I mean that an individual folder will always look the same (consistent), and also look distinctly different from any other folder (unique) if that’s how you arranged it. So you could identify a folder instantly.
Everything in list view looks the same at a glance, and most file managers don’t retain a folder window’s size and placement. Modern macOS kiiiind of does but you have to fight it if you don’t want a single-window browsing UI.
The last time I found icon view useful was in Mac OS 9. There were three main characteristics that made it useful that no current systems have AFAIK:
The icon grid was tight (32 pixels) and you could either snap items to that grid or place them freely.
Window sizes and places were directly associated with folders. (There was no “browser-style” single-window mode.)
File names used dynamic spacing. Longer names would occupy multiple grid spaces as needed.
These factors meant that every folder had a consistent and potentially unique size, placment, and layout.
OS X took the Finder and either ruined or neglected everything good about it. Windows explorer has always been garbage. Never found a Linux file manager with a compelling icon view either (though to be fair, I’ve never looked all that hard). The lack of system-level metadata for layout kind of mandates an abstraction between a directory and its display.
Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.
Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.
SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.
Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.
do they just want everything to be crawled
Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.
The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
Cool, sounds promising!
I wonder how much power Valve even has here. I mean, we’re talking about Windows compatibility. How many Windows games can run properly in a 64-bit WINE environment?
Dropping 32-bit support has to happen eventually, but there’s bound to be collateral damage. It wasn’t a painless change even on macOS, which is generally a more tightly controlled “adapt or die” platform.
The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.
Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.
Are those odd choices? My knowledge of emulators is more outdated than OP’s hardware.
They actually want to increase what can be done in user mode, to reduce reliance on kernel mode code.
That’s basically what Apple did with macOS 11. They deprecated kernel extensions and replaced them with “system extensions”, and created new APIs so security tools, VPNs and such could function without kernel-level privileges.
mpv still works.
Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.
There are two potential show-stoppers.
Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.
Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.
I guess I’ll look into XFS and see if it’s suitable for my use cases (I know almost nothing about it), but this supports my opinion that BTRFS is an easy choice over EXT4 at least.
Edit: No snapshot support in XFS, so I’ll stick with BTRFS. My performance requirements are not that high on desktop. If I set up a high-performance server that would be another matter.
I was surprised to learn that F2FS has rather small maximum volume sizes. 16TB with 4K block sizes, 64TB with 16K block sizes. But your whole kernel needs to use 16K pages to use 16K F2FS blocks, which seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Either way, it’s so non-future-proof I’m not even going to think about it.
For context, Debian dropped support for 586 in Debian Stretch (9.0), release in 2017.
I have not done the legwork to compare this to other distros, but Debian generally supports older hardware than most other major mainstream desktop distros.
It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.
If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.
Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.
If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).
It’s an extra step in macOS 15. You need to go into System Settings now.
Used to just be able to use the contextual menu to open it and get an approval dialog.
I’m actually using an atomic distro now (Bazzite). But that’s not why I chose it, and honestly I don’t think the advantages are significant.
There are some downsides that affect me on a regular basis, though.
I need to reboot more since every update requires it. That feels like going back in time 25 years.
I need to deal with the complexity of multiple distros with DistroBox to get the functionality I am accustomed to. I think that alone is proof that atomic distros are not quite ready for prime time.
The advantages elude me. Snapper or timeshift handle rollbacks just fine, as long as you use a modern filesystem like btrfs. So I haven’t worried about busted updates in years.
I’m quite happy with Bazzite, but I can’t point to anything good about it that is specific to immutable distros. I just don’t get it, really. I guess the advantages are more for the developers and maintainers than for end users.
Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.
Note that even GrapheneOS no longer supports the 5a, since it is no longer getting firmware security patches. You’ll need to install an archived version of GrapheneOS, or go for something else like LineageOS.
With LineageOS, you’ll continue to get OS patches, but you’ll be stuck with an unlocked bootloader, so there’s a security tradeoff there.