There are already libraries like clap that allow the developer to specify all their arguments including short and long variants and description strings. I think some of them will automatically generate --help based on the specified options. I could imagine a library that takes the same specifications and makes an interactive menu or a tui form out of them. It’s an interesting idea.

I haven’t seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don’t use it as intended. I think they’re mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach’s performance issues, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.

Both, I think.

It’s built in top of Mach, which has some architectural issues that aren’t fixable without a huge amount of work.

And no one’s interested in doing that work because we already have Linux and Linux is fine.

There have been a couple of pretty good post mortems over the years. I think one of them is on gnu.org somewhere.

Ive been using it for several years. I hardly think about it at all, which is pretty high praise.

There’s a built in snippet system too, called skeletons, but most people seem to prefer the yasnippet interface.

I would like Debian and the fsf to come to some kind of agreement so Debian can ship the emacs documentation.

There are companies working on providing that experience for Linux. System76 is one. You can buy a laptop with their is pre installed. Everything works, including suspend. If something breaks, you call the support number or email and they either talk you through fixing it or sending it in for repair or replacement. It’s not that different from having a Dell or HP.

Some GPL projects do it. If you find someone infringing, it’s easier to sue them if you have one copywrite holder instead of 100.

Soon we’ll be able to emacs the way the developers intended.

I thought that, but I had identical results using the stock install media and the modified nonguix one from systemcrafters.

The weird thing was that the initial install went fine, even after the first reboot. The problem was the next boot after my first system reconfigure.

Not only could I not boot my system after that, but I couldn’t boot the install media either. The only thing that would work was the installer for the most recent pop os.

I tried and failed to install it on my laptop last year. Couldn’t figure out the problem and went back to pop. I’m messing around with it in a vm, though, and liking it a lot. I may try again when I have some more time to troubleshoot.

What about Redox?

This is why I have a windows box. I’m hoping when they finally release SteamOS 3 for PC it will have stable SteamVR support.

Drm on Steam is optional. It’s up to the dev whether to include any or not.

However, if the game uses any steam features, like achievements, voice chat, leaderboards, etc., then those won’t work without steam.

If you’re looking to try something a little different, I recommend Guix.

It’s based around a nyx-style package manager written in scheme, which is also called guix. There’s an EDSL for writing package definitions. One interesting result about this is that the package manager has a REPL and a dedicated emacs mode

Instead of systemd, the PID1 process is called GNU Shepherd, and is also written in scheme.

Guix also has a strong emphasis on bootstrapping. You can build almost the entire system from source, relying on only a few binaries to start with.

It may be a sort of shy Tory effect. People don’t volunteer that they run Gnome because it’s seen as the default mainstream option, but if someone uses xmonad, they’re going to tell you about it.

I hate FPS games. They’re probably my least favorite genre. I really enjoyed HL2.

Although, I was playing through the series to get ready for Alyx, so that may have colored my perception.