F3nd0

Yet somehow French still manages to be altogether more coherent than English… or at least that’s the impression I’ve had so far.

Also some older but still kicking alternatives:

* https://darcs.net/

* https://mercurial-scm.org/

Even assuming it’s right, I don’t like this article. Not because of the claims it makes, but rather because of the implications it makes—or doesn’t care to avoid.

Organic farming is essentially the idea of farming more ‘in line with nature’, and is concretely defined and regulated by different laws in different places. If these regulations aren’t yielding the expected results, it may be a good idea to drop or improve them. What I find dangerous, though, is the easily acquirable belief that the idea of organic farming is deceptive and worthless.

Certain practices present in conventional farming are known to be problematic and it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned and seek to avoid them. Organic farming can miss the goal, but my understanding is that it’s aiming in the right direction. Therefore, I think a more responsible conclusion to draw would be ‘today’s organic farming isn’t what it should be’, not just the plain ‘organic foods are not superior’. In this form, I fear the message does far more harm than good.

The article does contain sections on climate and ecology, even if the focus is largely on pesticides.

Is it because the new flag is better, or is it really because some sort of a movement has formed around it? In other words, would the new flag have been this popular if it had already been the official flag, or does it owe its success to its role as the sleek, new, modern thing trying to displace the old and outdated design? I feel like this could be an important factor.

If my understanding is correct, enter by default starts a new paragraph (<p>…</p> in HTML). Holding shift makes it add a line break (<br> in HTML).

I think maybe Thunderbird has a plain text mode where this doesn’t happen, but it’s been a while since I last used it, so I could be completely wrong.

It does. Run `winecfg` and see ‘Folders’ under the ‘Desktop Integration’ tab. Wine used to link these to directories in your home directory by default; not sure if that’s still the case, but you can definitely change it.

The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?

These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.

People taking ‘usually right’ as ‘100% true fact’ sounds like a pretty big issue to me. Of course, it’s the people who must learn to know and mind the distinction, first and foremost.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.

In many cases, there are clear disadvantages to using AI, be it the effect on human psyche, the considerable resource consumption, the style of the output, or the fact that the resulting work was not authored by a person, which is a very subjective preference, but one that many people have nevertheless.

I agree that AI is a great technological achievement, but it’s not as if great technological achievements don’t come with any downsides. Celebrating them is reasonable, but also situational.

None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.

Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.

(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)

If the title is anything to go by, SVG’s of a hamster playing table tennis.

You can care about some issues more than you care about others, or only speak out against some of them. I don’t think anyone is (or can be reasonably expected to be) speaking out about every single atrocity happening in the world. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about human rights. People are nuanced. It’s not all or nothing.

I think your rhetoric is needlessly antagonistic.

The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely you can disagree with that without making up (in my view) silly-sounding arguments for the other side?

Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.

I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)

The point I was trying to make is that understanding and modifying software to do your bidding is significantly more feasible if you already have the source code than if you have to reverse-engineer it yourself, to an important degree.

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.

Yes, there is <https://osgameclones.com/>. Note that not all of the listed games are free software, but many are.

You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there.

It’s never been about what’s possible in theory, but what’s feasible in practice. By the same kind of logic you apply here, every country in the world is as good as democratic because you can work your way to free elections eventually, even if it takes a while.

Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.

https://openmw.org/

https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic

https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/

[…] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.

But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.

That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

Oh, it’s still alive! Development stalled a while back, so I was worried something may have happened to the author, with their land being invaded and all.

It seems more focused on the retro aesthetic, which I personally don’t love, but it’s still really nice to see.

Window Maker is still really cool! Not a full desktop environment, though. I tried using it with GNUstep for a while, but while the base libraries are apparently still actively developed and maintained, a lot of the applications are antiquated, and they’re very hard to make blend in with EFL/GTK/Tk/Qt apps.

Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)

I think it’s a little different to simply have the mascot than it is to make their introduction an officially endorsed celebration of ‘pride month’ and have them ‘presiding over KDE’s 30th anniversary celebrations’. If something has a greater chance to ‘create tensions’, it’s probably the latter, for better or worse.

It's impressive for the project to have come so far. Between the oversimplified, hyper-opinionated GNOME, the rock-solid but dull and minimal XFCE, the nostalgic MATE, and whatever Enlightenment is doing these days, it’s nice to have a continually polished, modern, well-integrated yet customisable experience like KDE, even today. And save for Akonadi (which just never seems to work reliably, rendering software like KMail useless), it’s been a pretty stable one for me, too. Here’s to another 30 years!

The presented mascot is not genderless, but non-binary. The situation you describe has hardly improved with their introduction.

(2 bits per color? how is that possible)

Assuming high colour depth, yes, but wouldn’t it have been specified as part of the question that ‘this was for four-color CGA mode’? I think 2 bits per colour for 4 colours total seem pretty sensible even in 2026. :-)

I don’t think the chances of confusion between a niche celebrity and a video decoder are very big.

The specification for AV2 has only been finalised very recently, so performant encoders have not yet been developed. Meaningful comparison to older codecs like H265 and AV1 will only be possible once that has changed. (It'll be slower, but almost certainly not one-frame-per-second slow.)