Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux…
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form.
I think it’s only fair to call me an X apologist. I get incredibly frustrated when people talk about dropping support for X11. I fight back against the notion that some day X11 will be dead and unmaintained, a curiosity of a time before. I’ve spoken to people in my circles at-length about the accessibility tools that…
I am publishing this because many people are asking me how I did it, so I will explain. When I talk about a model, I'm talking about a huggingface…
Why we never thank open source maintainers - Unicooo
(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works) Some years ago, I polished up and released an abandoned project for storing financial data in Django. It let you declare “Money” fields on your models, dealing with proper storage and currencies for you. My use case for the library, django-money eventually faded, but it…
For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't…
Story of how I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project
Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice? It's dead. Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014! In contrast, LibreOffice's release schedule is robust: Timelines of major product releases. OpenOffice is light blue, LibreOffice is green. (source) In 2020, LibreOffice wrote a constructive letter, outlining a path for…
esbuild and Redis1 are two examples of codebases with exceptional documentation. Through their READMEs, changelogs, architecture documents, and code comments, both projects explain their design in such a way that someone new to the codebase can understand where things are, how things are done, and why they are done…
Flatpak - a security nightmare
Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, and since we’ve been tapping away trying to make the best podcast client for people who love listening to podcasts. And! The team has been working really…
This website which you're on right now is free (as in beer), free (as in freedom), open source software called Nonograph. It cost about $600 USD to release, mos...
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back…
After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce.
A capability threshold I've been carefully monitoring.
The new version 5 of SubEthaEdit , the Apple Design Award winning text editor for macOS, is now available free of charge in the App Store and as direct download . The complete source code with history going back 15 years is also available under the MIT License.
Self hosting a software stack to replace Google Maps on an unused gaming PC.
Notable case of algorithmic approach to open source and non-profit giving
Back in December, I posted that we’re building an open laptop . The post generated hundreds of comments, and I was surprised there was so much interest.
The time has come to replace the work laptop (thanks, Mozilla!). Here is an adventure of setting up NixOS on a Framework laptop. I’m writing this on it right...
The freedom to speak in private is essential to democracy. The less private your conversations, the more careful you are about what you say. And being careful leads to less candor, less criticism, and less innovation. Thought and private speech are the breeding ground for new, sometimes controversial ideas. They are…
