on the desktop (various distros on different
> machines). It's just the least bad of the lot, but only marginally.

There are over 300 different Linux distros. Some of them are even
designed to cater to 1990s throwbacks.

>> Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
>> money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.
>
> I prefer the simplicity of CP/M on the RC2014 over the pain of
> managing a modern Linux install on a Raspberry PI. Also, RC2014 is
> not old authentic hardware, it's brand new. But even old authentic
> hardware takes a lot less effort to keep running than modern Linux.
> And I have ample experience of both.

Maybe you haven’t used that much “old authentic hardware” lately ... ?

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