one time, I asked and got a reply that it has been answered already, followed by a rant of why the hell people were asking the same question over and over again. IDK man, maybe you could update the installation instructions in your readme, then people wouldn’t be flodding discord with the same question over and over again.
(it was regarding the project being incompatible with the newest version of a library and you had to manually install an older version to get it to work)
Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it’s threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There’s only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don’t have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more “boomer hobbies” and it’s ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There’s car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you’re shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
In regards to the advrider comment, I don’t find those ridiculously long-running threads all that convenient even though they are very useful. In your example the WR250R thread could have multiple subtopics being discussed at once in the same thread which I find frustrating.
For example, one guy might ask about tires and while that’s being discussed another guy shows up asking about a big bore kit to make more power. Now there are two discussions happening at the same time and all I can do is view the thread chronologically. Then someone else shows up asking what oil everyone uses. Then someone new joins and says “Hey it’s not possible to go back and read through all 2300 pages in this thread, what GPS are you all using?”
Like sure it’s great that all the information is in that one thread but navigating through it only in chronological order can be super frustrating.
I have been playing with the idea of a documentation.org. Something publicly funded (mostly through corporate and individual donations) that hosts technical manuals, white papers, guides, links to video tutorials (likely YouTube), FAQs, and even links to Discord and/or forums if they exist. Documents are public, free to index (no login to view), version controlled and held in perpetuity.
Obviously there is much more to it, but I think we have reached a point where something like it is required.
In the most technical terms, yes. The idea is not new or bizarre, but I see the same missteps repeated. For starters, the venture HAS to be a nonprofit with zero need for monetization. It will also need an inviting and easy to navigate user interface, accessible to the most nontechnical of users. You need to have a massive document library from multiple large players from day one, so you need to have a lot of contacts.
As I said it’s not fully cooked, but I have spoken to a few people that could help me make it happen and they seemed open to it.
Please consider a Patreon for doc review. I don’t mean reviewing the doc against the project for fitness, as that’s the job of each project to maintain and review their own docs; I mean by a technical writer who can de-localize (you only think I mean ‘internationalize’) the document and make it syntactically and logically correct against a generic, classic style guide.
The rising popularity of really bad errors is definitely turning me off from videos or documentation from a few sources with a lot of churn. It ruins the flow and it robs the assumption of authority which I’d argue is an important part of any documentation.
That is a good idea. I am fairly certain I could get funding and/or loaned resource time for English, Spanish, French and German, but crowd funding incentivized localization for other regions is brilliant.
How does everyone feel about the “isolation” of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.
I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.
No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows
Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.
Way back in the olde tymes, I was having trouble with the NIC driver in my Linux install. I posted a question about it on USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the drivers. He asked for some info about the card, then updated the driver to support it.
There used to be a lot of cards based on same or similar chips, but with small differences. That made little changes to drivers common. It’s a bit like LCD modules or audio chipset quirks. One driver with tons of little differences depending on what each manufacturer decided to do differently.
Yeah, I know, that’s why the kernel with the drivers is not more than 150MB. Otherwise, you’d have the Windows situation where driverpacks compressed with 7z (LZMA2, solid archive, 273 word dictionary size and 2GB decompression memory, which requires about 128GB of RAM to compress) take about 30GB.
You have to pack the driver from each manufacturer because of signatures, even though they might even be the same with other drivers in the pack… but, REV differs and oh well, the driver installer doesn’t recognize that driver as a valid one for that device.
Of course, the kernel drivers are now commonly signed. The real problem is catering to manufacturers demanding to have their own bespoke driver pack, often including some stupid branded management application, when it’s just the same as the other dozen manufacturers packaging of the same product. Then you end up with bloated “driver packs” and a system tray of a half dozen vendors screaming for you to pay attention to them and know that they are somehow contributing to your experience.
In Linux, you have a kernel driver and a myriad of vendor’s pci ids mixed together and the vendors just have to deal with it. As a side effect, a USB to serial dongle is about 99% likely to work in Linux, and in my experience 90% unlikely to work in Windows (can’t find the driver for it, or in one very prominent case Microsoft bans drivers of counterfeit chips that function fine, but violate IP rights). Punishing the counterfeiters may have been understandable, but ultimately the unwitting customers paid rather than the counterfeiters (they still sold their devices, but the users that were oblivious suffered).
The real problem is catering to manufacturers demanding to have their own bespoke driver pack, often including some stupid branded management application, when it’s just the same as the other dozen manufacturers packaging of the same product. Then you end up with bloated “driver packs” and a system tray of a half dozen vendors screaming for you to pay attention to them and know that they are somehow contributing to your experience.
