Subj : Re: Ubuntu replaces core To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Wed Nov 05 2025 07:03:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > > KM> Yeah, obviously. But it wasn't to keep schedule, it was whiney > > KM> brats going "You can't make me!" They've set their hearts on > > KM> swapping out C/C++ for Rust, and when numerous actual programmers > > KM> pointed out the problems with Rust, the whiney brats went "DO IT > > KM> NOW!" and the question of ready or not went out the window. > > Not knowing who the 'whiney brats' are I'd guess they're powerful > > enough to be able to chop heads but as with a lot of leaders don't know > > diddly-squat about how the stuff they're overseeing actually works. IMO > KM> Oh, it's not ignorance.... I'm starting to think it's malice > KM> aforethought. > > It almost would seem so: someone (could be a group -- probably is) > forcing through the usage of Rust. Rust itself might not be the problem > but rather the conversion to Rust. (Gee,this almost sounds like X11 and > Wayland!) Exactly. But Wayland was a lot more developed than Rust, and had been test-deployed by major distros for several years already, and doesn't have the licensing issue (see below), and even so there were still disruptions. The woke loons (which is to say, useful idiots) had hung their star on Rust, and here the non-woke happened to be the ones saying, wait a minute, shouldn't you test this more first?? and the woke loons went YOU CAN'T MAKE ME, and forced the jump. And the more-cynical noted that the licenses are being changed along with the switch from C/C++ to Rust -- from GPL to BSD. Why is that significant? Because the GPL license forces you to share your source code with the world, and the BSD license does not. Which means that should some corporate entity, say, Canonical, wish to hive off source and prevent downstream distros from using it, they can now do so, and NONE of the downstream distros have the paid full-time programmers who could cope with recreating what they no longer get handed to them, so they either switch their base distro to something like Slackware or Arch (and accept being that niche), or they are SOL. What did I say about a commercial motive? And if you're one of the non-woke who happen to disagree with what's being done, YOU'RE ALL NAZIS and yes a bunch of the above woke loons have trumpeted that in exactly those terms. :: Nazi has become the generic shorthand for "I hate anyone who disagrees with me, and hope they all die in a fire." Fine, no one cares anymore, you overused "racist" until it's a joke. But the bigger problem is that different woke loons take it literally as a cue that "These are the people it's desirable to kill" and that got us the assassination of Charlie Kirk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00EPajdGrdY [As a KDE user, I now wear a bag over my head.] So it's no longer just a disagreement over how software should be handled. The more localized question becomes whether this nonsense burns itself out before the whole FOSS world implodes, or is narrowed down to those distros that are really viable if they don't have Ubuntu upstream. > How the incomplete product got released seems to be the big > question, but we have seen this sort of instance all over, not just > software. Middle management tells upper management "it'll work and make > us money!". Upper management looks at the one prototype -- "looks > good!". There is that, too. > > good to try something new but then also needs to be tested and found to > > work. > > KM> It gets worse. > > KM> https://lunduke.substack.com/p/debian-adding-hard-dependency-on > > KM> As I comment under the vid: > KM> === > KM> Watch what Canonical does next, and see if your thoughts go where > KM> mine did: > > KM> My cynical little voice wonders if the real "unintended > KM> consequence" is to (for all practical purposes) kill off all the > KM> projects downstream from both Ubuntu .... Ubuntu being the only > KM> distro that has both jumped on this bandwagon *and* has the > KM> resources to work past the problems Rust will cause.... and is > KM> for all practical purposes Commercial Debian. === > > I could see both possibilities. I'm leaning more towards the 'resources > to fix' option as it seems there are a lot of Ubuntu users out there. Users are irrelevant, here. Only matters whether the parent company has the paid programmers to deal with it. And whether it can be sold to enterprise customers. Which is going to be the real sticking point. > Would not be good to annoy a ton of users, but if they could somehow > restrict the annoyance. The 'restict' means something like run Here is what you're missing: ordinary users are not anyone's customers, and no one in the business of selling or supporting major software wants more home users. The real customers are enterprise business, who pay millions for support contracts. Ordinary users are a support cost, not a revenue stream. THIS is why IBM bought Red Hat -- because Red Hat was the 800 pound gorilla in the realm of server support contracts. And recognizing that home users are an expense, and not profitable, Red Hat had already spun off Fedora to get rid of the cost of supporting home users (and incidentally most of the cost of beta-testing their product). Red Hat had shown that they understand where the money is, and is not. And Ubuntu has not been "free linux CDs for everyone" in a long time... not since Ubuntu Server became a viable product that has enough business users to be attractive for enterprise support contracts. > everything under the old/it works way and slowly move (and so test) a > utility. Let's say test Pithos (plays Pandora, the music stream). If > Pithos doesn't work it's going to be quiet here but I can easily get > around the error (access via a browser). The Rust people would know > (how, I don't know -- quite sure there are ways to monitor without > grabbing too much personal data) it didn't work. The big distros and desktops have had automatic error reporting for a long time. And the commercial entities don't care if Joe Blow's PC won't boot. They care if Amazon pays their monthly bill for that big support contract. > Whis is sort of the basis of my Pithos example: start small and > restricted, and probably would be a good idea to start at the beginning, > or at least what is thought to be the beginning -- will find out! If > this test is made to work, great, and go on to the next. If not, well, > only one thing went down and reverse it to get it working and try to > figure out what went wrong. That's how it ought to be done, but when it's become a crusade, all that goes out the window. > > Going to give a tangent. One of the TVs here is a Vizio (brand). > Approximately October 30 we couldn't receive local stations: just > 'spinning' (process loader spinner icon). All the other inputs worked > fine. Ended up watching local TV though the MythTV input. (This is > starting to sound like my Pithos example!) Movies and other Internet > accesses worked fine. > > October 31 still down, or at least first thing in the morning as didn't > watch live TV the evening because of Halloween. November 1st all working > properly again. > > So apparently they did an update, it didn't go quite as expected, maybe > tried a few other options, of which one worked or they rolled back to > what did. This happens now and then.... about a year ago Apple had to roll back a major system update, because it was nuking phones. > I'm thinking the Rust project could do something similar for live > testing. They COULD, but they WON'T. Because this isn't about the quality of the software. > > .. Do electricians listen to AC-DC or something more current? ZAP ZZAPP!! þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com (454:1/1) .