For better or worse, Larabel does a great job of adding excitement to otherwise fairly humdrum activity. On the whole I think he's a major net benefit to free software, few people cover the goings on in random backwater mailing lists in such a public manner besides him and LWN, and AFAIK Larabel's audience is much less specialized, and his writing style can be considerably more vibrant.
I agree with your sentiment entirely, but have always lumped Larabel in with the fanboy blogs. He does a good job summarizing the boring mailinglists, but generally always does it in a semi-clickbait way. Jon Corbet is a legit journalist and kernel developer. They're definitely cut from a different cloth, but there is plenty of room for both of them.
Yeah, I do think he's doing us a favor, on balance. And I pay for a subscription.
Just surprised to see a news about a minor _library_ release see more upvotes than the "Linux on iPad" thing, for instance. With the whole love for Apple around these parts.
And I don't remember seeing anything from Phoronix in "popular" here even a couple of months ago. Perhaps it indicates some particular shift in interest?
I can tell you as a Linux user since before there was an iPad, I just don't care about that. At all.
Meanwhile, this sort of story (and the often technical discussion with people who know their shit) is precisely why I keep coming back to HN.
To be sure, there are a fair number of people who gained interest in Apple when they finally gave up on pre-OSX (I remember having to admin a Mac lab back in the day; long hours spent imaging machines and fighting the OS to make it as close as we could to multi-user), and many who just got fed up with Linux's learning curve at some point, switched, and never looked back.
Phoronix headlines are often sensational click bait. I still read them occasionally, because Linux news are not covered that well by many other news sources.
This article makes no exception to the sensational headline rule: The "lots of" changes are less than 5 that could maybe be important for a larger user base.
It's still worth a news item because not many would have expected a new release at all. But "lots of" is certainly misleading for anybody who reads open source change logs and does not apply a Phoronix filter.
As said elsewhere according to HN submission guidelines this article is not a valid submission, the release mail would have been. But probably it would not have been upvoted and most of us would have missed it. Click bait works :)
Vibrant isn’t really the word I would use. “Lots of fixes” in the title is overly casual, and the first sentence of the article is completely incoherent:
> It's been seven years since the release of libX11 1.6.0 for this central X11 library while on Friday was replaced by the libX11 1.7 series.
Like GP, I’m always surprised to see a Phoronix regurgitation-with-errors do so well on HN.
Would you prefer the exact wording from the mailing list,
"a bunch of bug fixes"?
Yes, the first sentence is confusing, but I still consider phoronix to be quite valuable. They always link to the original source, which is more than what many news sites do.
> Would you prefer the exact wording from the mailing list, "a bunch of bug fixes"?
The mailing list [1] contains much more than "a bunch of bug fixes," arguably more than what the Phoronix link provides.
>They always link to the original source, which is more than what many news sites do.
I don't find this to always be the case with Phoronix, as well as when referencing previous news they do a self link to their other posts rather than straight to the original source. Besides, is it not Hackernews guidelines [2] to "submit the original source?" How does Phoronix get away without being changed to the the right URL so often?
There’s a reason why phoronix is banned on r/Linux and other FLOSS subreddits.
I never click the links. It’s always a 1-2 paragraph low effort article that would be better if we just actually linked to the mailing lists/git comment chain.
