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lproven
8,777karma·4,928submissions·December 30, 2013
about
Tall dark black-clad atheist skeptic biker SF fan; writes, mainly about computers, for a living.
# Work
Currently the FOSS & cloud correspondent for the Register.
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
Work email: lproven+hn@sitpub.com
# Personal
Comments here (or anywhere else, unless otherwise stated) are personal opinion and not on behalf of any employer.
Based in Douglas, Isle of Man.
Quick info:
https://about.me/liamproven/
Personal blog:
http://lproven.dreamwidth.org/profile
Tech blog:
http://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/profile/
Socials:
https://social.vivaldi.net/@lproven
https://bsky.app/profile/lproven.bsky.social
https://x.com/lproven
https://meet.hn/city/im-Douglas
recent activity (4,928 total)
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> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and …
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> who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good I dunno man. I came from a ZX Spectrum (via several other machines, it's true) and compared to that, the ST keyboard was great .
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I wonder why GEM is back on bloggers' radar again? Last September, Nemanja Trifunovic did a good in-depth history, here: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-t…
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> What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline? Easy. Don't. That's the great bit. You don't have to. https://useplaintext.email/ …
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> Postponed my ios update as much as I could. That's what I did with iOS 6 on my iPhone 4. I never did upgrade -- it was stolen before I was forced to. Now it sounds like iOS 26 is going the s…
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The underlying project page is extremely long: https://eaw.app/picoz80/ It refers to other projects by the same author (?) without explaining them, such as "tranZPUter"…
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I wrote about this recently too: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/13/zram_vs_zswap/ I prefer zswap to zram and as I linked at the end of the piece, it's no…
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OK. Good to know. Thanks! What are we supposed to do, and what is supposed to happen?
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That's all I see too: an ugly rendered cassette thing I can spin. It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.
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Quite interesting. This is also why every video needs a transcript: that took me 6min to read, about 1/4 of the video's running time.
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I wonder if Nexi having LLM bots both originating and receiving emails might be the root cause of the FSFE problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451429 I do not know! Just s…
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Very interesting -- thanks for that!
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It might well be, yes -- it's a long time now, I have read all his published novels except maybe in the last couple of years, and I am not sure which one is which.
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It adds a parameter to the kernel boot line. That is not adding a repository. It is not doing what you claim it does. I am not putting any pressure on you. If you don't want to use it, then don&#…
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This is fantastic, but there's no way I am taking the time to build one, and the cost is a little frightening...
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> And who didn't do that! :) Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks. A taught a friend at uni, wh…
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Thanks very much indeed! There is a level where the criticisms of the neuroscientists are both entirely legitimate and at the same time probably not really valid. Again, to go to an SF reference, th…
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Okay, fair enough!
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You have misunderstood what these reports are saying. You claimed "Ventoy adds repos". It does not. It is incapable of doing anything of the kind. It does not run on the installed system. It…
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While I entirely take your point and am not arguing with it, sadly, running Docker commands is now the only way that many relatively new Linux folks now how to assemble and deploy systems. Which is wh…
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Previously: systemd 260-rc3 Released With AI Agents Documentation Added https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371568 Systemd 260-Rc1 Released: System V Service Scripts No Longer Supp…
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> If you do get it to work it silently adds extra broken repos which make it impossible to install packages. This is not true. I use it extensively and have done for more than 4 years now. It adds …
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> I do not think there is anything novel here. Absolutely wrong. Tumbleweed is a conventional distro. You're root, you can do whatever you want, you have full R/W access to the entire FS,…
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> Most of these distros (except btrfs-based) simply use the A/B root system. No, not "most". ChromeOS does it (and does not use Btrfs). Valve SteamOS 3 does it, and it needed to spec…
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Why? It looks exactly like any other KDE-based distro.
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Yes it is, but that's for servers. This is a desktop OS.
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> Would the A/B filesystem approach à la Android be a good way to distribute Linux with ZFS-on-root without all the angst from DKMS modules versioning? This is exactly what Valve's Steam …
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I wrote this up for the Register, and while I am not a neuroscientist, I tried to explain this is just a combination of chunks of existing work... https://www.theregister.com/2026/…
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FWIW I wrote about this last month on El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/river_wayland_with_wm... …