I hate how Desktop UI in general has been moving towards Mobile design for the last decade.
Everything has to always look like the latest shit from silicon valley, I despise it.

Imo all the work that was put into UI design for the last 20 years has been wasted effort.
I still use GNUStep and OpenMotif based Desktops because I genuinely think that those are better designed, and they haven’t been touched in forever.

Even if you happen to use older NVidia cards from before they started doing signed firmware blobs the experience is miserable.
Nouveau has 0 dynamic power management, so the only way to change clocks speeds is via a debug interface in /sys/.
Everytime you change clock speeds the driver can crash. And while some software does become usable it tends to be very unstable because some features are just not implemented or only half-implemented, leading to graphical glitches and unpredictable behaviour.

It’s a shame because I really feel like nouveau could be a great piece of software, but unfortunately nobody is working on it anymore.

I do this for a server in my LAN. I use DHCP+TFTP to boot grub over the network via PXE, and then grub boots the Kernel with the root pointing to a NFS share:

menuentry 'GNU/Linux NFS' --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
        load_video
        set gfxpayload=keep
        insmod gzio
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        echo    'Loading kernel ...'
        linux   <TFTP Root>/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=<NFS Server IP>:/export/rootfs/<Root Dir> rw loglevel=6 threadirqs
}

Doing this makes managing that installation much easier. It’s just a directory that lives on the Main Server.
I don’t even need to boot the other Server to update the software in it, chroot is enough. And I don’t even have to worry about doing separate backups, because I already back up the Main Server’s Storage regularly.

This whole thing feels like a celebrity ad.

Maybe they left it running for a while. The current Steam Client is basically an Electron App.
I miss the old Steam Client that was made entirely in Valve’s own GUI Framework which was written in C++.

Hey, I’m posting this via lem.el! I’ve been using it for a few months now.
Could still use some work, but far better than using a Web Browser.

You can use the lsof utility though to list all currently open file handles.

I rather deal with that than any Micro$oft® Garbage®.

It’s crazy how many people are just OK with running completely proprietary code that monitors everything that happens on the machine and phones home all the time, all with the promise to “catch cheaters”.

Fortunately every game I’ve seen so far with such malware is just a generic competitive multiplayer dopamine farm that targets the Streamer crowd.

“But all my friends are playing it!” - Is it really worth it to run omnipresent malware on your machine just to play the currently trending game for a few weeks until you move on to the next?

Eclipse 15 years ago was OK. Decent Debugger, useful Plugins (like WindowBuilder). It had issues, but instead of focusing on those they over time just kept piling crap on top of it.

Does anyone out there still use a 32-Bit Computer as their daily driver? The most recent 32-Bit hardware I’ve used as a Desktop was an RPi3 and running a modern web browser on that thing would almost cook the chip.

I pretty much share the same experience. I avoid using docker or any other containerizing thing due to the amount of bloat and complexity that this shit brings. I always get out of my way to get Software running w/o docker, even if there is no documented way. If that fails then the Software just sucks.

Coding directly in assembly is rare.

I used to think that, but when you’re dealing with a lot of low-level stuff you’ll eventually realize that Compilers are pretty bad at generating fast and reliable Assembly where it’s needed. Also, some Architectures have specific machine instructions that Compilers just don’t take advantage of, no matter what flags you enable.

You could spend your limited time and energy setting up an emulator of the powerPC architecture, or you could buy it at pretty absurd prices — I checked ebay, and it was $2000 for 8 GB of ram…

You’re acting as if setting up a ppc64 VM requires insane amounts of effort, when in reality it’s really trivial. It took me like a weekend to figure out how to set up a PowerPC QEMU VM and install FreeBSD in it, and I’m not at all an expert when it comes to VMs or QEMU or PowerPC. I still use it to test software for big endian machines:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]; then
    printf "Must be run as root.\n"
    exit 1
fi

# Note: The "-netdev" parameter forwards the guest's port 22 to port 10022 on the host. 
# This allows you to access the VM by SSHing the host on port 10022.
qemu-system-ppc64 \
    -cpu power9 \
    -smp 8 \
    -m 3G \
    -device e1000,netdev=net0 \
    -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::10022-:22 \
    -nographic \
    -hda /path/to/disk_image.img \
#    -cdrom /path/to/installation_image.iso -boot d

Also you don’t usually compile stuff inside VMs (unless there is no other way). You use cross-compilation toolchains which are just as fast as native toolchains, except they spit out machine code for the architecture that you’re compiling for. Testing on real hardware is only really necessary if you’re like developing a device driver, or the hardware has certain quirks to it that are just not there in VMs.

But most importantly, it won’t work in the end. These scraping tech companies have much deeper pockets and can use specialized hardware that is much more efficient at solving these challenges than a normal web browser.

A lot of people don’t seem to be able to comprehend this. Even the most basic Server Hardware that these companies have access to is many times more powerful than the best Gaming PC you can get right now. And if things get too slow they can always just spin up more nodes, which is trivial to them. If anything, they could use this as an excuse to justify higher production costs, which would make resulting datasets and models more valuable.

If this PoW crap becomes widespread it will only make the Internet more shitty and less usable for the average person in the long term. I despise the idea of running completely arbitrary computations just so some Web Admin somewhere can be relieved to know that the CPU spikes they see coming from their shitty NodeJS/Python Framework that generates all the HTML+CSS on-the-fly, does a couple of roundtrips and adds tens of lines of log on every single request, are maybe, hopefully caused by a real human and not a sophisticated web crawler.

My theory is people like to glaze Anubis because it’s linked to the general “Anti-AI” sentiment now (thanks to tech journalism), and also probably because its mascot character is an anime girl and the Developer/CEO of Techaro is a streamer/vtuber.

Exactly. All modern CPUs are so standardized that there is little reason to store all the data in ASCII text. It’s so much faster and less complicated to just keep the raw binary on disk.

That’s only been my experience with software that depends on many different libraries. And it’s extra painful when you find out that it needs hyper specific versions of libraries that are older than the ones you have already installed. Rust is only painless because it just downloads all the right dependencies.

Some old software does use 8-Bit ASCII for special/locale specific characters. Also there is this Unicode hack where the last bit is used to determine if the byte is part of a multi-byte sequence.

This isn’t limited to JS. Too many times have I seen someone ask a question of how to do XYZ in language ABC where most of the replies were some form of “Just use this library bro” while not actually answering the question. And usually the library that’s being suggested is some big monolith that implements a ton of shit that no one really uses.