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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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More info from the other chap involved in the port: https://www.ilande.co.uk/2026/04/06/porting-3dmm-to-linux-pa... https://www.ilande.co.uk/2026/0…
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> When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe. I'd use any of them in preference to Vim. But you might find you like Tilde. https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/…
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I feel the same way. When I started at Red Hat in 2014, they asked if I liked Vim or Emacs, and what was my favourite IRC client. They were boggled when the answers were "neither" and "…
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> My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it. I played with a 30something friend's brand new ReMarkable a few years ago. I was torn between tears and rage. It is so miserable a…
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[[citation needed]] I tried it last year, was impressed, and have now moved all my Windows partitions to it. I don't use it much (mainly Mac and Linux here) but it does all I need and more. I hav…
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> Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. I agree. But it's all relat…
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I was an Archimedes owner and user so I didn't get to use an ST until the 1990s and an Amiga until the 2000s. > Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. :-o > I am tempted to point an LLM…
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> Firefox is probably doing it wrong Up to a point -- although Mozilla added vertical tabs about a year ago, it's pretty clear nobody uses them, same as nobody left at Microsoft is competent e…
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I believe you. I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car b…
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> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translatio…
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> Ah, the SAM Coupé, it was such a bad luck coming at the end of 8 bit home computers. You're right. I feel it should have had a much faster Z80 as stock, but it was probably too expensive at …
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Twas ever thus. There was the proposed eTLA namespace extension... https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html …
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> GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. Yes, it does. So much so that Apple noticed and sued. I gave some links in: https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
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I offer a modern distro of a DOS. :-) So yes. https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
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> ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? Yes it is. I still read the comic, but it is very strange and unpleasant, really actively nasty, now: currently it's in an arc of why …
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You really do. It is pretty much a work of art. I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse. 2022: https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21&#x…
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Nope, I am with @sharts here. In my then job we called Win98 "GameOS" and I have zero nostalgia for it and the horrid IE4 "Active Desktop". Yuck. By XP the rot and bloat were getti…
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But it causes cognitive overhead: you need to think about which bits of the title-cum-button bar are safe to grab, as opposed to which overloaded and do other things, which are possibly useful. I use …
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Released November 8 2006, so not yet 20Y old... quite...
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> a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? On the desktop? No. In human-computer interaction? The multitouch UI using a capacitative touchcreen, as used in the iPhone (2007, so 19 …
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Yup. Nemanja Trifunovic's recent history is pretty good, I thought. https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-... …
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> I don't know what happened to GEM. Choosing to interpret you literally: Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected. https://www.nytimes.com/…
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Relevant: "Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes" (May 4, 2026) https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe... …
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> I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that. Same here. Windows 2 and Mac System 6 at work, RISC OS 2 at home -- faster, more responsive, more capable and flexible, and much better…
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Thanks! Is it me or do 3/4 of the pages not load any images? The title took me a moment to work out. I suppose it was written by someone who speaks in an accent where "OS-some" sounds l…
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> If you still want to work on it, add sample code. Oh my word. I haven't played with it in some years. That doesn't make it impossible, just harder... And ideally, non-trivial examples..…
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Thanks! And to @einsteinx2 and @rp8yxmdmr too.
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The article uses the term "CCAs" without ever defining it. I followed the links, and googled it, with no useful result. What is a CCA in this context?
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Is the pervasive advertising not bad enough already that you want to waste time and energy inventing fake advertising using plagiarism bots? I can't offhand thing of a worse idea in the context…
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Screenshots -- or GIFs -- of Plan 9 compared with Inferno would be most instructive. The Plan 9 folks I've talked to are a bit shocked by this, but I preferred Inferno's GUI to plain old Rio…