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Visit blog.liw.fi → On Hacker News Feb 2018 – May 2025
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A rant about "year of Linux on the desktop" from a tired old man. I've been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there's been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more…
ETA, 2022-05-19: I'm happy this blog post has gathered a fair bit of interest. However, this post is as much effort as I'm prepared to put into the topic. I think it would be a good idea to write an essay, article, or even a book, on how syntax of the Unix command line has varied over the years, and in different…
Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of…
When I wrote Why is Debian the way it is? , a year and a half ago, I was asked to also cover why Debian changes the software it packages. Here's a brief list of examples of why that happens:
I first started using Python in 1993. It's been my main programming language since about 2000. I've written a ton of code in Python, both for work and in my free time. For several years now, I've been growing dissatisfied with it. Partly it's because I'd like more help from my programming tools, such as static type…
Lars Wirzenius Consulting Ltd has created a Git repository with the source code of Debian 12 (bookworm), the main component. It's one repository for all the source code, as one commit. It's a monorepo .
This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.