In the same kind of vein as imagemagick, Dave Coffin's dcraw tool at least partly underlies almost every non-proprietary RAW image decoder, and some of the commercial ones (if they don't use code, they use constant matrices and such).

He's not a sole maintainer to any of his major projects anymore, but honorable mention to Fabrice Bellard who initiated both ffmpeg and qemu among other notable activities.

IIRC the Expat XML parser that's embedded everywhere was basically on spare-time maintenance by Clark Cooper and Fred Drake for a couple decades, but I think they have a little more resources now.

SQLite is a BDFL situation more than single-maintainer, but D. Richard Hipp still has his hands on everything, and there are only a relatively small number of folks with commit access.

It's not just the technical interest community on the lemmy instance, SDF as an entity has gravitas that I appreciate.

It's backed by a 30 year old 501(c)(7) nonprofit established from an even older entity, instead of "someone who spun a VM the other week."

They've handled the abuse of hosting public-facing UNIX systems for decades, so this isn't a crew who will freak out when they get a look at the Internet's gaping hate hole.

This is a community with roots in the BBS era, and the Usenet era, and which maintain their connection to the culture of the ARPANET era via the historical systems (Ya'll played with the TOPS-20 box?). These are people who know that, as platforms go, 'All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.' and that's the perspective I deeply desire in my platforms these days.

I will preface that Xorg is obviously an unmaintainable mess of legacy decisions and legacy code, and I have both a machine that runs Hyprland and a machine that usually starts Plasma in Wayland mode so the Wayland situation getting to be more-or-less adequate with persistent irritations here and there... but Wayland is trauma-driven-development. It's former xorg developers minimizing their level of responsibility for actual platform code, but controlling the protocol spec, and in the position to give up on X in time with their preferred successor.

Essentially all of the platform is being outsourced to other libraries and toolkits, who are all doing their own incompatible things (Which is why we have like 8 xdg-desktop-portal back-ends with different sets of deficiencies, because portals were probably designed at the wrong level of abstraction), and all have to figure out how to work around the limitations in the protocols. Or they can spend years bikeshedding about extensions over theoretical security concerns in features that every other remotely modern platform supports.

Some of that outsourcing has been extremely successful, like Pipewire.

Some attempts have been less successful, like the ongoing lack of a reasonable way to handle input plumbing in a Wayland environment (think auto-type and network kvm functionality) because they seem to have imagined their libinput prototype spun out of Weston would serve as complete generic input plumbing, and it's barely adequate for common hardware devices - hopefully it's not too late to get something adequate widely standardized upon, but I'm increasingly afraid we missed the window of opportunity.

Some things that had to be standardized to actually work - like session management - have been intentionally abdicated, and now KDE and Gnome have each become married to their own mutually-incompatible half solution, so we're probably boned on that ever working properly until the next "start over to escape our old bad decisions" cycle.... which, if history holds, isn't that far away.

We're 15 years in to Wayland, and only in the last few years has it made it from "barely a tech demo" through "Linux in the early 2000s" broken, and in the last year to "problems with specific features" broken ... and it is only 4 years younger than the xf86->xorg fork.

I initially didn't do enough of that in my PhD thesis (CS, about some weird non-frame-based imaging tech that is still only of academic interest), and my committee demanded I add more stake-claiming favorable comparisons to other tech to my introduction before I submitted.

Have you seen that Jason Scott recently received and started digitizing 200 issues of Computer Shopper? The February 1986 issue is already uploaded as a pilot test, and it's pure nostalgia fuel to flip through. You lose a little bit of the experience not having to wrangle a ridiculously large piece of low grade paper, but it's still delightful.

He doesn't currently have a complete set, if anyone has a cache they might be willing to contribute to the effort, check the bottom of the post for missing issues.

Yup.

I have a little Dell 3189 2-in-1 that I originally got used just to see what the ChromeOS fuss was about and hack on.

