gpdpocketer

Here in Vienna, there is a thriving small-business, local IT economy... but it is rapidly being countered with "cloud all the things" new-economy bollocks.

Also, I once saw a "Linux-friendly" PC shop, literally sign-posted "LINUX SHOP", out in farm-boy country, in the lower Austria sprawl, so.. pretty sure there is a mom 'n pop/cousin shop mentality for a lot of IT needs...

Totally easy to step off the net. You just put bits of it in your own space.

I wanna write a book titled: "how to run your small/medium-sized office with just a linux box on the wall and your staffs cell phones..."

Pretty sure I read a FAQ for how to do this, 20 years ago, though...

I've been using a cross-platform GUI framework/engine to do app development on all the platforms: Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android - and it has been a joy to deploy one app on all of these systems.

One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.

This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.

I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..

Amstrad CPC with a HxC card...

I've been a Linux user since the very beginning, and have settled on Ubuntu as my daily driver for .. now .. decades (or is it, I dunno, feels like it..) .. anyway, I am a systems-level developer, lots of experience, and I enjoy myself a well-put together system.

So, since I tend towards the multimedia experiences, I use the -Studio variant of Ubuntu, which is preconfigured and biased, default installations-wise, towards the cool music and video and creative tools, and so on. Its really a treat.

Anyway, I have a few systems. A DAW, Digital Audio Workstation, my studio, which handles multiple channels of audio on a regular basis, often 32 independent streaming inputs per REC session .. and a fair swath of plugins nobody has ever heard of before, which is often a positive...

On my personal laptop, I run the same thing. A GPD Pocket, with a small satchel of cables, and I can pretty much set up anywhere and review sessions.

Through all of this, I have updated my Ubuntu systems - but the only way I've been able to survive, personally, is to avoid Gnome Shell, and select FVWM or LWM at login.

That said, the only place Gnome Shell really feels nice .. is on the GPD Pocket. Does this say something about where things are at?

I tell you one thing: the GPD Pocket has replaced a Macbook Air ...

I use Ubuntu-Studio, which doesn't do this.

People seem to forget that Ubuntu is just the front door. You can totally turn all their crap off, run some other window manager, and avoid all the turdburgers.

True fact, the only reason it is that way is you didn't do something about it. If you want to argue about the reasons behind it being a default, thats one thing.

But please, for the sake of those of us who use Ubuntu- and its derivatives on a daily basis, please do not sally the water with piss-taking .. you most certainly do not have to stay at the front door.

Given that the indigenous Australian languages hold the record for the longest-running oral traditions (70,000 years worth of story-telling), it would be no surprise to me to hear that there was such an influence...

What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on?

http://pyra-handheld.com/

Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet to see the Pyra/Pandora classes of devices?

Neither of these services are going to work to solve our current dilemna until we can drop a .framework in and use it from a mobile app.. this is really the space that needs adoption strategies.