I'm still on facebook and a lot of my friends still are, the main problem we have with facebook events it that almost no one sees them.
This section has been over loaded with suggestions to event you might have no links with of things your remote friends are going to take part of.
I have no clew how come the difference on what's usually said on this forum and the situation in Europe.My only understanding is that the US as whole is more sunny that gives a better ratio solar panel and produced electricity.
Maybe also it's a provider thing ? From country to country, you can always have things that seem randomly more expensive. Germany is more renewable but more expensive than France, is it because of their national company is benefiting citizen properly or is it because the remaining gas part drives up the cost ?
Germany may use more renewables in volume, but it is absolutely dirtier than in France. Their electrical mix makes use of lots of natural gas and lignite coal, the worst kind, both expensive and very dirty.
Rome wasn't built in a day and I find it hilarious to advocate for nuclear power instead, if the average construction time (not even taking into account the prior mountain of bureaucracy) is over a decade. Not a single nuclear power plant built in past 15 years in Europe has been on time or on budget. Not even close.
I think this graph from Wikipedia is better, as it goes back to 1990 [1].
Renewables have increased significantly, but much of that is displacing nuclear power. The remainder, plus a small increase in natural gas, his displaced hard coal and a small amount of lignite. Presumably hard coal is more expensive.
The overall trend is coal is reducing, but it's a poor show compared to Great Britain [2].
Yeah, Germany did have hard coal mines but they closed a few years back as they've gotten too deep and difficult to access to be economically viable (and it was subsidised until 2018), so Germany imports hard coal. Meanwhile germany is either #1 or #2 lignite producer.
Strategically speaking, Europe lacks the natural resources to build renewable, wind turbines and solar panels have to be imported, most of them from Asia.
Nuclear is still a bit cheaper per Watt and less carbon intensive, as it involves less infrastructure, logistics and batteries overall. It's also somewhat more reliable, as it doesn't depend on sun or wind (the former of which France often lacks).
Also, I am hopeful that nuclear power plant construction delays will only improve in the near future, as Europe rebuilds its expertise in nuclear engineering, which it lost after the past decades of anti-nuclear waves.
Finally, I don't see fossil fuel usage going down much in Germany in the link you gave, if at all. Which is the only thing that matters, ecologically speaking.
LCOE [1] of nuclear power in Europe and the USA is roughly thrice that of solar or wind [2]. In China it is about even. If you do not trust the Deutsche Bank report, the World Nuclear Association comes to roughly the same conclusion but assumes a lower discount, thus making nuclear power more attractive. [3]
Is this based on cost per Watt without the expenses related to keeping the grid perfectly synchronized or not?
A significant and stable base load is important and it has shown that wind/solar makes it substantially more expensive to keep the grid stabilized, which is of course a no brainer if you don't want a blackout.
> Is this based on cost per Watt without the expenses related to keeping the grid perfectly synchronized or not?
It's the LCOE, you can read what it encompasses in the link I provided.
> A significant and stable base load is important and it has shown that wind/solar makes it substantially more expensive to keep the grid stabilized, which is of course a no brainer if you don't want a blackout.
I assume you mean the utility frequency [1] when you say "base load", because you said "synchronized" and "stabilized". The frequency indeed has to be stable with a rather small margin of tolerance. Today that's mostly a job for gas turbines, though. One can hope that we find ways to store all the surplus regenerative power soon, so that we can retire those, too. Nuclear power plants, in any case, are too slow for that purpose.
Just in case you really meant load, load has no requirement to be stable. The power demands at any time can be met by dispatchable power plants, but utilities like to plan long-term, so they use some averaged load over time to determine a "base load" and buy accordingly on the electricity market. That's prudent business practice, but there is no technical reason to run low-variability power plants because of that.
In France, the most recent report [1] by the Cour des comptes, our official accounting organ, still gives nuclear power as slightly cheaper than solar and wind.
I trust your data, but the situation here is different, most reactors are already built, and "only" need maintenance and fuel replacement.
I still stand by what I said in my previous comment about emissions per watts, etc.
This report is about the cost of production of AMORTIZED nuclear plants (moreover the real cost of France's nuclear fleet of reactor, including public money is a matter of debate). Comparing it to the total cost of new renewable is meaningless.
> Germany is more renewable but more expensive than France
No, germany is more renewable but it's also more coal, any time there's no wind the coal plants start up. And they burn lignite (because that's what in germany e.g. that's what the Baggers strip mine).
It's not as bad as Poland which basically runs entirely off of coal, but it's absolutely at the bottom of the european barrel.
Also electricity storage still isn't much of a thing (and while germany has two pumped hydro station they have very little capacity), so in periods of high winds germany actually pays its neighbours to take electricity off its grid so it doesn't collapse (at this point it has hundreds of hours of negative spot prices every year).
Which is getting problematic because increase in wind generation in said neighbours means the issue is spreading as they too need to get rid of their wind production at those times.
The comment I replied to is comparing germany to france. The map I linked literally tells you that in 2024 Germany generated 370g CO2 equivalent per kWh, where France generated 32, that's an objective number you can straight up read.
