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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s quite a titanic enough endeavour to put slow in quotes. It’s been in development for 16 years and only got a stable support for screenshots a few months ago. Does drag and drop work yet?

    IMO at this point it is reasonable to say that the idea of having a shared protocol and then making every desktop environment implement the entire display server was not a good one. The Linux community does not have enough manpower to make that work well.




  • Two things:

    1. Desktop requires mature CPUs (large out-of-order designs with high IPC) and there just aren’t really any of those yet. They’re starting to arrive (e.g. XiangShan which is even open source!) but as far as I know there isn’t a single chip available to buy that’s faster than a Raspberry Pi 4.

    2. Microcontrollers can get away with only the basic instruction set (add, multiply, load, store etc.) but for high performance you need a ton of extensions that are considered standard. x86 and ARM have had decades to build them up but in RISC-V a lot of them are only recently ratified (e.g. Vector) or still in the process of being defined.

    I would say we might see cheap Android phones with RISC-V CPUs in maybe 5 years. Though there’s an additional difficulty there in that you need to emulate ARM for games, and I don’t think anyone is working on that.












  • Yeah there’s more stuff that runs in the shell. But pretty much all the things you mentioned would work on a VT100 from the 70s. This is about modernising the terminal itself.

    Hell, Linux terminal emulators don’t even have a “clear screen & scroll-back” keyboard shortcut like Command-K on Mac. There’s no command output history, there are no auto-complete popups, editing commands is still extremely basic (no multiline input for example). The command prompt doesn’t even have the text editing capabilities of Notepad.