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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Have you ever worked with a computer with modern general-purpose OS like Linux and no RTC? It sucks. It is not strictly necessary, you can live without it, but you need workarounds for basic stuff timestamps in log files or in the file system. At least for a minute until NTP connection is established, but may be longer when internet connection is not available. And when routers are rebooted most often? When troubleshooting broken internet connection. This is also the time when properly timestamped logs could be useful.

    And battery backed RTC is cheap. It doesn’t fit on a Raspberry Pi board, but can easily fit into a router case. No excuse for omitting it.







  • What is more interesting, Google came as a more friendly alternative, with drastically less ads than Alta Vista and other search engines of that time had. Today’s Google is only just approaching now the amount of ads on the search results page that those had. It is just a bit smarter about mixing ads with actual search results and the ads are more targeted (which is not necessarily a good thing).


  • Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

    I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.


  • Differences between 2.4 and 2.6 were quite big, I don’t think there was another such big change in kernel releases any time later. But that was also the time when Linux was transitioning from being a hobby project (already useful for serious stuff) to being a serious professional operating system – the last moment for major refactoring.

    Linux kernel is still changing and being constantly refactored, but now the changes tend to be more gradual and version numbers matter much less.






  • Every major distro uses systemd, because before that it was nearly impossible to properly implement things that distros have to provide.
    Most startup scripts were incredible set of hacks to make services behave. Those were very inefficient (they could not be efficient being shell scripts calling other commands for various simple repetitive tasks) and would often break when circumstances were different from ideal.

    Systemd just makes building Linux distribution much easier, and the resulting system is more reliable, more consistent and more flexible. Why would distro developers chose anything else?