> Because initramfs is just a (mostly) normal Linux system, that means it has its own init PID 1. On Arch, that PID is in fact just systemd.

Debian has (or had; at least my Devuan still has) a simple shell script as first init. Was an interesting read and helped me understand were to add my remote rootfs decryption.

https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/initramfs-tools/-/blob/...

`mkinitcpio` supports both.

The `base` hook installs the shell PID 1, the `systemd` hook installs systemd as PID1. The default hook setup was changed with the latest'ish release to default too the `systemd` hook setup.

Shell `init`; https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/mkinitcpio/mkinitcpio...

I wouldn't even expect it on newly created stuff without the -p flag. Normal cp doesn't do it.

> 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others.

> I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.

Reason why I still always get the Java 8 docs for any search. Annoying.

I think the real reason for that is simply that a lot of people are still running Java 8 (so those docs still see a lot of traffic). I remember reading that it's still used by something like 25% of Java developers.

Process substitution and calling it file redirect is a bit misleading because it is implemented with named pipes which becomes relevant when the command tries to seek in them which then fails.

Also the reason why Zsh has an additional =(command) construct which uses temporary files instead.

> Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

Reading the first sentence on that page was to much?

"Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice."

systemd fails on the portability criteria.

Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.

> Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. [...] The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.

Well, I remember one incident were a 'professional' data center burned down including the backups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVHcloud#Incidents

I know no such incident for some basement hosting.

Doesn't mean much. I'm just a bit surprised so many people are worried because of the server location and no one had mentioned yet the quite outstanding OVH incident.

I'm not going to pretend datacenters are magical places immune to damage. I worked at a company where the 630 Third Street datacenter couldn't keep temperatures stable during a San Francisco heatwave and the Okex crypto exchange has experienced downtime because the Alibaba Zone C datacenter their matching engine is on experienced A/C failure. So it's not all magic, but if you didn't encounter home-lab failure it's because you did not sample the population appropriately.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/wvqxs7/my_homelab_...

I don't have a bone to pick here. If F-Droid wants to free-ball it I think that's fine. You can usually run things for max cheap by just sticking them on a residential Google Fiber line in one of the cheap power states and then just making sure your software can quickly be deployed elsewhere in times of outage. It's not a huge deal unless you need always-on.

But the arguments being made here are not correct.

Surely "Juan's home server in basement burns down" would make the headlines. You're totally right.

I was curious if they optimized the download. Did it download the 'optimized' ~150 GB and wasting a lot of time there or did it download the ~20 GB unique data and duplicated as part of the installation.

I still don't know but found instead an interesting reddit post were users found and analyzed this "waste of space" three month ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1mw3qcx/why_the...

PS: just found it. According to this Steam discussion it does not download the duplicate data and back then it only blew up to ~70 GB.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/discussions/0/43725019...

Steam breaks your content into 1MB Chunks and compresses/dedupes them [0]

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading#AppStructur...

They downloaded 43 GB instead of 152 GB, according to SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/ Now it is 20 GB => 21 GB.

At least Prosody implements BOSH (xmpp over http) and communication over Websocket.

https://prosody.im/doc/setting_up_bosh

https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_websocket

But I never tried it myself and from a quick search the popular non-browser XMPP apps/clients don't seem to use it.

I actually enabled BOSH on my Prosody setup.

For reference: https://www.someodd.zip/phlog-mirror/xmpp-server.gopher

BOSH still has some interesting trade-offs even today. It can help with some NAT headaches and rides over plain HTTPS. I like this old post:

https://metajack.im/2008/07/02/xmpp-is-better-with-bosh/

Curious who here uses BOSH in production and/or WebSocket (RFC 7395) these days.

Not for 13ish years but we built the chat feature in a social networking platform with BOSH. Looked just like FB Messenger, really. The thing never took off, so I don't remember any talks about outside federation, I think it was not on by default.

with chat control on the horizon, they should probably consider implementing it

It is apparently also hard to maintain over time. I heavily customized my Firefox and Thunderbird and it is annoying how often GUI components which should be equal (e.g. toolbar buttons in different places) look the same* but have multiple different CSS rules.

Some widgets, or rather the repeated reinventions of widgets in HTML+CSS, use variables and the next equally looking widget has none, or other variables with the same values.

From an outsider perspective it looks like a mess.

* or almost the same with minimal, likely unintended, differences like one button has a slight border when hovered but another button right next to it has none

> I understand that search bar position is not changeable by theming,

It is changeable. With enough dedication you can go a long way just with CSS.

In this case it is even rather easy because the "unified toolbar" the thing containing the search box, the menu bar (if shown) and the tab bar are three elements in the same flex box. They can be reordered by setting the order property.

Only downside in this case is that (if client side decoration is not disabled in the settings) the window buttons (close, minimize) are also part of the unified toolbar and would end (without further fixes) below the tab bar.

As a quick (and dirty) experiment I moved the tab bar left to the search bar in the same row just with:

  #titlebar {
    flex-direction: row;
    > unified-toolbar { order: 2; width: 50vw; }
    #tabs-toolbar { order: 1; width: 50vw; }
  }

And a hacky way which often works good enough is to reposition and hardcode stuff with position:absolute/fixed/sticky.

Finally Thunderbird's own customization dialog can be used to fill the empty space around the search bar. By default it has a spacer left and right but that is easy to change even without custom CSS.