BSD Cafe Billboard

The site logo (also used for a couple of forums, like this one) loads slow enough that I can see it show up. I checked and https://billboard.bsd.cafe/assets/uploads/system/site-logo.png (with some cache-busting ?v=... suffix) is 2MB!

I'm not sure if it really needs to be a 2048x2048 pixels, 24bit PNG. Same size as a 16 colors PNG: virtually identical, 390kb. Same size, but jpg: 297kb. And even that seems excessive to me for a logo that's usually scaled down to thumbnail size.

There's https://eternal-september.org/

Some threads come in from elsewhere, e.g. https://billboard.bsd.cafe/topic/db5881ef-e539-44f5-9c80-6ca6f4675226/if-you-really-know-your-gnu-coreutils-you-probably-don-t-need-as-many-extra-tools-as-you-think.

When answering to that, I see my response on here, but not elsewhere (such as the original server of that thread: https://snac.bsd.cafe/r1w1s1/p/1775189213.762361)

Is it supposed to be like that?

There are, what, seven or eight branches and renames already? Cui bono?

2.5: LibreOffice, Collabora Office and the dead/dormant Apache OpenOffice (last major release 2014)

@mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org

• OnlyOffice is a separate development based out of russia (and trying hard to conceal that relationship). It's AGPLv3 with some "keep our logo alive" provisions that may or may not stick (that's the point of contention between them and Euro-Office). OnlyOffice seems to be built web-first.
• Collabora is a software service company that did LO development for clients who use LO, need improvements and are able to pay for them. They also have a LO build under their own name. One of the big contributors to LO.
• "TDF forked OO into LO" is a good shortcut version of what happened (LO is based on the Go-OO fork that used to be maintained by Novell/SUSE and others, and lots of pesky details like that, and TDF eventually became the trade org where all those OO-forkers came together)
• LO Online is basically LO running on a server, more-or-less sending bitmaps of the UI to a web client (not sure about the amount of "native web" parts in the UI these days)

From what I understand of Collabora's perspective, TDF was more of an umbrella org for all the annoying legal bits (holding trademarks etc for everybody, without anybody being able to take over), and people in that org now deviate from that bland, simple mission into something bigger. Kinda like mozilla.org expanding its mandate to cover whatever so more folks can be well-paid executives for random projects they think up, instead of sticking to a "let's help techies so they can do one thing well, while we sort out of the non-tech annoyances that surround it" mandate.

On a tangent: For the specific task of (what's now called) word processing, there's a mighty fine book showing how the tools on a UNIX system can add up to something greater than the sum of the parts. See https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/

@worik@mastodon.social

Please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater

Everybody is connected with everyone all the time, that's a problem.

Using other communication systems allow for some calm instead of the constant anxiety trifecta made up of:

• dopamine-inducing "did anybody respond/fave/follow?" (and yes, the Fediverse is as bad at this as anything)
• what horrible thing happened in any part of the world that now floods my feeds/portals/front pages?
• is my data still secure or did some clown hack my systems or the ones that I'm using?

(with a bonus fourth for some: "when will the censor step in, and will I even notice?")

The Internet might still be a useful tool as cheap-and-available distribution method for overlay networks (until it ceases to be), but in my opinion anything that encourages "always-on" is poison.

Give me a store&forward system (that, ideally, can just switch away from IP to something else, perhaps "microSD cards in an envelope sent via traditional mail"¹) any time.

¹ For the global connections that I came to appreciate, I was checking out what a global SD card ring would mean. A regular letter could carry 3 µSD cards within its weight limits. Just one of them is essentially infinite storage for human-scale data transfer needs, even when serving entire regions that way.

Sending one or two such envelopes constantly east/west, forming a global ring, with each hop taking the data that's for their region to redistribute, and adding data destined for elsewhere, at a weekly cadence, that would come out at ~20€/month for the EU->US hop.
And yes, it's high latency. A worthy trade-off.