Norbert Preining

Nope. He cited several such cases. Usually it goes like this: Devs putting out some innocent statement, some aggressive culture warriors taking it out of context and interpreting it evil, shouting wolf, and the Debian managers reacting with an immediate ban. On the dev, not the aggressive culture warrior. This is usually matched with falsified arguments to support this ban. Devs also began reacting like in the stalinist culture wars from the 30ies. A typical example is https://debian.community/laura-arjona-reina-carnival-mafia-murders/ This guy posted old citations that "Debian is not fun anymore", followed by, "Well, Times are changing". https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/11/on-lars-wirzenius-fun-and-debia… Of course he was banned from Debian.

Debian packages: https://www.preining.info/blog/2021/06/kde-plasma-5-22-for-debian/

This may be a bug in an older KDE version. I'm on debian testing with running the latest stuff from https://www.preining.info/blog/2020/12/debian-kde-plasma-status-2020-1… . I'm no longer running into those HiDPI issues in gnome or kde apps (some wxwidgets stuff is still wonky). Nothing ends up the wrong scale when using Plasma Wayland, but there are still other issues that aren't worked out that keep it from being perfect either. You might quickly try the KDE Neon distro on a live usb disk to see if it behaves better and then you'll know if the bugs you're running into have been fixed. https://neon.kde.org/

The amount of unnecessary drama this has created is astonishing. Ian Jackson even deemed it necessary to start a public call for reports on Preining's "misbehaviours", even though nobody seems to have had anything other than pleasant experiences [1]. I have not much hope for Debian as a project anymore, lots of important people seem to be burnt out by crap like this and have decided it's not fun anymore. Also this was all started by Sage Sharp, in the end [2], and revolves around Codes of Conduct. Again. I have never seen an example for a Code Of Conduct working out to something positive in an Open Source project. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2019/01/msg00170.html [2] https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/09/sharp-did-it-again/

I'm always uneasy when I install software in Windows because it means I have to trust another third-party. If I have 100 programs on my Windows PC, I've had to trust 100 third-party organisations with my computer and all the data on it. Not only that, but I've also had to trust my own judgement to find the correct website for all those programs, and not copycats that wrap the program in malware. Sometimes I check Wikipedia to find the official site and sometimes I find an official-looking GitHub repo with a lot of stars and work back to find the official site, but sometimes it doesn't matter anyway because the program itself becomes malware (eg. CCleaner.) With a package manager I have to trust one organisation, which is the same that I get my operating system from. I don't even have to trust the website that hosts the packages, since the packages are signed. It's true that someone might try to sneak malware under the package mantainer's nose with obfuscated source code, but that's much harder than sneaking it in a binary. You're practically guaranteed that the software running on your PC matches the publicly available source code, and it's built with the latest compilers and hardening flags. (7-Zip used to build without any hardening flags because they made the binary larger.[1]) It's not even just security issues I'm concerned about when it comes to trusting software. I also have to trust the software not to make global, permanent changes to my system, which isn't…

tl;dr: Debian's work is very important here, but NixOS' reproducibility aims are more general than Debian's and began more than 8 years earlier Despite the fact that Debian (as a project) has shouldered far more of the work with upstream projects to make bit-identical reproducibility possible at build time, Debian (as a distro) doesn't have a design that makes this kind of reproducibility as feasible, practical, or robust at the level of a whole system or disk image in the way that NixOS has achieved here. To quote the Debian project itself[0]: > Reproducible builds of Debian as a whole is still not a reality, though individual reproducible builds of packages are possible and being done. So while we are making very good progress, it is a stretch to say that Debian is reproducible. Beyond the fact that some packages still have issues upstream and the basic technical problem of versioning (i.e., apt fetching binaries from online archives in a stateful way) Debian additionally struggles with an extremely heterogeneous and manual process of acquiring and uploading source packages[1]. Debian doesn't even have the resources to construct a disk image where the version of every package is pinned, short of archiving all the binaries (which is how they do ‘reproducible’ ISO production now[2]). But pulling down all of the pre-built binaries for your distro isn't really ‘reproduction’ in the same sense as ‘reproduction’ in Debian's (package-level) reproducibility project. Some…

> It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese Chinese (and Japanese and Korean), when written vertically, the collums are written right to left. In the Mongolian script, the columns are left to right, so I don't know how well it works with Chinese. > Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers Almost every book I have in Japanese, including Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, Kanji dictionaries, kids science books, temple books and even a bilingual Japanese and English Shogi book are written with vertical text (English is horizontal in this last one). My Japanese cookbooks have text in both directions. Manga text is written vertically, to the point even most translated manga has their pages going right-to-left as their Japanese counterparts. Japanese ebooks can be read vertically too: https://www.preining.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PW-GLO-Japan… I also frequently see very recent Japanese lessons texts and questions all vertically. So it's definetly not just on novels and some newspapers. You are correct about the smart phone apps and software in general though. > this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. Yes it can. I remember being able to print vertical Japanese almost 20 years ago. > So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software It does not have to…

One theory I had was that blogrolls were common previously and allowed for cluster navigation. My friends and I certainly had these pointing to each other because why wouldn't you? The big bloggers on HN I see are tptacek, rachelbythebay, and simonwillison and none of them have a blogroll. General wisdom in website SEO etc. is to keep the user on your page and not send them elsewhere and I thought that perhaps many people were adhering to that. However, I think blogrolls were just not common ever and I was in a bubble that had them and so thought they were. Here's what I did to find out. I first used an RSS aggregate feed that I recall: Planet Debian. I then picked out a ten year old archive of that feed but not on September 11 itself (well because you know). And the data says that blogrolls were always rare! So it's not that. Blogroll: https://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1576 No Blogroll: http://blog.alteholz.eu/ http://damog.net/ https://henrich-on-debian.blogspot.com/ http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norw… https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/ https://grep.be/blog/ https://www.preining.info/blog/ http://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/ https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/Systemd_pitfalls.html Indeterminate: https://blog.sesse.net/blog (relaunched now, original excluded, can't be…

I think you mean this package? https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/calibre-python3-git/ Judging from https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107/comments/11 the Arch maintainer doesn't think highly of Debian as it has been buggy in the past. OTOH he's biased because he's on Arch. Here's a recent post from the Debian maintainer: https://www.preining.info/blog/2019/10/state-of-calibre-in-debian/. The tl;dr is that most/all of the work is done but he's holding off updating unstable to Python 3 because he doesn't want to break external plugins. He also mentions that he can't update to 4.0 or higher because Debian still hasn't updated Qt to 5.12. That seems slightly inaccurate as it's in experimental (https://packages.debian.org/experimental/qt5-default); I think the maintainer could do an upload of a Calibre 4.x using Qt 5.12 & Python 3 to experimental. But experimental is not in common use regardless. The post seems to be an extension of https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=936270#87