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IgnorantGuru's Blog
Personal blog · igurublog.wordpress.comsystemsprogramming
IgnorantGuru's Blog is a personal blog at igurublog.wordpress.com about systems and programming. Since 2011, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link IgnorantGuru's blog mainly for its 2012 critique of GNOME's developer attitude toward theming and customization, plus posts on systemd and the Ts'o/Torvalds dispute.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Linux software, news, and tips
Most-linked posts?
- GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2012-11-08
- Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-04-05
- GNOME, Ubuntu et al. rotting in threes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-09
- Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-04-10
- Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA | IgnorantGuru's Blog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-04-29
- /2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-and-how-cryptography-affects-your-life/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-07
What Hacker News says?
> Have you tried Gnome 3? Not being sarcastic :). These days it's a very stable, slick environment with a very good window manager. Beats the pants off of OS X at least. I used to use OSX but now I use Arch with GNOME3 and your comment is not based in reality. GNOME3 doesn't even have feature-parity with Snow Leopard. It's many years behind the OSX in features and polish department [0]. I encounter various GNOME3 is…
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3”Submitted GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes as a story · 258 points
HN discussionOne potential problem is if Gnome make breaking changes, it's hard for Canonical (or anyone) to use it as a base for their own UI. I've not experienced this first-hand, since I haven't used Gnome or written GTK+ apps since the 2.x days, but judging by what I've seen online they like to break APIs at each release, drop working features if/when their opinions change, and be semi-hostile to any use-case other than thei…
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu”Submitted Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA as a story · 34 points
HN discussion> can you point to the constant reinvention of themeing engines? https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “A new wave of Linux applications”Submitted Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space. The point of this "first impressions" exercise was to explore the happy path. > It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting. I would agree with that sentiment, though I didn't want t…
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “Debian 10 “Buster” Released”Submitted Arch’s Dirty Little Not-So-Secret as a story · 5 points
HN discussionOpen source projects are not shielded from this either. Plenty of paranoia, justified or not, going around these days. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-de... http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-milli... https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-backdoor-left-in-Unix-or-... https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backd... On one hand, we've been privy to some of NSA…
Comment linking /2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-owned-by-the-nsa/
on “Kaspersky OS”Submitted Red Hat / Gnome Developers Censoring GTK+ Bugtracker as a story · 4 points
HN discussionUpdating software shouldn't give a sense of security, instead use sandbox/cipher technologies more generalized, for firefox you could use firejail[0] or sandfox[1]. Or even more general approaches like subuser[2] or QubeOs[3]. Personally I use FF 28.x + Noscript + Adblock plus + Firejail 0.9.28-1 and I feel quite confident I won't get hacked by random attacks. [0] https://l3net.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/firejail-a-se…
Comment linking /downloads/script-sandfox/
on “Firefox exploit found in the wild”Submitted Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA | IgnorantGuru's Blog as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBecause major Linux distros and the upstream developers like to ignore or mock use cases that deviate from their "brand identity" (witness https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... which recently saw the HN front page).
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible”Submitted How GNOME is turning Linux into Windows as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe GNOME devs are actively closing the software as much as possible; their software philosophy is probably as closed as you can get while being formally open source. There are many interesting informations around to get a picture of how they think; this article has interesting concepts: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... and this is the most relevant part: I think one of the most import…
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “RHEL is deprecating KDE”Submitted GTK 3.10 Drops Menu Icons and Mnemonics as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now. Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one rant from 2012: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast”Submitted GNOME, Ubuntu et al. rotting in threes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and... Yet just two days ago, we see Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux and maintainer of the Linux kernel), launching into a tirade against – yes, you guessed it – systemd developers because of their atrocious response to a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged. Linus is so upset with systemd developer Kay Sievers…
Comment linking /2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/
on “Systemd as tragedy”Submitted Gnome (et al): Rotting in Threes (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> oh my god, what a spectacular issue. And, seriously, the Poetterings' response is basically "not my job" and "not a bug". And this person develops something that sits at the core of a modern linux system... All the while Lennart claims that he's making Linux more secure. FFS. Edit: I forgot about this https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and... > He (Theodore Ts’o) goes on to describe how he pr…
Comment linking /2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/
on “Systemd as tragedy”Submitted Kdbus: Systemd’s Kid Cousin Come to Stay as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDoes systemd increase the security of the OS or reduce it? For example, does it allow currently-separated processes to dip into each others' memory space? I would appreciate a birds-eye view from someone familiar with the security ramifications of systemd. Would not the incorporation of many loosely-coupled but individually secure mechanisms into a single monolithic mechanism be useful to an entity whose purpose was…
Comment linking /2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-owned-by-the-nsa/
on “Systemd redux: The end of Linux”Submitted Why do it? - Motivations behind free software. as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you want to go down that rabbit hole, see: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cy...
Comment linking /2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-and-how-cryptography-affects-your-life/
on “How to Crash Systemd in One Command”"It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes." Or most of them probably just gave up making GTK themes. https://github.com/QtCurve/qtcurve-gtk3 https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3”Below link may shed some light on gtk3 controversy. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3”Before I started to use Qt in my python projects, I was using GTK. At the time, there was no absolute reason for doing so - it was merely the first thing I tried. For various reasons (memory is vague, it was a while back), I soon began to get frustrated with GTK. Then I started reading various articles on the subject of 3rd-party Gnome theme designers getting extremely frustrated because for every point release of G…
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
on “KDE makes Qt”GNOME doesn't reach parity on configurability because... it's by design. There is an extensive post on the subject: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... . It's tragicomic to read ("And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.") I'd say that the GNOME devs have Jobs' ego and intention, but none of his talent(s). But at least they have branding™! /s
Comment linking /2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes
on “Mate Desktop 1.24”I agree that a code of conduct is a great idea but I'm really bummed to read that the Django CoC is going to be adopted by golang. 1. The Django CoC uses very vague language on what it is forbidden and explicitly tells you that "this isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do" just to be extra vague in what constitutes unacceptable behaviour. 2. It does not define what process will be used to address CoC v…
Comment linking /2015/06/04/
on “Russ Cox: Go, Open Source, Community”