I'd rooted it, and played with the various hosted/injected Linux options (like chromebrew and the 1st party Linux VM stuff, neither of which was great) while it was under support, but some time after it went AUE I went ahead and flashed a Mr. Chromebox UEFI payload onto it and just slammed normal Linux onto it. It basically "Just Works" though that's thanks to considerable efforts in the Coreboot port and Kernel because there is a bunch of cheap bullshit (badly plumbed i2c input devices, that stupid bay/cherry trail style half integrated audio setup, etc.) in the hardware. I had briefly flashed it over a couple years ago and that hadn't all been smoothed over yet back then.

Lately its an Arch system playing with various Wayland options - Hyprland is ricer bullshit, but it actually does a pretty decent job at being not wildly broken compared to the big environments in Wayland mode, tiling makes good use of the not enough pixels, and the search key in the left pinkie position makes a great WM key.

It's not a nice computer, an N3060 with 4GB of RAM 32GB of emmc and a 1366x768 panel is distinctly in craptop territory these days, but you can also get them for like $50 now because no one wants past AUE Chromebooks, and they make nice beaters - and unlike refurb SFF boxes, SBCs, and similar usual sub-$100 beater options, they come with a screen and keyboard and battery.

NeXTStep became MacOS (OS X and later) and related systems. It does contain quite a number of BSD pieces that are now periodically pulled from FreeBSD.

The story is fun and I like telling it, strap in:

NeXTStep was basically the MACH microkernel hybridized with BSD (actual Berkley BSD before the court cases and diaspora that lead to Net/Free/Open BSD and Solaris and such) parts to make a reasonably performant modern design Unix-like, with a fancy PostScript based display layer on top, lead by Steve Jobs after he was ejected from Apple, a bunch of folks he effectively took with him, and Avie Tevanian who was the major force behind Mach when it was a research project at CMU.

Between 1988 and 1996 Apple failed like 3 times at building their own next-gen OS. Apple and IBM cooperatively fucked up the Pink/Taligent development process so hard it's still told like a ghost story to software developers, Copland got out of control with feature creep and empire building, and A/UX, cool as it was, was never going to be a mainstream OS because it contained Unix-brand-Unix and the associated thousand dollar license fee (Also IBM got involved combining some future development of A/UX and AIX for PowerPC and some of the Taligent stuff entered the picture and it turned into a clusterfuck).

So it's the mid 90s and Apple is shipping an OS from the mid 80s that they had to do hacky shit to make do even cooperative multitasking, and the executives are looking to acquire one that is already done.

Two former heads of the Mac division had left and built companies that tried to build whole computer platforms then pivoted to just selling software, Steve Jobs with NeXT and Jean-Louis Gassée with Be. The exact details of the negotiations about how they chose NeXT over Be are kind of ambiguous and vary from account to account, I'm personally of the opinion that the biggest reason is that OpenStep looked a lot like "Taligent, but not completely bungled."

So Apple Bought NeXT in 1997 in a scenario better described as "NeXT Bought Apple with Apple's Money" because all the executives in charge after the shakeup were NeXT folks.

There was an initial plan to more or less slap a OS 8 like Copland-looking GUI on the hybridized Mach/BSD kernel and most of the userland from OpenStep (an environment that at the time was called "Yellow Box"), ship it with a virtualization environment called Blue Box to run legacy MacOS programs, and call it a day. You can even play with the missing link Rhapsody from that era, and the Classic environment that early OS X versions had is the direct descendant of that BlueBox compatibility environment.

Then some of the important software vendors (read: Adobe, whose shitty development practices are why Macs are case insensitive by default to this day) revolted at the idea of having to do ground-up rewrites so Apple designed the Carbon APIs that are kind of a stepping stone between classic MacOS and the native Cocoa APIs that evolved from the Yellow Box deign which are the usual target on modern macOS/iOS.

