Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 31, 2024

• Nate ☛ ActivityPub/Nostr/AT-BlueSky Compared

  Distributed social media networks have been on my mind for a while, especially during my deep dive into Nostr over the last few months. Being on my mind I started writing a comparison between the big three, which sort of morphed into this. I should clarify that I’m a layman here: I’ve never participated in the development of any of them, or the development of anything built on top of them (nor the development of anything complex at all). I have tried to cover my bases by looking into each one and clarifying things I assumed, but with such a broad list of topics there’s a chance I’m wrong about something here.

  Still though, I think a broad fairly technical bird’s eye view of how each compares could be useful, or if not at least somewhat interesting to those with similar interests to me. The plan is to introduce each protocol and then list off how I believe they perform in the following categories: [...]

• Kodsnack ☛ Kodsnack 567 - Arrow straight through, with Matt Topol and Lars Wikman

  Fredrik has Matt Topol and Lars Wikman over for a deep and wide chat about Apache Arrow and many, many topics in the orbit of the language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data. What does that even mean? What is the point? And why does Arrow only feel more and more interesting and useful the more you think about deeply integrating it into your systems?

• FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: A recap of 2023 by MediaGoblin co-maintainer Ben Sturmfels

  An update from MediaGoblin co-maintainer Ben Sturmfels on the impressive work they did in 2023.

• Events

  • GNOME ☛ Tobias Bernard: Save the Date: Berlin Mini GUADEC 2024

    This year’s GUADEC is going to be in the USA, making it difficult to attend both for Visa/border control reasons and because it’s not easy to get to from Europe without flying. Many of us want to avoid the massive emissions in particular (around 3 tons of CO2, which is half the yearly per-capita emissions in most European countries). If that’s you, too, you’re in luck because we’re doing yet another edition of the fabulous Berlin Mini GUADEC!

  • OpenSUSE ☛ openSUSE Conference Travel Info

    Getting a visa may take some time. There are certain requirements necessary to receive a visa for those who are not citizens of a Schengen country. You may need a formal invitation letter that fully explains the nature of your visit.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3

    I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I’ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I’ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was initially tempted to buy a new Thinkpad by the prices of high end X1 devices dropping, this new Yoga has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 screen – that’s a good upgrade from 8G with 1920*1080.

• BSD

  • Klara ☛ Debunking Common Myths About FreeBSD

    FreeBSD, a Unix-like operating system, is often shrouded in myths and misconceptions. Originating from the Berkeley Software Distribution (hence BSD), FreeBSD is renowned for its reliability, performance, and advanced networking features. However, several myths have arisen over the years, clouding the true capabilities and characteristics of this OS. In this article, we aim to debunk these myths and shed light on what FreeBSD truly offers.