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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Have an upvote. I use Edge on Linux every day for Outlook and Teams. I do not really use Office online to create my own docs but, if there is an attachment in an email, I use Office in the browser to view it. It all works well enough that I hardly think about it.

    It used to be that Edge was the only browser that worked well for Teams. Ironically, with the latest update to Edge, my webcam stopped working. I loaded Teams in Firefox and it worked fine. There are other reports online of the same problem and Microsoft posted that they are working on a fix. So, Microsoft managed to break Teams compatibility in their own browser and it seems that Teams now works fine in Firefox. At least, it did for me.



  • I do not think it is about the royalties in most cases. I mean, RISC-V royalties may be the reason you choose it over ARM for a custom chips ( say in the bajillion SSDs you are going to ship ). Perhaps you were going to choose a different ISA for a microcontroller and the lack of license fee makes RISC-V attractive.

    For chip maker, it is the freedom that matters as that is what “convenience” means to them. And it means less risk. Look at the Qualcomm / ARM lawsuits right now. That would not happen if Qualcomm had chosen ARM.

    And if you are a chip maker licensing core designs, do you want your ISA to force you into a monopoly? ARM is more mature today but the role that ARM the company plays is being filled by multiple RISC-V suppliers ( HiFive, Milk-V, etc ). More players means more completion means more choice and probably better prices. ARM’s core business is licensing chip designs and they are about to have a lot of competition from RISC-C.

    And in the end, competition from and within the RISC-V space will drive down prices for consumers. That is what consumers are going to care about. The lower prices will not really be because of lower license fees ( though that will help of course ). And it all comes with a large and open software ecosystem. So the “convenience” will be there too.



  • I am torn on this chip. One way of looking at it is negative as they are adding custom instructions that are not part of the RISC-V standard. Part of me hates the fragmentation.

    On the other hand, the alternative is that they release another MIPS chip ( MIPS ISA, not RISC-V ). That obviously fragments the CPU space even more and does nothing to drive the RISC-V space forward.

    If I take a step back, this is exactly the freedom that RISC-V represents. Not only did it make sense for MIPS to adopt RISC-V over their own ISA but this is the kind of thing that would not be possible if they went with ARM.

    What makes RISC-V better than ARM is the freedom, not the lack of licensing fees. I think this is an example of how RISC-V wins in the end.

    Equivalent instructions will make it into the RISC-V spec ( official extensions ) and future MIPS chips will no doubt use the standard at some point.

    In the end, this just creates more demand for and more support for RISC-V on Linux and Open Source RISC-V toolchains ( such as compilers ).

    Anything that moves RISC-V forward is positive.






  • Much more stable but much, much older packages at some point. Can you tolerate that?

    It is a lot easier these days as Distrobox and Flatpak offer great escape hatches to get newer software when you really need it.

    Some of us fiddle with the base OS more than we should. In many ways, I think using something that changes less often is a great idea.

    One great thing about RHEL is the documentation. First Red Hat themselves make great stuff. Then there are mountains of third-party materials. Finally, since it changes slowly, whatever issues you are facing have probably been seen before by others and what you find about it on the Internet will still apply.



  • If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.

    If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.





  • I am not sure how I feel about it but there seems to be some resistance in the GTK world. Desktops like Cinnamon,MATE, and XFCE have said they are going to stick with GTK3. Mint has proposed a common suite of GTK3 apps called Xapps that would maintain GTK3 versions of some of the applications that GNOME has pulled to GTK4.

    https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html

    One of the best things about the GTK world was that you had a choice of DEs but got the same universe of “native” applications with any of them. Sadly, it seems that there may now be GNOME and “other GTK” DE universes. On the plus side, there will be a haven for those that want off the GNOME train without as much “left behind” feel as MATE users have had.



  • He says “no commercial interest” but honestly I bet there could be. For one thing, there is still an astounding amount of VB6 out there is real use. I know of several US law enforcement agencies with Petabytes of data stored in an evidence management system whose UI and core logic is VB6 for example.

    Also, there is really nothing quite like VB6 out there today for rapid prototyping or rapid GUI desktop dev for amateur devs. It is a niche that has never really been filled.

    If this can run VB6 apps cross-platform on a modern foundation, that could be huge.

    [yes, I realize this is a one man hobby project with no such ambition. I am talking about potential.]