(The story of how Windows NT - which is the underlayer of all modern windows systems - is basically "The DEC VMS team got pissed off about obviously-dumb management decisions and were looking to leave DEC while Microsoft became aware that OS/2 was failing largely due to bad IBM decisions, so Microsoft hired the core of that team to write the operating system they were designing, moved the few remaining competent folks over from OS/2 to help, and sold it as Windows" is similarly absurd. As the joke goes, it may not be a coincidence that WNT is VMS incremented).

The argument was that if you put all your static resources in /usr, you can mount it RO (for integrity, or to use a ROM on something embeddedish) or from a shared volume (it's not uncommon to NFS mount a common /usr for a pool of managed similar machines).

...that said, many of the same people who made that argument are also the ones that went with making it so systemd won't boot without /usr populated anymore, so that feature is now less useful because it has to be something your initramfs/initcpio/whatever preboot environment mounts rather than mounted by the normal fstab/mount behavior, and the initcpio/initramfs/dracut schemes for doing that all (1) require a redundant set of tools and network configs in the preboot (2) are different and (3) are brittle in annoying ways.

It still works OK if you're using a management tool like Warewulf to manage configs and generate all the relevant filesystems and such, but it's a lot more fucking around than a line in fstab to mount usr once the real system is up like the old days.

Selecting Suns is easy because there aren't many bad choices in the era you're talking about, but a little weird because the internal names and the package label names don't always match in obvious ways. Most of the "classic era" Sparc boxes are Sun-4 variants, with SparcStatons mostly being Sun-4c or Sun-4m and Ultras mostly being Sun-4u machines. The Sun-4* name is more important to knowing what you are looking at than the case badge. For example, I have a "SparcServer 20" that some previous owner installed a TurboGX (cgsix) video board in, so it's almost exactly a similarly-spec'd SparcStation20 with different badges.

Pre-SparcStation Sun-3 and Sun-4 VME based machines are quite a bit more exotic to source parts for in a modern context, and newer stuff are PCs (remember they did go and re-use the Ultra name for a family of x86 boxes a couple years later, so watch model numbers if you're trying to buy a SPARC Ultra).
SparcStations are a little more bespoke and workstation-y (SBus cards, SCSI discs) and Ultras are generally a little more PC-like (mostly PCI cards, ATA discs), but neither are particularly hard to work on these days since the common SBus peripherals aren't terribly expensive and SCSI disc emulators like BlueSCSIs have come down in price and up in performance. IIRC, in all cases you have to be kind of specific with RAM, some older machines use memory modules unique to the family and Ultras mostly take 168pin PC style DIMMs but are picky about the exact details.

IMO the SS10/SS20/SS5 Sun-4m machines are pretty nice to work with because they are still "workstation grade" high reliability parts but were made in HUGE quantities and are extremely modular within the family so it's easy to work on them and get parts/upgrades/documentation/etc. They also have 10baseT Ethernet onboard (careful about degrading your whole switch), while the older SS1/SS2 need an AUI transceiver.

Peripherals:

Remember that older Suns use their own protocol over MiniDIN-8 for keyboard and mouse and 13-W3 video cables. You'll need a suitable Sun keyboard (probably a Type 5 or Type 6) and mouse, and those can be expensive on their own if not bundled because keyboard people. They're not as bad as some of the more exotic and/or desirable to keyboard enthusiast bespoke keyboards, but still pay attention when considering a machine to buy. Video is a little easier because 13W3-to-VGA cables are a thing, (I have one of these with switches so you can configure for Sun or SGI or Next or IBM's particular signaling). You still need a monitor or scan converter that works with Sync-On-Green to accept the signal... most modern LCDs with VGA ports actually can, but the labeling is typically not very clear about that. Sun video adapters are generally a little more willing to negotiate video modes than some of the other workstations (eg. My SS20 has talked to almost everything I've plugged it into, my HP Apollo 9000/735 and its absurd CRX-24z video board will talk to the Dell P2314H on my real work desk and has spurned every other monitor I've tried it with).

