@aral It also means that if you want to modify some free software so it can, say, control your military equipment, then that does not put you outside of the free software community, even though the free software community might have a larger percentage of people of people who are also pacifists than the general population.
But that's not an absolute, and to claim that free software is about human rights, privacy, or democracy is inaccurate, at best.
@aral My absolutely personal opinion in this debate: Open Source is about methodology, Free Software is about principles.
The principles in question are that everyone should have the freedom to modify software so it does what they need it to do, rather than what the author of the software wanted it to do. This does often include freedom of expression, privacy, human rights and democracy as a side benefit, but they're not why I care about free software.
Yes, Free Software is about politics. Which politics? Depends on who you ask. Some will say that freedom/privacy/human rights/democracy are part of that, but not everyone will, and that doesn't mean they're not part of the community.
This is an important debate but I don't think one in which FOSDEM as an organization has an opinion, even though some of its members might.
I felt that I couldn't pay attention to more than three displays. Even though the displays were arranged optimally (the desk's 2 on stands side by side, the laptop and portable one below those), it quickly became impossible for my brain to care about the fourth display. I'd often look from the laptop to the portable monitor and back, occasionally to top left, but top right just kept being ignored, even though lots was happening there.
YMMV, of course.
@hko
I tried the 'four displays' setup when last I was at my work's headquarters. Each desk there has two monitors connected to a USB-C docking station; I added my own USB-C portable monitor, and obviously also the laptop's built-in.
3 is useful. One where you work, one with the result of your work, one where you have reference material.
I had no real use for the fourth. I tried my mail and chat clients there, but that just didn't work for me.
@hko
You can totally brew it, but don't come complaining if you need to go to the doctor afterwards 😂
@original_peterm
the g in gobject stands for glib, and the g in glib stands for gtk, and the g in gtk stands for gimp, however the g in gimp stands for gnu, so really the g in glib stands for gnu, but you shouldn't confuse it with gnulib, which is developed by the gnu project, who shouldn't be confused as the developers of glib, which is the gnome project, in which the g also stands for gnu
Agree with most of what you said, do want to point out that the last bit (firewalls) is not a problem if you use podman as your container platform.
Apologies if you know all that already, just thought it might be nice to know.
@tippfehlr @thelinuxcast @rl_dane
/dev/random and lightning talks https://fosdem.org/2026/news/2025-12-10-dev-random/
@aral Good thing #FOSDEM isn't about freedom/privacy/human rights/democracy, then. It's just about Free and Open Source Software.
(disclaimer: yes I'm a FOSDEM organizer, but no I don't speak for FOSDEM, my thoughts are my own)
RT: https://mastodon.ar.al/users/aral/statuses/115662581483977762
I've done L1 tech support while in college, can confirm.
People ask you to help fix their internet connection but you have to explain to them what 'right clicking' means, first. Nobody wants to do this.
Doesn't excuse not doing it. Nobody wants to call people to sell them things they don't need (BTDT too -- not proud of it, was desperate) yet they somehow find people. If they can do that, they can also find someone to answer a f***ing phone.
@briankrebs
You think RAM is expensive today? One byte of ENIAC RAM would, according to quick-and-dirty back-of-envelope cost estimates, run you around $7,000 in 1946 dollars or $ 125,000 in today's cash.
Of course, there could be off-by-ones depending on the exact birthdays, but those are details.
Also, I believe you and your younger sister could be twins, but you and your older sister can't be without also being triplets.
You could be triplets (in which case you would all be turning 42 today).
Failing that, assuming your older sister was 23 on your younger sister's 21st, she would now be 46, you would be turning 45, and your younger sister would be 44.
If your older sister was 25, she would now be 50, your younger sister would now be turning 46, and you would be between 47 & 49.
@NanoRaptor
Happy birthday!
Also, no, you can't work it out.
What we do know:
Your younger sister's 21st birthday is in the past, otherwise your older sister's date of birth would be in the future (an impossibility).
Your older sister's date of birth must be long enough in the past that, at a point where your younger sister turned 21, she was half the age she is now while (probably) being 23 or older herself at the time (assuming there is at least a
@SRAZKVT @ariadne That would be a lot less bad, but only an experienced human could do the conversions properly.
Honestly, I think we should stop normalizing the fact that upstreams provide policy. The fuck? Policy is downstream's job, that's what they're here for. (And systemd is to blame for that normalization.)
Distros should start taking back control of how they run their services; if upstream want to provide unit files, sure, why not, but they should be used as hints, as inspiration, not as a source of truth.