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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I haven’t seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

    IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don’t use it as intended. I think they’re mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

    Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach’s performance issues, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

    And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.







  • I had a similar experience. Back before epub took off, I started reading Gutenberg books on my wince phone. I think I was using an app called jbookshelf. Even then I loved the convenience of it.

    Once android happened, I switched to epubs and it was so much better.

    Now I’m mostly using koreader, along with kindle and Google play books. I prefer reading anything in a foreign language on Kindle, because it’s so easy to look up words.











  • If you’re looking to try something a little different, I recommend Guix.

    It’s based around a nyx-style package manager written in scheme, which is also called guix. There’s an EDSL for writing package definitions. One interesting result about this is that the package manager has a REPL and a dedicated emacs mode

    Instead of systemd, the PID1 process is called GNU Shepherd, and is also written in scheme.

    Guix also has a strong emphasis on bootstrapping. You can build almost the entire system from source, relying on only a few binaries to start with.