NVRAM:

Most older Suns have a chip on the motherboard - typically with a yellow barcode sticker if it's original - which contains a small battery-backed NVRAM storing the serial number, the Ethernet MAC, and various configuration parameters, and a RTC (Real Time Clock). At this point the internal batteries on all of them should be presumed dead. The M48Txx line of chips Suns use were originally made by Mostek, who was absorbed by SGS-Thompson, who became STMicro. Ref for NVRAM chips. Once it dies the machine loses its machine ID and MAC address and such. Fortunately, they can be reprogrammed from OpenFirmware, either with original values read from stickers and the like, or suitable made-up replacements. There are a lot of surviving Suns hand-assigned MAC addresses containing amusing strings like DEAD, BEEF, CAFE, C0FFEE etc. as people have made up suitable numbers. Sun's factory MAC addresses have a 08:00:20 prefix if you want networking tools that notice that sort of thing to assume it's a Sun.

Generally there are 3(and a half) options for dealing with them:

1. Modern production compatibles are still available though you have to be a bit careful about model compatibility, and they're rather expensive these days, something like $25 a piece (eg. Mauser has a small stock of MT48T08s for $26.50+S&H ).

2. You can also grind an end and attach a 3.3v coincell battery holder yourself - some folks say you should always cut the old battery all the way out because there may be unwanted effects to having the dead battery in parallel with the good one.

3. You can crack the whole top of the module with the battery and crystal off and solder on a module with a replacement crystal and user-serviceable battery holder in place.

4. For rarely-used machines, you can just do the reprogramming procedure (in the first ref) at the OpenFirmware OK prompt by hand each time you start the machine, it will hold while the computer is powered.

It's not a huge deal, but it is a thing to expect to have to deal with.

Software:

Remember that the OS nomenclature is a little weird because Solaris started out being versioned on top of SunOS (eg. SunOS 5.1 hosts Solaris 2.1), and at they dropped the SunOS name then leading "2" from Solaris versions so you have Solaris 2.5->2.6->7->8. The Wikipedia version history table is straightforward enough to work through, and has decent notes on supported systems. You'll generally be between 2.1 and 9 on the era of systems you're talking about, and those are the ones that "feel" like old commercial workstation Unix with OpenWindows and CDE and whatnot - I'm partial to 7 as "peak Solaris" but I'm sure that's because I helped maintain a bunch of 7 boxes at one point, it's a fully mature SVR4 with all the commercial Unix-isms before it started to converge with the modern Free Unix-likes. Many of the usual suspects like Tenox and WinWorldPC have install media and/or software.

Edited to add from downthread:

Emulation:

If you don't want to fuck around with large pieces of aging hardware and just want to marinate yourself in a retro Solaris environment, the qemu sparc support is really good. Folks restoring Sun stuff with disc issues often do their installs via netboot from an emulated server. Adafruit even has a beginner click-by-click tutorial for spinning your own emulated Sun4m system.

The near instant heat up is a big part of how I ended up with my Bambino with its "Thermojet"(Thermoblock coil thing) heater.

3s from wake to ready, it takes longer to grind and prep than to heat. I usually pull a blank shot through the clean portafilter into the cup I'm going to pull the shot in so the downstream parts aren't crashing the temperature, but that's still seconds.

Ascaso and Decent have more up-market offerings with thermoblock heaters that are similarly fast but offer more control. I wasn't 5-10x price compelled for my needs, and I'm certainly not over 100x price in to that thing... But it is a great feature that the commercial derived machines don't do.

Just wait for the 9,000th repetition of the same three posts and it'll start getting sassy.

"Your print problems are almost certainly because you haven't properly trammed and offset the bed."

"PLA itself is foodsafe, filament additives may not be, and print texture is a bacteria farm."

"Consensus starter printer in each price bracket right now is..." (actually not as obvious as it has been, some Ender3 variant and Bambu P1P? That one isn't as tired as the other two because it changes over time.)

Don't trust that they're 100% compatible with mainline Linux, ChromeOS carries some weird patches and proprietary stuff up-stack.

