Great to see they are making headway. Wonder about the long term sustainability though, as more and more software such as GNOME3 DE lists it as a dependency
This doesn't address the point raised. He mentioned that more and more software relies on systemd giving just one example.
IMO not much has changed in the last 2 years. Not too much additional software really relies on systemd. Nor that systemd integrated any other software like it did in the beginning (e.g. merging udev into it). There haven't been too many feature additions as well. What did happen is that way more software ships a systemd conf file, but that's about it.
If you have ever used TWM, then you would know that the 'T' stands for Terrible. Fortunately, there are lots of lightweight WMs that are far better.
Personally, I use tiling WMs (namely XMonad at the moment), so I could really care less what GNOME, KDE, et al are up to. However, I realize most people are accustomed to stacking WMs and expect something similar to what is provided by proprietary OSes with a similar amount of eye candy as well.
Hey now, no need to resort to name-calling. In fact, the “T” originally stood for “Tom”, but the name was later changed so the “T” stood for “Tab” (referring to its then-default look of window titles as little tabs on top of windows).
Furthermore, it is not terrible. I’ve used TWM for more than 20 years. It worked perfectly fine for me when I started to use it, and it still does so today, so I have not seen a need to switch.
Under Debian you can run GNOME under other init systems thanks to Debian+Canonical creating systemd-shim (alternative to logind). Under Devuan you cannot use GNOME (they don't offer it). This as Devuan claims that it is impossible (despite being possible within Debian) (!)
This task package is used to install the Devuan desktop,
featuring the GNOME desktop environment, and with other
packages that Devuan users expect to have available on the
desktop.
It's a mystery to me that people still associate linux desktop with gnome. The gnome project has a long history of not caring about users or developers and prioritizing their view and their brand.
Are you advocating that software such as Qt version 1 as of 1998 that is neither available under a license that meets the FSF's Free Software criteria nor the OSI's Open Source criteria nor Debian's DFSG should be a core part of the GNU/Linux desktop?
So many years XMPP has been a protocol not suited for modern mobile devices with unstable network connection. Messages could be easily lost (and you had to ask for receiving acknowledgment yourself in another message), battery consumption was very high. XMPP also has been barely usable on multiple devices. While we had Message Archiving XEP since 2004, Message Carbons XEP since 2010 and Message Archive Management since 2012, most desktop clients still lack support of these functions giving you frustration when you want to access previous conversation history that was made on another device.
Everything changed when Daniel Gultsch created Conversations. That's a modern XMPP client for Android which has support for most current XEPs. Finally mobile XMPP client that is usable, reliable, supports history sync and doesn't noticably shorten battery life and is a proper competitor for other proprietary mobile IMs.
Still, the situation with desktop clients is unpleasant. Only one client has Message Archive Management support (Gajim), only one has support for outdated and rarely configured on the server side Message Archiving support (Vacuum IM). Not even mention Gajim UI problems that you can see previous conversation history only in "history" menu, the chat window contains conversation history only of that exact machine. To this date there's no client for OS X with MAM support. Also should note that Gajim lacks MAM support for MUC.
We, a small group of people, want XMPP to be suitable for modern every day use for casual users, power users and teams. We decided to improve that situation by implementing missing XEP support in most popular desktop clients (Psi/Psi+ for Windows and Linux, Monal and Swift for OS X) and improving UI and overall usability of said software. Our goal is making desktop experience as good as mobile experience with Conversations.
The Immediate Goal
Make sure desktop clients support the following XEPs and implement what they lack:
XEP-0184 Message Delivery Receipts
XEP-0198 Stream Management
XEP-0280 Message Carbons
XEP-0308 Last Message Correction
XEP-0313 Message Archive Management
XEP-0363 HTTP File Upload
Make various Linux distributions repositories, Windows installers and signed OS X packages of software.
The Complete Goal
Implement additional XEPs:
XEP-0333 Chat Markers
XEP-0163 Personal Eventing Protocol
XEP-0384 OMEMO Encryption
It did work. The "decision" was to try changing the rules for a short time to see what we could learn by doing so, and we learned a lot. We ended it early because (a) the learning stabilized and (b) there were costs to continuing.
It's strange to me that so many people heard "just for a week" as "forever" and are continuing to comment as if those mean the same thing. The internet is weird.
Will you be making a "Tell HN" saying the experiment has ended with your thoughts? Are you okay replying to comments by users who do not know the experiment has ended?
I would be comparing a) data after the first announcement b) data after your comment in an unrelated thread saying the experiement is over c) data after the week is over and d) data after you write the promised lessons learnt post.
Yes, we decided to try distributing the info in the threads and see how well that works. So far it seems to be working well, because (a) there aren't that many such comments (as of a few minutes ago there aren't any that haven't been replied to), and (b) nearly all of them are now getting replied to correctly before we even see them. Together with the fact that HN has gone back to approximately normal re political stories and flagging, that makes me believe the information is working its way through.
Making an announcement a la Tell HN doesn't necessarily disseminate information. In this case it would almost certainly turn into a huge rehash of the original argument, with new information getting drowned out in the process. There are so many counterintutive effects to this, and we're still learning--indeed I feel like we're still taking baby steps. Turning up the volume definitely doesn't necessarily turn up the communication.
