I'm on my mail since year BUT the issue is that most mail tools came from another era, nice for us, but not really usable for most people.

My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user.

Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.

It was the future OS most fails to understand. The ZFS/IPS integration was the first modern step aside of declarative distros. A thing 99% of people still fails to understand refusing the concept of storage system/package system/installer interdependence.

Zones, DTrace was the rest.

I submit that the problem was Solaris 9 just being massively overtaken by desktop Linux in every way - easier to install, faster, simpler to patch, better GUI, more software available. Solaris 10 was too little too late; it already had to compete with mature Linux offerings that had a greater mindshare, and the excellent features like Zones were too far ahead of their time (and lacked the centralized store of downloadable Zone-prepackaged apps that is really the reason for Docker's success).

Purity doesn't matter in practice - especially in a world where OS installations are increasingly ephemeral and ideally immutable.

I always hear DTrace is awesome, but have never used it. And seem to have gotten by just fine... what am I actually missing?

ZFS, on the other hand, was so good that it has outlived Solaris itself and is at the core of e.g. TrueNAS as a commercial product.

Dtrace essentially allows two things. The first is exploring a live system, similar to being in a debugger but without its overhead. The other is monitoring; it's possible to notice that something is wrong earlier and with less overhead than monitoring logs and testing services.

Both aren't strictly necessary/much used in practice for various reasons, but depending on what you're doing, it's very handy to have. In a way similar to ZFS vs Stratis: the first ready to go, well-made, convenient, while the second is an absurd mess made by people who don't understand operations and think they know better from their development machine.

On Solaris... In my opinion, the real problem is less about Slowlaris and more about having chosen to target the élite for so long instead of targeting students, who are the future technicians, managers, etc.

GNU/Linux succeeded IMVHO because it was aimed at this audience, which is much broader, with many who weren't interested, but it's also the group that shapes 100% of every future generation of decision-makers and technicians. When SUN realized this, first with SXDE/CE and then OpenIndiana, it was, yes, damn late.

Do you have any recommended references to understand that concept and how it plays out in Solaris?

I find myself in the middle of what I imagine are similar design challenges in software packaging, storage, integration, and deployment.

Not at hand unfortunately, because IPS was introduced with OpenIndiana (the IllumOS base) which objectively didn't last long enough to have time for serious documentation.

The super-basic description is that the package manager, IPS (Image Package System), is somewhat integrated with storage, enough to allow creating new BEs (Boot Environments), which are ZFS clones of the current system. On disk, these only consume the differences compared to the original system, are bootable directly from GRUB, and can even be soft-booted if needed (restarting just the userland without a full reboot). It allows updating in a clone, so if something goes wrong, you can reboot into the old version (not so easy if databases are involved, but let's say it's generally doable).

The installer is similarly "integrated" but at least back then it was in a very rough, early state, a fork of some Debian GUI installer I don't remember the name (prodigy maybe?) that never went mainstream, called Cayman in OpenSolaris. The idea was to deploy a system as a ZFS volume in the pool with some scripting to "link the root volume to the bootloader."

The future could have led to packages like mini-ZFS filesystems mountable/composable/exposable in the ZPL to virtually build an FHS-compliant deployment but operate entirely at the zfs blocks level. An immutable system if desired, ZFS-diffable if desired, cloneable, rollbackable, updatable incrementally so hyper fast and with low overhead etc. The project unfortunately fell apart before getting there, but if it had, deploying a new host would have just been a `zfs send` of a set of volumes. Essentially what NixOS/NixOps/Disnix does, but ideally without the complexity of the /nix/store.

That’s actually super relevant and helpful, thanks.

To better compress my personal preference is

    pdftops -paper A4 -expand -level3 file.pdf # I'm from EU, so A4 is my common paper format

    ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true        \
    -dUseFlateCompression=true           \
    -dOptimize=true                      \
    -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceRGB       \
    -r72                                 \
    -dDownsampleGrayImages=true          \
    -dGrayImageResolution=150            \
    -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false         \
    -dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic   \
    -dDownsampleMonoImages=true          \
    -dMonoImageResolution=150            \
    -dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Subsample \
    -dDownsampleColorImages=true         \
    -dColorImageResolution=150           \
    -dAutoFilterColorImages=false        \
    -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic  \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook                 \
    -dNOSAFER                            \
    -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY                \
    -dShowAnnots=false                   \
      file.ps compressed.pdf

If you do `-dEmbedAllFonts=true` then probably `-dSubsetFonts=true` would also be useful.

And for the rest, `-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` should already have most of the values that you set explicitely.

My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.

We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.

So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.

If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.

We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.

As usual Gnome do it's best to alienate users and have some who restore good behaviors as the can. Meanwhile the fraction of power users who still use Gnome are less and less. In few years if they keep going they'll earn a share of Windows expatriate newbies and lost all power users, becoming then irrelevant like many who have choose the same path.

Well... Until people will react protecting their own interests we will only go in a death spiral.

Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.

This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.

In the past, for technological reasons, because it is technology that determines every civilisation, cities were rich places, because they had trade, nearby arts and crafts; knowledge and economy travelled in this way.

Today, for similar reasons, cities are chicken coops where the inmates are not much different from the human batteries in The Matrix; they live to work, generally without realising it, for masters who are no longer in the city. Technologically, they are failed places, because they cannot evolve without being rebuilt from scratch, and they cannot be rebuilt on such a scale, both due to the impact of the work and the quantity of raw materials required.

Most people never weigh the real cost of a modern city; they are so accustomed to owning nothing that they think what is there is natural, ignoring what they don't see, whether underground (like the cathedral with mega-pumping stations to mitigate flooding beneath Tokyo) or in the surrounding areas to bring water and food, because we all eat, but in the city no one produces.

The cities of the coming century are ghettos, polluted and devastated, where misery is concentrated like a compound, while wealth leaves the compound to reclaim life in nature.

That is an utterly cartoonish take on city life and does not match my experience at all.

Basic FLOSS desktop knowledge must be in high schools for everyone, you can't study in the modern time without contemporary tools. LaTeX must also be in the game, because we need people who know how to express themselves crafting good quality documents.

Python for scripting honestly is Xonsh :)