I have a little Dell Chromebook 11 3189 that I did the Mr.Chromebox Coreboot + Linux thing on, a couple years ago I couldn't get the (weird i2c) input devices to work right, that has since been fixed in upstream coreboot tables and/or Linux but (as of a couple months ago) still don't play nice with smaller alternative OSes like NetBSD or a Haiku nightly.

The Audio situation is technically functional but still a little rough, the way the codec in bay/cherry trail devices is half chipset half external occasionally leads to the audio configuration crapping itself in ways that take some patience and/or expertise to deal with (Why do I suddenly have 20 inoperable sound cards in my pulse audio settings?).

This particular machine also does some goofy bullshit with 2 IMUs in the halves instead of a fold-back sensor, so the rotation/folding stuff via iio sensors is a little quirky.

But, they absolutely are fun, cheap hacker toys that are generally easy targets.

Most of my machines are KDE on X, but I have one where I've been feeling stuff out in Wayland-land. The most appealing thing I've tried has been Hyprland with Waybar. It's a little bit of a kit in traditional WM fashion, but easy to configure from straightforward config files, fairly light, and not "Just like this X WM, but broken because of missing Wayland functionality" (I know, I know, it's not technically Wayland deficiencies, its "not yet complete extensions", because it's all extensions, the Wayland protocol itself does almost nothing).

I've been using Kitty for a terminal emulator and it's pleasing as well.

I haven't found a launcher I love, I have fuzzel right now and the only major issue is it doesn't currently support mouse interaction, and I prefer a "use whichever input device your hand is on at the time" to keyboard-only.

Neat.

I set up some basic compute stuff with the ROCm stack on a 6900HX-based mini computer the other week (mostly to see if it was possible as there are some image processing workloads a colleague was hoping to accelerate on a similar host) and noticed that the docs occasionally pretend you could use GTT dynamicly allocated memory for compute tasks, but there was no evidence of it ever having worked for anyone.

That machine had flexible firmware and 64GB of RAM stuffed in it so I just shuffled the boot time allocation in the EFI to give 8GB to the GPU to make it work, but it's not elegant.

It's also pretty clumsy to actually make things run, lot of "set the magic environment variable because the tool chain will mis-detect the architecture of your unsupported card" and "Inject this wall of text into your CMake list to override libraries with our cooked versions" to make things work. Then it performs like an old GTX1060, which is on one hand impressive for an integrated part in a fairly low wattage machine, and on the other hand is competing with a low-mid range card from 2016.

Pretty on brand really, they've been fucking up their compute stack since before any other vendor was doing the GPGPU thing (abandoning CTM for Stream in like a year).

I think the OpenMP situation was the least jank of the ways I tried getting something to offload on an APU, but it was also one of the later attempts so maybe I was just getting used to it's shit.

1. Neat, I never knew what that system was called. I have fond memories of my local libraries DEC terminals.

2. Ooh, it looks like that ran on Pick, which is a neat early database/operating system/programming environment ..thing named for one of its primary authors (I shit you not) Dick Pick. Later typically the UniVerse hosted variant, which is proprietary up to it's eyeballs, and still sold by Rocket Software as U2. I don't think I've ever come across a copy of native Pick or UniVerse for a 90s Unix or NT in a vintage software archive, but it has been widely used essentially forever, and it is virtually search proof, so it might be out there.

3. Dynix itself is pretty search proof since it was also the name of an influential multiprocessor Unix from Sequent, which, like Pick, was at some point bought by IBM.

4. Holy shit they're still a thing https://www.sirsidynix.com/

Many manufacturers have been moving to cardboard. Less wasteful than plastic spools, more convenient than reusable spools.

For the most part, I'd rather have native packages. I'm not deeply philosophically opposed to secondary packaging systems, and only mildly opposed to "ship the whole dependency tree in an archive" software distribution methods (lookin' at you NextStep/OS X style bundles), and see their potential especially on platforms with no/bad native package managers or to bring in specific software that would pose a compatibility problem for the host system... but they never seem to work nearly as well as native packages, and the two big players on Linux have problems.

