I think a lot of that can be chalked up to the fact that the minds behind CMake are pretty consistently top-notch--most of the Kitware folks have at least one post-grad CS degree and have not insignificant levels of experience approaching design problems from a more abstract/academic POV than your average dev team. I think over the years it's kept them from making the truly awful implementation blunders that send projects scrambling for another alternative just to 'never have to do THAT again.' Hence, CMake has had the time to seep into the way projects organize themselves in ways the "flavor of the month" build systems (qmake, scons, et al.) couldn't.
What I'd like to know is where this supposedly excellent documentation for Meson is that the author refers to. The times that I've needed to use Meson have been uniformly unpleasant precisely because I found the official docs to have a ton of holes and also assumed an unrealistic level of familiarity with their underlying logic. Give me the CMake docs anyday; at least I can be relatively sure the answer's in there instead of hiding in a GitHub issue regarding some design flaw that'll be solved in the next release.
I'm not sure that the criticisms for the article and parent comment are quite so easy to dismiss wholesale, but I do concur that many of them are actually criticisms of the GNOME DE and not so much Linux itself. In my experience as a daily Linux user it was somewhere between 2-3 years ago that KDE Plasma surpassed GNOME as the most productive desktop environment for Linux, and the distance between the two only appears to widening still. I would love to see what impact the simple choice to swap plain Ubuntu for Kubuntu would have had on their conclusions.
Yeah, I was going to recommend Keybase as well, despite still being extremely butt-hurt over the sale to Zoom and subsequent abandonment of continued development on it. While it has some limitations, it's hard to beat their combination of uptime, price, a built-in Markdown parser so you don't even have to muck around with Jekyll/Hugo/Pelican et al., as well as mobile apps that expose the files and directory structure for editing on the go. You can even map it to your own external domain.
This was an enjoyable read for me, well-written and reflective and more importantly: critical without being overtly cynical.
There's one thing that's always been kicking around in the back of my mind since I started getting involved in various open-source projects the last couple years that was missing, though: Despite all the unpleasant parts of our participation, we're actually very fortunate to have that inner drive to roll up our sleeves.
There have been so many millions of humans that have tried to answer the call of their era's needs and leave things better than they found them, almost always with scant chances of success and even smaller chances that any of their labors will be faithfully documented and offer them some form of a legacy. While I know VCS often creates its own headaches, it is always silently creating that faithful record of our labors. Sure, there's a good chance that those that come after us will never have any cause to stumble across that one section of the commit log where your ingenuity quietly dominated a problem that people had tried to solve for years, but even so, it exists. I figure between that small perk and the fact that we can listen to whatever music we like or throw up a comforting old TV show from childhood on the second monitor while we do our thing, we have it pretty good even at the worst moments along the way.
LLC is definitely the most flexible business structure currently available, but it comes with a high price tag in California (>$1k once you've paid the attorney, and that's every year). Depends on how good your margins are and what kinds of things you'll be having your employees do, but if liability exposure isn't a big concern, hang onto DBA status as long as possible.
California is an amazing place to live, but a lousy place to be in business. If you're not tied to your current location, the best advice you'll get is to get setup in Nevada ASAP. Your balance sheet, stress levels and sinuses will all thank you often and profusely if you do.
I find myself stuck on a single data point from this article, the one that reports 16 people lost their lives due to the release of just 248 incarcerated kids. Now my rational mind is able to grasp that this is only 6.5% of the group they were tracking, but I can't help but feel like we owe those 16 people a greater standard of care than to release these deeply disturbed individuals. The recidivism rate for that same group was 97%...so a virtual certainty. They don't break that down into violent crimes vs property crimes, but seat of the pants wisdom suggests that even if it is property crime initially, that it is similarly likely to progress to more sinister deeds later on. If that's not enough to justify a life sentence in perhaps a minimum security facility, I don't know what is.