This is exactly why I use driverpacks in Windows (3rd party, like SDI). If the drivers are not in the pack, I download them from the manufacturer and if they’re packed with an app, I just extract the whole thing and point Windows (through manual driver update) to search for the drivers in that location. It will install only what it needs to work, nothing else.
they still sold their devices, but the users that were oblivious suffered
Or they did know, but the copy was a lot cheaper than the real thing. Hell, I’ve done it. If it does the same thing, why buy the more expensive thingie. I get IP rights and all that, but seriously, in the end, you just have to deal with these things. Unless you’re Intel, you should expect your device/chip to end up being copied. China doesn’t enforce western world IP laws, so it’s a “free for all” kind of a thing there. If you plan on doing this (making your own device/chip), your device/chip better be niche enough so it’s not viable to actually copy the design. Otherwise, copies will pop up left and right.
Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).
A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.
It’s mind boggling just thinking that things like this depend on the effort of one or two guys… while on the other hand, it’s not so uncommon that a team of engineers and developers fails to deliver a working (mostly) bugfree product.
I think management is who is responsible for the shitty decisions, as always… and, in general, just holding the team back.
The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Yes, but someone still has to implement that “a thing or two” in it every few years.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
Agreed. But, to be honest, most aren’t. Just take a look at Realtek. There’s bound to be at least one chip made by them on your board (in most cases, two, LAN and audio, two very crucial pieces of hardware).
Realtek NICs are junk (even the buggy Intel I225-v chip is better) so I try to avoid them, but I honestly haven’t ever checked which sound chip my motherboard uses. I’ll have to check if it’s a Realtek one. Realtek is generally the lower-end manufacturer for cheaper products.
Realtek is basically on every retail motherboard manufacturer. Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Biostar, ASRock, etc. If you’re talking about hi-end or server grade motherboards, yeah, but let’s face it, the chips are cheap so they’re practically in every household.
I’ve got a “ASUS ROG Strix B550-F” which wasn’t exactly a high-end motherboard when I got it (I got it because it was cheap), but it’s got an Intel chip rather than a Realtek one. The lower-end motherboards have Realtek NICs but I usually don’t get the cheapest of anything since there’s usually a pretty big difference in quality if you spend just a little bit more.
The Intel I226-V chip on that motherboard is only $2.87 each (for quantities of 1000, even cheaper for large bulk orders) and the manufacturer can likely use the same PHY chip and timing components, so it doesn’t really increase the price a lot to use a non-Realtek chip.
ROG is a Republic Of Gamers edition motherboard… it’s probably a lot more expensive than the lower end models (like my Z97-K board for example… and that wasn’t cheap as well, like 100€ back in the day).
I guess the definition of “cheap” varies from person to person. My definition of cheap is lower end (50, 60€ tops) motherboards. I don’t buy those either, but make no mistake, they’re a common household item in 3rd world countries (I can vouch for that).
I have no idea what the prices are for a Realtek NIC vs. other manufacturers. All I know is, they’re usually the default choice for cheaper models… which probably means they’re dirt cheap. Have no idea how this compares to Intel or other manufacturers (Marvel, Qualcomm, etc.).
In general, yes, those NICs are cheap. But, let’s take USB to Ethernet adapters. I don’t think Intel has a solution for those things… or if they do, it’s probably more expensive than the one Realtek offers. It’s $5 on AliExpress. They’re not great, but they get the job done (no wifi, no onboard etherent plug on a brand new laptop, and you need internet to get it up to date with drivers). I haven’t looked for anything else since this one does a great job, but I guess that, even if there is an Intel based solution out there, it’ll be at least tripple the price of the Realtek one.
Unfortunately, it would likely be detrimental to my ongoing work situation.
Though saying that, the BBC had a guy who would turn up to work dressed as a wizard (think harry potter style). He was the reason Teletext continued for so long. He was the last one left on the team. They retired Teletext the day after he retired himself.
I’m still not sure I have the force of personality to not just look like an idiot try hard however. 🤷♂️
Tempting… Unfortunately, I don’t think I could pull it off. You need a certain… force of personality to pull off something like that. I’m just not outgoing (or skilled!) enough to pull off a full Thom Merrilin look.
I remember early 2020, there was a small push to bring capes back, before something else took over every discussion. Something about blue jays or crows or something
Send your thanks directly to the maintainer (preferably email/mastadon/twitter/etc, not a ticket)! Open source maintainers don’t get a lot of positive direct feedback.
To be honest, yes. In general, not just tech or Linux related stuff. You look at humanity and what it has come down to, and then you notice these people… and hope fills your heart again.
The vast majority of my open source projects, I’m the only user. I release it open source because back in the day, GitHub only allowed open source projects if you want to use it.
But another reason is the hope that someone will find it helpful. If not the project itself but maybe the code.
I have one project that has a significant following and honestly it’s sometimes very scary because I might not want to keep it updated because of my own interests changing.
That’s the great thing about open source though. Sure, you might drop off the face of the earth tomorrow. But if you do, the code is there, and maybe someone who was using it clones the repo and carries on that work.
The astounding thing is history is full of these types of people when you peel back the “couple great men” narrative of history and actually look at how good things happened, it is kind of bewildering.
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