2026-05-14 06:15:39 The way I see it, VNC is a simpler protocol, thus allowing for simpler implementations. And less code tends to mean less bugs as well. As an aside, sharing an X server between clients you trust entirely (such as local ones) and the ones you trust less (such as those from a system not under your control; like "$ ssh -X sdf.org ") has security implications. 2026-05-14 08:45:12 What are the security implications? That's actually news to me although I don't go around connecting to foreign X servers 2026-05-14 08:48:46 A rogue X client can obtain a copy of the image on any 'mapped' window (including 'root window'), for one thing; just like xwd(1). Same with access to 'clipboard' / 'primary selection.' 2026-05-14 08:50:49 Stealing keypresses / mouse events is also possible, though I believe it's somewhat trickier to do in such a way so it won't be noticed. XTerm does offer the 'secure keyboard' command for that reason, for example. 2026-05-14 08:53:40 Interesting 2026-05-14 09:33:20 So Windows replaced the old control panel sound settings with a new settings interface finally 2026-05-14 09:33:36 Balance is gone, instead you adjust the balance by changing individual volume settings for left and right 2026-05-14 09:34:14 But of course they don't remember the ratio you set, so if you e.g. set the mixed volume all the way to zero then it is back to 50-50 balance 2026-05-14 09:34:44 Awesome, took them I swear like a decade to finally implement audio in settings, and they've broken stuff that worked fine in the 90's 2026-05-14 09:36:27 Solution: every MS employee needs a pair of broken headphones where left is slightly louder than right, should be fixed in a week 2026-05-14 09:37:17 I mostly control my balance with that good old TDA1524A chip. 2026-05-14 10:05:19 I suspect that is superior to what MS has done here 2026-05-14 10:12:31 Speaking of breakage; as of few versions ago, Debian broke the X server. For one thing, it logs the absence of Dbus connection about every 10 seconds or so. Also, installing it pulls in bits of stuff required to interface GPUs, as well as Mesa. 2026-05-14 10:12:32 And /not/ through --install-recommends - which I could understand - it's hundreds of MiBs of executable code that's all hard Depends:. As if an X server without working XGL were entirely broken. 2026-05-14 10:15:15 Both wtmp and utmp, that is. Haven't checked if talkd still works - it was quite tied to utmp, IIRC. 2026-05-14 10:19:11 I wonder how things will change after all this X drama recently, with that active contributor who left to create a fork, and then after they removed all his commits 2026-05-14 10:19:37 I think the accusation is X is being maintained by people who favour Wayland, so is languishing 2026-05-14 10:20:00 But the guy who has made a fork seems like he might be full of it, so I'll have to just wait and see which X looks more broken 2026-05-14 10:25:51 X.org seems a lost cause to me, TBH. For a long while, there simply weren't all that many people interested in X proper. X.org was used in some proprietary distributions, so there were people paid to maintain it to the extent needed to fulfill existing support contracts. Then there was the "desktop" crowd, who, until recently, needed X for theier Gnome / KDE to work atop of. 2026-05-14 10:25:51 Hardly anyone maintained X for what's important about it: portability and network transparency. The way I see it, the NetBSD X maintainer and the guy who initiated the fork were about the only two interested parties in this. 2026-05-14 10:30:27 Not unlike how there's Thomas E. Dickey - with a long-time interest in DEC VT-series terminals. When it comes to writing terminal emulators, he's /the/ expert. Pretty much anything written by anyone else is "good enough" at best, in the sense that it implements, say, 30% of DEC VT escapes that are used in 99.99% of cases. If you need anything from the remaining 70%, you use XTerm. 2026-05-14 10:35:34 What I've heard is the forker just broke a lot of stuff, so I guess I'll see how true that is in a year or two because we can just see which is more stable 2026-05-14 10:36:38 And a lot of people calling him a 'Nazi' but whether that's true or not, I see 99% of people crying wolf when they say this, so I've not even bothered looking into that allegation 2026-05-14 10:37:37 It's not just X, apparently Linux is in that same position, the number of maintainers who understand it well and have time/money to work on it is thinning out in a lot of key parts of the kernel 2026-05-14 10:37:39 M-m. That reminds me of one good SCP. 2026-05-14 10:38:08 That's partly why they're looking at using Rust, according to Linus anyway, that it might attract some young blood 2026-05-14 10:39:50 As the barrier of entry becomes higher, the number of newbie developers decreases. And as to 'breaking stuff,' well, this year I've discovered that GNU Screen v5 is quite a step back, stability-wise, from GNU Screen v4. 2026-05-14 10:40:19 That's not surprising because GNU Screen I think lost all interest to tmux which has had loads of flashy updates 2026-05-14 10:40:30 Even though I've found Screen more generally useful and reliable 2026-05-14 10:40:49 So I'm not surprised someone with tmux envy has come along and ruined it, probably 2026-05-14 10:41:30 Although I've been using tmux instead for years, because despite the clunkier interface I have found it has a number of useful features I rely on 2026-05-14 10:41:42 I only use Screen for some serial/tty stuff now 2026-05-14 10:44:14 When I saw that list of recent security flaws in the Rust coreutils rewrite, I thought it looked pretty rookie-ish. I've actually been learning Rust over the last week and now it looks even more rookie-ish to me. 2026-05-14 10:44:19 https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/ 2026-05-14 10:45:07 Also I enjoyed seeing immediate confirmation of my suspicion that they would run into all the same issues Python 3 has with pointless unicode exceptions when I saw how UTF-8 strings worked in Rust 2026-05-14 10:47:18 But it's encouraging too. If I want to get into Rust, or into Rust security research, then it seems the barrier to entry isn't that high. 2026-05-14 11:50:43 Ancient tech proverb, the best monitors are the hardest to carry 2026-05-14 16:25:54 Screen has a couple of features that I find rather important, which aren't in tmux: logging that can be toggled ("log"), and utmp records that, too, can be toggled ("login".) Sure, I can use script(1) for logging, say, my shell sessions, but then I cannot turn it off when I start Vim there. (And tty transcripts of visual editors aren't particularly informative.) 2026-05-14 16:25:54 Neither can I rotate logs of my longer sessions. Then, the busier of my Screen sessions tend to have dozens of windows. Unless I be mistaken, tmux records /all/ windows in utmp - so when I "$ w ", I get a screenful. With Screen, I often reserve one or two windows for talk / write / wall - the rest are never in utmp (i. e., "deflogin off".)