Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.
For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.
For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.
I have never had so much negative feedback and ad-hom attacks on HN as for that story, I think. :-D
Short version, the chronology goes like this:
2004: Ubuntu does the first more-or-less consumer-quality desktop Linux that is 100% free of charge. No paid version. It uses the current best of breed FOSS components and they choose GNOME 2, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.
By 2006 Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" comes out, the first LTS. It is catching on a bit.
Fedora Core 6 and RHEL 4 are also getting established, and both use GNOME 2. Every major distro offers GNOME 2, even KDE-centric ones like SUSE. Paid distros like Mandriva and SUSE as starting to get in some trouble -- why pay when Ubuntu does the job?
Even Solaris uses GNOME 2.
2006-2007, MS is getting worried and starts talking about suing. It doesn't know who yet so it just starts saying intentionally not-vague-at-all things like the Linux desktop infringes "about 265 patents".
This is visibly true if you are 35-40 years old: if you remember desktop GUI OSes before 1995, they were all over the place. Most had desktop drive icons. Most had a global menu bar at the top. This is because most copied MacOS. Windows was an ugly mess and only lunatics copied that. (Enter the Open Group with Motif.)
But then came Win95. Huge hit.
After 1995, every GUI gets a task bar, it gets buttons for apps, even window managers like Fvwm95 and soon after IceWM. QNX Neutrino looks like it. OS/2 Warp 4 looks like it. Everyone copies it.
Around the time NT 4 is out and Win98 is taking shape, both KDE and GNOME get going and copy the Win9x look and feel. Xfce dumps its CDE look and feel, goes FOSS, and becomes a Win95 copy.
MS had a case. Everyone had copied them. MS is not stupid and it's been sued lots of times. You betcha it patented everything and kept the receipts. The only problem it has is: who does it sue?
RH says no. GNOME 3 says "oh noes our industry leading GU is, er, yeah, stale, it's stagnant, it's not changing, so what we're gonna do is rip it up and start again! With no taskbar and no hierarchical start menu and no menu bars in windows and no OK and CANCEL buttons at the bottom" and all the other things that they can identify that are from Win9x.
GNOME is mainly sponsored by Red Hat.
Canonical tries to get involved; RH says fsck off. It can't use KDE, that's visibly a ripoff. Ditto Xfce, Enlightenment, etc. LXDE doesn't exist yet.
So it does its own thing based on the Netbook Launcher. If it daren't imitate Windows then what's the leading other candidate? This Mac OS X thing is taking off. It has borrowed some stuff from Windows like Cmd+Tab and Fast User Switching and stuff and got away with it. Let's do that, then.
SUSE just wearily says "OK, how much? Where do we sign?"
RISC OS had a recognizable task bar around 1987, so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire. This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
Yes, the Icon Bar is prior art, but there are 2 problems with that.
1. It directly inspired the NeXTstep Dock.
This is unprovable after so long, but the strong suspicion is that the Dock inspired Windows 4 "Chicago" (later Windows 95) -- MS definitely knew of NeXT, but probably never heard of Acorn.
So it's 2nd hand inspiration.
2. The Dock isn't a taskbar either.
3. What the prior art may be doesn't matter unless Acorn asserted it, which AFAIK it didn't, as it no longer existed by the time of the legal threats. Nobody else did either.
4. The product development of Win95 is well documented and you can see WIP versions, get them from the Internet Archive and run them, or just peruse screenshot galleries.
The odd thing is that the early development versions look less like the Dock or Icon Bar than later ones. It's not a direct copy: it's convergent evolution. If they'd copied, they would have got there a lot sooner, and it would be more similar than it is.
> so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire.
RISC OS as Arthur: 1987
NeXTstep 0.8 demo: 1988
Windows "Chicago" test builds: 1993, 5Y later, well inside a 20Y patent lifespan
Win95 release: 8Y later
KDE first release: 1998
GNOME first release: 1999
The chronology doesn't add up, IMHO.
> This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
You're missing a different point here.
Buttons at the bottom date back to at least the Lisa.
The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top. Just as in 1983 or so GEM made its menu bar drop-down instead of pull-down (menus open on mouseover, not on click) and in 1985 or so AmigaOS made them appear and open only on a right-click -- in attempts to avoid getting sued by Apple.
> The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top.
Well, the buttons in the titlebar at the top are reminiscent of old Windows CE dialog boxes, so I guess they're not really original either! What both Unity and GNOME 3 looks like to me is an honest attempt to immediately lead in "convergence" with mobile touch-based solutions. They first came up in the netbook era where making Linux run out-of-the-box on a market-leading small-screen, perhaps touch-based device was quite easy - a kind of ease we're only now getting back to, in fact.
> I'm inclined to think Christianity on paper is "the best" of the Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic? Maybe. I have studied comparative religion somewhat -- more than the vast majority of religious people -- and the least unpleasant "religion" by far is old-school Buddhism.
The original has been widely corrupted and turned into a forest of competing rival faiths, most of which have become religions, but the original seems to me to have been designed by someone very smart, who studied, subjected themselves to various allegedly spiritually-improving practices... and then wrote down a sort of vaccination to inculcate into people carefully designed to protect them from religion.
Religions are contagious memetic infections. Virtually nobody that calls themselves Christian actually follows what little is known of the teachings of Yeshweh. In practice, "being Christian" is not so much a recommendation as a warning.
In my 58 years, I have so far met one (1) person who was a true Yeshweh follower.
Original Buddhism was an inoculation to protect lesser minds from memetic infection.
But it itself has been corrupted by viral influences, to paraphrase Neal Stephenson, and turned into what it sought to protect people from.
Any sect of Christianity that has a name should be avoided. Ditto Islam, Judaism, all the big ones.
For a good overview of world religions, I recommend this excellent book:
> specifically what about the Bible they found resonant
A valid point.
I'm not interested, myself, but this is an interesting question.
My upbringing was very vaguely Church of England Protestant. I read very fast and read a large chunk of the bible as a child. I decided when I was 11 that religion was a fairy story, just a work of fiction and nothing more, and that I didn't believe in it.
I have read much of the Christian bible, and I was top of the class in religious studies at school. I am confident that I know much more about Christianity than 99% of Christians, and most ex-Christian atheists I know are the same.
For most intelligent adults, actually reading the bible is a leading cause of atheism. This is a meme among atheists.
I have never heard of anyone getting religion from the bible before.
During the Joseon era of Korea, Christianity was suppressed. Nevertheless, Western books made their to Korea including the Bible. Among the nobility some secretly converted just from reading the Bible. Korea’s first saint was one of grandchildren of those who converted purely from reading.
> Wow they ported Windows Millennium Edition to Linux??
Aw, come on.
WinME had the exact same UI as Win2000, and for a lot of us, that was the peak of Windows' design.
Secondly, Win11 is worse than ME in every important way. ME was all right once it got a few fixes, and worked great on very low-end kit that NT wouldn't look at.
At the time (1993, when NT came out) there was a good reason.
C-A-D was a special reserved keystroke that couldn't be intercepted or redirected. So you could use it even to interrupt a task that had frozen the entire UI.
Using it for login meant it could bypass and circumvent any malware that attempted to steal credentials, etc.
Then MS let people replace the GINA that handled it, and then they let people turn it off, and it joined the rest of the slide into junkware...
For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.
For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.
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