Yes Germany is 58% renewable versus France's 28 (something the map also tells you), but then 30% are gas and especially coal, the link you provide agrees with that. Coal is insanely polluting, especially because Germany mainly uses lignite which is the least energy rich coal (so even more emissions for the same production), coal represents >3/4th of its emissions.
Meanwhile gas is a minor component of france's electricity mix (pretty much just peaking plants and a few combined cycle district heating plants) and coal is a rounding error.
It's a weird turn of event that OS X stayed a much more classic os than what Windows 8 was becoming. I remember that for a long time OS X was wasting less screen estate than Windows 8 and all that mix that was Windows 10.
But since Big Sure it means that it got even worse than what It was with the first version of OS X.
I remember how crazy it was it setup a mac emulator, set it's resolution to my mac's resolution, full screen mode, and see how much space you could have with classic Mac OS, it's just crazy and everything remains legible.
Suddenly the windows desktop metaphor makes more sense because you can actually have many windows next to each other.
OS X has almost always tried to diverge from than, that lead to great things like exposé, spaces and then mission control but it looks like they never considered to reduce elements size.
And here we are, those are my two cents and my experience.
I have used Linux for years, I liked the idea of defending something free and open.I absolutely love KDE and its personalization ability, it’s just exactly what I want.
Yet, I’m back on Windows, I like well defined screen, I have a 4K another one of lower resolution, to handle that well, I need Wayland, heck KDE just sometimes has less features or less solved bug on X11 now.
And at night I just want to watch one or two things before sleeping, I just need to turn my screen to my bed, and choose one the suggestions of plateforms like YouTube or Netflix with my mouse.
…Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.
This is so dum, it’s crazy to me that we used to fly away from all the dysfunctions of Windows to go the sane Linux ecosystem to only find that is starting to look a bit absurd on that side too. And we look at the discourse of Wayland devs, they speak exactly like corporate would do.
So that and few package management breakage and I think this is also a weak point of the ecosystem, tends to break, to upgrade everything when you only need one thing, too complex too trouble shoot.We usually think we have superior technological paleform on with Linux kernel, but package management is one of the weak point IMO.
All of that pushed me outside of Linux for now.When I encounter something that looks infuriating on Windows, I just think I might see something like this on Linux.
For work, Windows is not it for me anyone; it's a constant and distracting cesspool of ads for Microsoft services. In contrast, KDE wins here, by far, and not just because it's not distracting.
As for night time, I don't want or need my computer; I'll grab a tablet and consume all the content I want.
As for package management, let me know when I can type a single command on Windows and have my entire system and applications up-to-date.
> Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.
You can turn your phone into a trackpad/remote keyboard, as long as your desktop is running the host software. Works just fine on Wayland, in my experience.
Overall I think people are right to blame Wayland for asking developers to reinvent the wheel, but wrong to defend the first-draft nature of x11. In a truly reductive sense, Linux never really had a desktop that worked. It was a desktop server that got hacked into usability by a lot of contributors, who ended up building a big unusable monolith. Naturally, a solution that is neither big nor monolithic is bound to make people angry.
But, I think we're past the point of lamenting x11's death. It was meant to be this way, Microsoft built Desktop Window Manager and Apple rolled out Quartz; sticking with x11 just didn't make competitive sense. Wayland's "big problem" is that it asks desktop developers to go the extra mile, and I don't really think that's a bad thing to ask. Linux didn't need taller, more fragile software stacks; it needs more thoughtful integration and actual diversity in implementation. It's not a coincidence that modern applications like the Steam Deck practically rely on Wayland to deliver such a customized experience.
Thanks for the tip, I’ve already used KDE connect even for iOS-Windows communication, it’s just great.
I think people resort back to X11 because it’s only think that worked for a broad sets of features.Sure we can have Wayland making progress but it seems there’s little resource targeted it, not even implementation but even standardizing some things and we’re 15 years past. Linux kernel itself was already at infamous 2.6 version by then.
Sure proprietary desktops have kind of shown the way. One side, it’s good to have standards clear/clean enough that it can be easily implemented, on the other side, it can just be especially resource taking to redevelop things that are the core difference of the desktop environnement you might be developing.
I can wonder and worry, if we would have and will still ever see something like compiz fusion, the diagonal screen tick seen this year or anything else.
Design standards api, inter app communication and make it customizable is no way easy and I feel like Wayland has absolutely not find how to articulate all of those things.
It's going to be a pain-point for a while. I invite you to look on the bright side, though; the past 10 years of Wayland was as bad as it will ever get. We live in wonderful times, where Nvidia/Wayland setups are actually stable; this is stuff people thought would never get fixed 10 years ago, but now we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's still work to do, but I think we're passing the point where Wayland has more features than it lacks.
x11 has a place in my heart, I loved many of it's apps (shoutouts to xsnow) and cherished the wildly bloated featureset. But damn, it was broken. MacOS had a pretty terrible compositor for a while, but once you booted up Quartz with double-buffer V-sync (imagine, back in 2005) you would already know x11 was finished. Wayland was the inevitably long-winded response from the Open Source community, and while it languished for a long time it's finally quite usable.