As far as I'm concerned, they're just taking the old last-ditch practice of "I have this piece of recalcitrant software that is incompatible with the rest of my system, so I'll throw it in /opt with its entire dependency tree," replacing opt with a bunch of bind mounts, and doing so with varying degrees of additional tooling.

The sandboxing is a nice idea, but it seems like in practice the models on both snap and flatpack are simultaneously restrictive in ways that make them annoying-to-unusable for many tasks, and too sloppy to provide reliable security guarantees.

They make debugging problems harder because you can't check functionality from another program because they likely don't share libs. ldd is a lot easier than spelunking around with eg. flatpak list --app --columns=application,runtime until you find a "peer" to test.

If I need a one-off piece of software that is a compatibility nuisance on my host distro (but not so much of a nuisance it needs to go in a container or VM, which is a pretty narrow window), I'll usually reach for an AppImage because unlike the other two, they're actually fairly standalone and don't involve a big invasive runtime/tooling system.

The Immutable-core OSes that depend on them are kind of the same way at the moment. Fundamentally a pretty neat idea, but so far I find them super frustrating in practice. Nix is ...different... to work with, but is likely a more elegant scheme to solve the same class of problems.

I was so annoyed by the dialog-buttons-in-title-bar nonsense that I ended up replacing my system gtk3 package with gtk3-classic the first time I used gimp after the 3.0 upgrade. It fixes some other bizarre gnome-isms so GTK3 software is less-jarring under KDE (or ...anything not gnome).

I have an ESP32 set up with Zimodem which just makes the ESP32 act like a Hayes modem that talks IP instead of phone numbers to the serial port. They're a ton of fun.
FujiNet appears to offer a little bit more in the way of high level service translation.

This thread is demonstrating one of my favorite things about the coffee community: There is a fundamental semi-seriousness, acknowledgement of diminishing returns, and awareness of varying tastes in (almost) all quarters. A lot of gear-heavy hobbies take themselves way too seriously, but the coffee folk with an $8000 La Marzocco espresso setup, with a $7 plastic cone and a kettle, and waiting in front of the microwave with a bottle of instant and a spoon are all just trying to have a pleasing coffee experience.

My fancy, ritualistic coffee is a shot of espresso in the morning, usually prepared like a Brauner with a dash of milk inversely proportionate to how well I did at making the espresso that day.

A few weeks ago I upgraded from my old (ca. 2010) Lello Arite 1375 Chinese thermoblock pressurized basket "espresso" machine and Capresso Infinity grinder combo ($140+90+accessories) that were kind of mediocre to start with and literally falling apart by the end, to a Brevelle Bambino and Turin SK40 ($350+200+accessories) and have been delighted by the additional ability to play with parameters (and occasionally revolted by the results while I was getting my bearings). The old set up produced a long-tuned pleasing thing that may or may not technically count as espresso, but in retrospect may have been a relative of the extraction optimum from that "Systematically Improving Espresso" paper from a few years ago. The new one is full grind-controls-infusion espresso experience. The bambino is "nice for the price" and has a delightfully fast heat up and surprisingly good steam wand for when I'm feeling foamy, but slightly annoying manual shot controls. The SK40 is just great so far, my only tiny complaint is that every now and then I have to give it a little rock to get the last of a dose of beans out of the feed cone.

I also really enjoy how this setup is sitting in superposition of ($600 is an absurdly expensive way to make coffee | $600 is absurdly cheap to make real espresso).

Home espresso is never really practical, but I find the ritual of preparation deeply pleasing (weights and ratios and times and gadgets! Instant feedback! Total focus!), and enjoy the experience of varying parameters.

I also drink a fair amount of Instant when I'm out during the day, I've been recommending Mount Hagen to everyone who will listen lately because it's like $10 a jar and so much better than any of the other instants I've tried.

...and I have a coworker with an office aeropress that I sometimes play with, and I want but have no real reason to have one for home. The super clean immersion brew is a really interesting way to experience a coffee, and of course one never has enough coffee paraphernalia.