Some quick thoughts in passing

Just been reading some of the ongoing threads, and the big ones seem to be regarding pulseaudio and palemoon. I don't have a horse in either one of those races, but just some off the cuff thoughts for whatever they may be worth to whoever they may be worth to.

Palemoon: Not quite ready for prime time, but the 27.4 alphas seem to fix most of the issues regarding video playback and rendering. I'm not sure how long they can hold the fort against what Mozilla is doing to Firefox, but I wish them well. For that matter, Firefox is a dead browser walking IMO and it's only a matter of time before they give up the ghost to Chromium/Chrome (which I hate with a passion. Vivaldi is only slightly better - no offense to those who like/use it. I'm just not going to be one of them). Seamonkey's days seem numbered as well, which will be a shame for people who like that all-in-one approach.

I can envision a day where I'll be doing the least amount of surfing possible, and that only in text-mode. I do most of it that way now, with only a few holdout websites keeping a graphical browser installed. That said...

...I'm trying Waterfox right now, and there don't seem to be any showstoppers that jump out at me. https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ for anyone who's interested in what he's doing. 64-bit support only. It does seem faster, and Ecosia is the default search engine. Somebody just trying to do a socially good thing. I wish him well, too.

The Chromium clones are all either closed-source or meh. There is nothing in that camp that interests me in the least.

If all the Firefox clone people could come to a meeting of the minds and agree on a common philosophy, there might be enough manpower to support a browser that people actually want to use. Better chance of pigs flying, again IMO.

PulseAudio. Meh. It works. The apps built against it work. That's about all I have to say about that. I get the pushback against it, but I built my latest rig with an eye to FLOSS software, my testcase being the Linux-Libre kernel, so I have no real problems, but for the record, life was better with Alsa. Not easier, necessarily, but better. YMMV.

The thing is, a small dev crew can only do so much before it bows to the inevitable. Maybe a middle ground with apulse could have been a stopgap action, and one day I'll look at it out of curiosity, but once you make the decision to support Bluetooth, you have to either go all in or fold your hand. The die is cast, so we can like it or go to whatever lengths to avoid it as long as possible.

Again, for the record, I'm too old and lazy to be a diehard, except against that init thing that causes all the ruckus here. There isn't anything about that I want any part of, but other than that, I'm going with the flow until something sinks the boat.

That's what I got. Slackware is where I'm at until either the current storms pass or they swamp me under. For now, I'm treading water in pretty good shape, thanks for asking.

Stay cool and keep slacking.

Originally Posted by Launfal Again, for the record, I'm too old and lazy to be a diehard, except against that init thing that causes all the ruckus here. There isn't anything about that I want any part of, but other than that, I'm going with the flow until something sinks the boat. That's what I got. Slackware is where I'm at until either the current storms pass or they swamp me under. For now, I'm treading water in pretty good shape, thanks for asking. Stay cool and keep slacking.

That's about where I am as well. I mostly use Slackware(along with a few BSD laptops).

Originally Posted by Launfal PulseAudio. Meh. It works.

The problem is that it jfw nicely for some people, and is broken for other people, and so far nobody knows why.

Theoretically specific audio hardware shouldn't make a difference, since ALSA abstracts away the hardware interface and PulseAudio uses the ALSA interface. I have no proof, but my working hypothesis is that isolation from hardware details is imperfect. The problems people have reported certainly seem like the problems are coincident with differences in hardware.

Originally Posted by ttk The problem is that it jfw nicely for some people, and is broken for other people, and so far nobody knows why.

Indeed. I have two Lenovo T410 Thinkpads. One runs Slackware perfectly. The other developed audio problems after the introduction of pulse audio, that is, sound output would intermittently stop working on the unit. That Thinkpad is now running FreeBSD.

Thanks for suggesting waterfow!!!

I did not know about that project. That browser really feels snappier.

hello, how do we install waterfox on slackware? I downloaded the bz2 file, extracted it but when I try to execute (not as root) the ./waterfox I can not get it to work. I get

waterfox is already running but is not responding. To open a new window you must first close existing waterfox process or restart your system

. There is also a directory created with name waterfox_<username> that has an empty file .parentlock. Do I have to delete it?
Regards, Apostolos.

OK, apparently it was the firefox browser that was running that prevented waterfox to start. Closing firefox was the solution to get waterfox running. Now I can not run firefox again with waterfox running...Also it seems that waterfox found out all my info from firefox (bookmarks, login passwords like for this site etc.)

About dying software: we all die, sooner or later. IMO.

Why would Pale Moon hold the fort against Firefox. They are making a different browser. As the time goes by there will be more and more differences. Why do you care, if you can browse the sites you are interested in ?

There are more serious questions. Like, what will happen to extensions ? How many people will make extensions for Pale Moon (and old Firefox) ? What will happen to old extensions in Firefox repositories. Will they just be erased ? Some people announced that they can't port their extensions to new Firefox, btw.

What will happen to NPAPI Flash plugin ? It looks like new Firefox will keep using it.

I was curious about waterfox.
I downloaded the source.
It's huge. Even after compacting

$ du -sh Waterfox-54.0.tar.xz
2.7G    Waterfox-54.0.tar.xz

On a Lenovo T430 it took about 1 hour to build.
As for firefox and palemoon you need to use an old version of autoit (2.13)
and you need to install rust first.
I still have to figure out how to package it.
(I detected the presence of 'DESTDIR' in some *.mk files).

Originally Posted by askfor Why would Pale Moon hold the fort against Firefox. They are making a different browser. As the time goes by there will be more and more differences. Why do you care, if you can browse the sites you are interested in ? There are more serious questions. Like, what will happen to extensions ? How many people will make extensions for Pale Moon (and old Firefox) ? What will happen to old extensions in Firefox repositories. Will they just be erased ? Some people announced that they can't port their extensions to new Firefox, btw.

Good points, and they tie into each other nicely. I was thinking of security fixes and stuff like that when I made my original comment, but extensions are as/more important. Will PM continue to be a valid alternative to people who were originally never Australis and who now seem to be never Web Extension? As long as the old FF extensions work in PM, or can be easily ported over, PM can gain traction and be a viable alternative when FF fully switches over with 57 later this year.

They are a small team, and now they're talking about developing a branch that somehow follows post-57 FF in some way. Can they maintain the original branch that people will be interested in while also pursuing that other work? Time will tell.

As for Flash, meh. Adobe made it's opinion of Linux pretty clear when they let Flash-Linux rot all that time, so I don't install it nor let it show on any website I surf. HTML5 will be the stake in the heart for Flash/Silverlight, and good riddance to them both.

Originally Posted by vonbiber I was curious about waterfox. I downloaded the source. It's huge. Even after compacting $ du -sh Waterfox-54.0.tar.xz 2.7G Waterfox-54.0.tar.xz

Yeah, I did notice how big it was when I DL'd it, but I never tried to build it. I just unpacked it in /opt, scripted a simple launcher and ran it. I do the same for Icecat when I want to look at new versions of that. I build PaleMoon, but that's only 20 minutes on an I3.

...

just finished building waterfox. Took a little less than an hour (core I5 and 8 GB RAM).

$  du -sh waterfox-54.0-x86_64-1_vbi.txz
81M