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Interview: Thomas Voss of Mir — October 2014

Obviously there are disadvantages to having only one graphics language, but the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. ... Android made the same decision to go that way. Even Wayland to a certain degree has been doing that. They have to support EGL and GL, simply because it's very convenient for app developers and toolkit developers — an open graphics language. That was the part that inspired us, and we wanted to have this one graphics language and support it well. And that takes a lot of craft.

So, once you can say: no more weird 2D API, no more weird phong API, and everything is mapped out to GL, you're way better off. And you can distil down the scope of the overall project to something more manageable. So it went from being impossible to possible. And then there was me, being very opinionated. I don't believe in extensibility from the beginning — traditionally in Linux everything is super extensible, which has got benefits for a certain audience.

If you think about the audience of the display server, it's one of the few places in the system where you've got three audiences. So you've got the users, who don't care, or shouldn't care, about the display server.

How is it that I never fall into the category of people described as "users"?

Does what I do for ten hours a day, every day, not fall into the semantic category of "using"? Me, and everyone like me? How do we always find ourselves filed under "a certain audience"? Well, this "certain audience" is today crying no giant room-temperature crocodile tears—neither any small, steamy gnat tears.

Here's the underlying problem: "user", as fantasized by far too many software developers, is the centerfold normalization of real womanhood.

Gift a journal for a monthly fun - math, popular science, computing ...
I am a https://www.linuxvoice.com/ subscriber; the magazine is newcomer-friendly, covering stuff like games, programming, Raspberry Pi, history... By coincidence, Oct 2015 issue teaches (python) profiling on prime numbers and the sieve method served as an example.

i guess your typical troll pig ignorance is showing. poettering actually wrote a bit of software so Gnome didn't have to use logind but Gnome decided not to use it. http://www.linuxvoice.com/inte...

i'll mark your AC words as Trolling based on ignorance

Well, it's showing for one of us. :) Maaaaybe don't believe everything Poettering is misrepresenting in these types of cases.

You can go check the Gentoo and other bug reports for yourself: Gnome3 made logind a mandated dependency. I'm sorry if this is hard for you, but it's simply the reality of the situation and what has gone down. It was eventually worked around so that you could use it without it, so long as you didn't want any power management and other things... It's straight from the horses mouth.

This is a classic example where you're told something technically true, but the important bits are left out so you're misled. And sadly, Poettering is known for that at this point.

"Now, if you want to use Gnome3 -- or even ship it for your users -- it depends on logind, etc" - i guess your typical troll pig ignorance is showing. poettering actually wrote a bit of software so Gnome didn't have to use logind but Gnome decided not to use it. http://www.linuxvoice.com/inte...

i'll mark your AC words as Trolling based on ignorance

Did he add that code to Gnome?

Yes

Some people don’t realise that when Gnome started making use of Logind, I actually wrote the patch for that. I ported GDM onto Logind. But when it did that, I was very careful to make sure it would still run on ConsoleKit.

http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/

This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:

Another aspect of systemd is that it collects all output from processes that it starts.

Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.

systemd puts the stderr (and sometimes stdout) of processes it starts in the system journal. This is extremely useful (to the extent that various anti-systemd trolls around here are denying that it happens).

If your journal is readable by the NSA you have bigger problems than systemd. If your various init started daemons are writing confidential information to stderr you have bigger problems than systemd.

systemd does not "launch all processes". systemd only has access to the stderr/stdout of the processes it does launch.

Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!"

This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:

Another aspect of systemd is that it collects all output from processes that it starts.

Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.

"Because Lennart Poettering managed to make his friends doing GNOME development make GNOME depend on systemd, " - if you do some research, you'll find he actually enabled the software remain compatible with Consolekit but Gnome chose not to use it. read this for more info http://www.linuxvoice.com/inte...

its quite amazing (and disappointing) just how much mis-information is out there and that people do no research before jumping on the bandwagon

Why not phone up Peter Hofmann and ask him ..

"Munich city council has migrated 15,000 workers from Windows to Linux .. We visited the city and talked to Peter Hofmann, the man behind the migration" ..

This article asks for a rant, so here you go:

I got into this by luck. Otherwise I might have been just the run of the mill awkward person :) My mom found an ad in the paper. A school was looking for students to start 5th year on a computer programming curriculum, and entry was test-based. You had to pass a maths and a literature test on subjects that a 4th grader should be knowing.

I hadn't seen a computer until I started school in September, but there was a book that was recommended, and I got that during the summer holiday. With no computer, just with pen and paper, I went through the book, and it just went in. I had a void in my brain that gladly sucked it all in. The I about forgot it all when I sat in front of a Spectrum clone and didn't realise I had a power button to press on the monitor to turn it on.

Ever since, I've been attracted to the field. I was 11 when I started. Being awkward helped a bit. I was never competitive, so I rarely played any games that others could play, so if it was a game, it had to be a text-based adventure. Nobody would play those, and I'd get my ass kicked in any others, so I avoided those. The guys kicking my ass in games weren't really that good at programming the computers, so hey, while you guys are busy playing games, I'll try this little algorithm I saw in a book and see what it does and try to understand it. I spent my PE classes in the computer lab instead. Things moved on, we got PCs, we moved from BASIC to Turbo Pascal, and it was still great. I dabbled with assembly language, but never got experienced with it. I picked it up a few times, but never got past flinging a few registers and some data on the stack. I don't regret it though. I learned other cool things.

I'm glad I didn't jump straight into C, as in Pascal you have a real string type that you don't care about, but in C you have a... convention... And if anything, when you start to learn programming numbers and strings are what you play with first. These days people are started in C, which I think is plain mad. Back then Python wasn't on the horizon. Nowadays, if you don't start newbies on Python as their first ever language you need to be shot. Python is the new BASIC in my view. What I like about Python is that "batteries included" thing. Want to have a taste with something? import thing_that_does_what_you_want_to_play_with. You'll study what that does later. Play time is now. Some purists may consider this to be ass backwards, but come on: to get interest, you have to play with it first, then study the boring bits. And study the boring bits in locally ordered random sequence. Sequential order can only put you off and make you hate the thing. And by FSM don't start people in Java or C#! You can put that in a follow up class, after your students know WTF to do with a computer in terms of programming.

Nowadays I'm abusing the hell out of Bash, but only because I got really good at it, hated Perl, didn't actually get properly acquainted with Python until recently, and I have serious aversion of using PHP to write console tools.

Of course, as you might imagine for a Slashdot reader, my social life is absolutely devoid of content :) I don't like it that way anymore, but if I let go I have no idea what to do next. It's like you either do this full-life, or you don't. If I cut down, I just feel that I'd write OpenSSL-style code instead, and I'm not at ease with the idea at all. The fact that I work in a very tiny company that relies on me probably doesn't help. This paragraph is probably good material for an "Ask Slashdot" article: "How do you cut down and get a life?". I know it's a viable proposition for an article after reading the comments on the "Parenting rewires male brains" article. Either everyone there was masterfully trolling, or I've been doing everything wrong in my life so far. I'm yet to see what I can do to fix that, but I have to, as I'm 31 now, and I don't want to become Larry Laffer (he is 40 in the game).

Oh, and I think I'll be getting my first downmods ever. But do as you like. /RANT

Apparently the NSA and CIA don't want us to read that - the link points to how / when to write a kernel module.

It's been fixed now, but it totally pointed to http://www.linuxvoice.com/be-a... originally