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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Yeah, and you don’t have to know which fork to choose. Only the compatible fork will show up in the search.

    (I was going to recommend that, but had something in the back of head, that you needed a manual step to enable the configuration. But I just saw that this is described in the Plasma 5 version, not the Plasma 6 fork, so I guess, it’s not necessary anymore…)



  • I believe, that’s something which became impossible with Wayland?

    But it wasn’t very good under X11 either. Even back then, it was much less clunky to use the various KWin scripts, which offer tiling. Well, and by now Plasma has built-in semi-automatic tiling, which those scripts basically just configure, so they do now feel quite smooth.






  • Yeah, one of the largest pieces of software humanity has created, next to Google Chrome and the Linux kernel, which are all around 30 million lines of code.

    To give a frame of reference: With a team of 5 full-time devs at my dayjob, we can dish out a codebase of about 20 thousand lines over the course of two years.

    A browser might be somewhat quicker to build, because the requirements are relatively clear at this point and you can start implementing many standards in parallel. But yeah, it’s still just an insane amount of code.







  • For those unfamiliar with music production: VSTs are basically plugins you can use in music production software (more specifically in “Digital Audio Workstation” software, DAW).

    Except they’re also not really plugins, because they’re actually full-fledged programs, into which an audio stream is fed and then they run arbitrary code to ransom your files transform that audio stream. Well, and typically also to display a UI with knobs to control how the effect should sound like. Those pictures on that webpage are screenshots of their UI.

    As a result, most VSTs are basically just bundled EXE files. You can often run them through WINE, but many people use dozens of these VSTs and may even pay money for them, so you really don’t want to have to worry about them not working under Linux.




  • I’m guessing, it’s not trying to find the closest commonly used names in each country, but rather just names which have the same etymological roots as John, while being sort of “at home” in those specific countries. So, it might be that you guys later imported Jon and John from England, for example. But I am just spitballing that last part. 😅




  • IMHO one of the fundamental problems with XML for data serialization is illustrated in the article:

    (person (name "Alice") (age 30))
    [is serialized as]

    <person>
      <name>Alice</name>
      <age>30</age>
    </person>
    

    Or with attributes:
    <person name="Alice" age="30" />

    The same data can be portrayed in two different ways. Whenever you serialize or deserialize data, you need to decide whether to read/write values from/to child nodes or attributes.

    That’s because XML is a markup language. It’s great for typing up documents, e.g. to describe a user interface. It was not designed for taking programmatic data and serializing that out.