mato

Because it's a totally awesome and fun challenge? Read the details of the integration!

I used to program pure Xlib when I was 13 or so. I don't think the then-13-year-old me would manage pure Wayland.

Does anyone know of a precedent for this? I've never heard of a social (or other) network claiming to own account identifiers, then again I don't read their ToS with a magnifying glass either.

The combination of 'it just works' and 'SSO integration' is a killer.

To be honest, in 20+ years of working in IT, I never understood the point of the latter until recently, on a gig salvaging systems for a client with ~650 users after their sole IT guy unexpectedly resigned after 20 years and left for the mountains.

IRL, SSO is gold. Many hackers, like me, underestimate it.

Yes, but that's just using the standard browser keybindings for keyboard navigation across links.

I was thinking of <LEFT>, <RIGHT>, <ENTER> or something similarly "DOS-like".

Cute. Keyboard navigation doesn't work though, that'd be properly '80s.

Or do people actually want their keybindings to change when they change their layouts?

It depends. As a counterpoint to the folks replying "yes", I have for years had Meta-[1..9] bound to "switch to desktop X". I also regularly use US English and Czech/Slovak keyboards.

In the X11 days, I never had to think about this, since for whatever reason (I believe technically a bug and/or X11-specific WM behaviour, but I've lost the reference...) Openbox would use the US English layout for its keybindings exclusively.

Since I switched to KDE Plasma on Wayland, I constantly get annoyed, every day, as I may have my keyboard set to SK, press what muscle memory says is Meta-[1] and instead I get a funky zoom, since that keystroke translates to Meta-[+] in the SK layout :-(

Windows certainly does not.

Actually, scratch that, comments below suggest that WSL2 uses 9P for file sharing with the host, so it's possible that a version of Windows with the WSL2 bits installed will support 9P.

Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.

Add e.g. foo.bar.com:/path /net/foo.bar.com nfs to /etc/fstab with options=user ?

Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.

Windows certainly does not. MacOS I don't know, but if you mean "natively" as "stock install without third-party software", then probably not.

This is awesome. NFS is very much undervalued as a cross-platform interface for talking to a (not necessarily remote) filesystem.

~20 years ago I was using SFS (Self-certifying file system), which was a SSH-like Internet-usable TOFU filesystem, using NFS as the "backend" for talking to the host OS. The site has since disappeared, but is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080330201843/http://www.fs.net....

Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.

I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.

Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:

(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).

(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.

I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).

To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).

TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.

I was responding to your comment, but should have used less cut and paste. You wrote:

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period.

Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have done.

So, my point is, that this dynamic exists even for things that you pay money for.

Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".

Cool, can we get the same for Pixel4+?

Ta.

Yup, they even get firmware updates via LVFS/fwupd!

The relative high-DPI-ness of the internal display in combination with worsening eyesight forced me to migrate from X11/openbox to Wayland/Plasma. That has mostly turned out OK, with the caveat of getting used to/working around a non-zero set of desktop bugs in my daily workflow.

My most recent Linux laptop upgrade as of 10/2022 was:

FROM a refurbished Panasonic Let's Note CF-SX3, Intel Core i5-4300U, ~2013 vintage, 8GB RAM, aftermarket Intel 400GB DC S3610 Series SSD, purchase price EUR ~1500 ex VAT plus random hassles with customs importing used tech from JP to EU

TO a refurbished Dell Latitude 7390, Intel Core i7-8650U, ~2018 vintage, 16GB RAM, 512GB SK Hynix NVMe SSD, purchase price EUR ~600 ex VAT

The new one unexpectedly came with 16GB RAM instead of the advertised 8GB, lucky me. My main reason for upgrading was "want Thunderbolt / DP capable of driving 4K display", which turned out to be a mixed blessing.

This person's compromise was going from 64GB of RAM to 32GB, and from 2TB of storage to 1TB.

You young whippersnappers are so spoilt.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

PS. Now that you know the exact CPU I run, I'll invite you out to dinner at a Michelin restaurant of your choice in exchange for my private key of your choice.

This, 200%. I have the same problem with my 87yo father, and no idea how to fix it. I've drawn up step by step instructions, labelled both the TV and set top box remotes and devices with icons, yet somehow he manages to press something on either that throws the whole system out of whack and results in a phone call about "the TV not working". Usually unsolvable without being there in person, which with Dad living 250km away is not doable on a daily basis.

No it's not. Assuming the OP means something vaguely modern, it'll be a Thunderbolt dock that shares PCIe devices to the host. Try and work out the complexity of a PCIe device disappearing while you're "asleep" in your head. Trust me, you don't want to go there.

crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended;

That is a thing? To be honest not sonething I'd expect to work reliably under any OS, the low-level complexities involved are mind-boggling.

The rest do seem like legit complaints, that's a shame.

I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude.

I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux.

Oh, and it has a proper selection of ports, including wired LAN.

vim ~/docs/passwords.gpg

The EU is not a 'trade bloc' (sic).

In the grand scheme of things, Brexit and its consequences were much alike to what I imagine would happen were $STATE to leave the USA.

So the biggest problem is that every optional feature you offer up does not help when someone walks into the library already locked out. The vast majority of society will never be aware of available options and features for their Google account, so it's only the default behavior that matters.

Fair enough. I live in the EU, we all have state-issued ID cards and no cultural problem with using them, so presenting those via some channel to Google would work here, but I can't imagine it working in the states.

Another option is that a service libraries could provide (at possibly great expense to themselves, but options on the table) would be to serve as a credentials broker for their users. Have the library keep track of the 2FA side of things. Risky and adds expense to the library, but for this userbase that local service is the missing piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, this isn't something Google is set up to provide; they're too centralized, they aren't actually in the communities where the need lies.

This. I wrote as much in an earlier comment. Why not allow the option to delegate a trusted third party to manage $ACCOUNT MFA flow? I'd use it (and kind of already do, via the recovery email addresses) for managing my aged parents accounts.

This seems like not that hard in terms of implementation and UX. What is the risk/expense from the libraries PoV you are alluding to?

Here's an idea:

Why not allow the owner of a Google account to delegate a trusted third party who can handle MFA/otherwise approve logins on their behalf. I kind of do this already by setting the recovery emails for family members (especially aged parents) Google accounts to those that I control, but to my knowledge it is not possible to do the same for the mobile number used to secure the account.

This way, at least as I imagine the authors scenario, the library's regulars could delegate them as the trusted third party, problem solved.

Oh yes, and also what they write -- add an on/off setting for "Be less anal about logins from unrecognized devices".

I beg to differ on this. Went to a presentation by the ChromeOS engineers who developed the Android support, at LinuxCon 2016(?) in Berlin. Everything shown there pointed to an explicit distrust of Android, their security posture was essentially 'sandbox the hell out of it'.

Here /Europe/ some banks are starting to require the use of mobile apps for authenticating transactions, instead of providing hardware tokens.

When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.

Not the original poster, but I have a hard time imagining you'd be able to meaningfully maintain the OS and integrated software (e.g. Hub, supported TLS versions for mail, etc.) via "mods" of any kind.

What _might_ be useful and actually possible would be an up-to-date maintained "rebuild" / "rewrite" of the native browser app, since there you can vendor pretty much all the important components you need.

AFAICT from the Internets, BB10 OS actually supports VoLTE, but there's no way to manually enable it. Given the support status of the devices no carrier will provision VoLTE on it for you these days either, so we're out of luck.

Which is your Twitter app? Now that m.twitter.com no longer works in the BB10 browser, I need one.