Nobody is going to stop you from using x11, or maintaining it yourself if it comes down to it. The philosophy of the matter is decided, though; smaller featuresets are more secure and easier to implement. Especially since the advent of smartphones, I feel like the idea of an x11-native desktop metaphor has been nonsense. Yes, the GNOME pundits push this point pretty extremely, but there's a kernel of truth to it. We really do need more flexible desktop architectures if we want Linux to be a commercial-quality product. x11 is holding it back.
>>> Snap and Flatpacks are solving problems that don't need solving for most people. Shitty sandboxing that doesn't even work and makes my app slower? I don't want it.
To me that also raises the issue of Snap/Flatpacks and Wayland both handling part of sandboxing/capabilities.
Ultimately if you want to handle how your apps can be run and got resort back to lower primitive and you’re handling very different things like files acces(Snap/Flatpacks) and visual elements(Wayland) and maybe got back to the Linux kernel to handle that.
As I'm looking at the vision pro and try to envision what I could with it, when I think of developing a new app for it, those kind of extreme hostilities come to my mind now.
It just shows they don't care, they are releasing a whole new platform right now and at the same time show one of the most abusing attitude to developer I think we have rarely seen.
Apple app store condition were already overreaching but this time they really went the extra length with every single of their DMA adaptations.
That's not at all the case. Apple does care, a lot. It's just that their interests are not perfectly aligned with yours (or most developers).
The issue is that Apple needs 3rd party developers because a platform without apps has little value. However, there are so many developers on iOS that individuals have almost no leverage. Thus Apple invests their resources into the fattest part of the curve (developers of highly monetized games, mostly) because it gives them the best returns. It's not economical for them to focus on the elite developer's highly specific needs.
I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity.
To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs.
It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they really look like a clear bifurcation from the modularity and customization we used to see on the distro world.
I remember the mid 2000 and early 2010, when computing was still cultivating this cool image from the animations of Mac os Leopard and the aero style of Vista and the leader above all in the form compiz crowning Linux from far.
In the talks around Wayland vs X, the maneer Wayland proponent(not only its developer and also any linux user) dismisses critics of missing feature because 15 years later they're still not standardized or lack of composabilty between windowing and compositing is a stark contrast with the way we used to talk about free and open source software at the turn of the millennium.
We used to defend customizability and a certain form of freedom.
Sure X11 lack security and should be replaced by something that works better.
The Wayland shortcoming are defended in the name of security is some kind PR speak I wouldn't think I'd see in the linux world years ago.
It comes as particularly bitter as other closed platform from wich we used to hear a lot corporate speak still allow apps to do more things with their own windows that Wayland does.
The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.
All in all, I wonder if things would have went more smoothly and in greater general agreement if those 15 years+ were spend make Linux work like plan 9.
Wayland is still customizable, and x11 isn't going away. If you want to trade in security and maintenance for features and capabilities, nobody will try to stop you. In that sense, distributions still don't hold much power over the user besides what they present as default.
> The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.
I disagree, and I'm a staunch GNOME skeptic myself. Flatpak and Wayland were both built as extensible systems from the start, and GNOME's implementation of both technologies is just one interpretation of the protocol. KDE is a good mirror example; their Wayland implementation exposes many features completely unavailable on x11, and their Flatpak permissions are integrated right in the Settings app.
Personally I don't like GNOME's approach to the desktop anymore, and I refuse to defend most of their more opinionated decisions. Those choices have a minimal impact on desktop Linux outside of GNOME though, and it more feels like Red Hat is displacing the amount of work put into keeping legacy systems alive.
Yes, technically nothing prevents someone to make a customizable Wayland compositor.
You’re taking about KDE and I agree that it is certainly one of the most customizable Wayland desktops we have.
What I deplore is that those customization have not made their way into at least an extension of Wayland.
And as you say, hopefully I can still use X11 when needed but I wish the more modern option would carry everything I need.
Wayland feels more customizable and modular to me, in that it is a set of protocols and optional extensions with multiple implementations instead of one server (Xorg) to rule them all. This feels much more in the Linuxy/FOSSy mindset to me.
In fact, many, many people complain about the multitude of wayland implementations as fracturing and a division of work.
I'm not saying that I don't see the benefits of all building on a single server, but I can't say a bazaar-style development of multiple implementations and protocol extensions feels at all corporate.
Also funny that you say it's about customizability, having a bunch of implementations of the wayland standard seems more customizable than having the one X server.
The french are very pro EU, maybe more so than the rest of the continent. The french pay attention to strategic things and that's why they project their will into the EU hoping the bigger demography will help keep fighting against the super powers.
Yet they totally fail to realize that the rest of the continent doesn't always think like them. That some countries will never accept a majority vote, that some others just take the EU for it currently is: an economic free exchange zone with democratic requirement.
Still today, for a french commoner, the solution the contradictions of EU, in social, economic or strategic matters is always more europe and be damn if you don't.
Le Pen is not "quite popular". Except in the rich neighborhoods where she's from, it's hard to find anyone supporting her views. However, even in the poor neighborhoods where i'm from, it's more and more common to find disillusioned youths who'll happily announce they will vote Le Pen just to put an end to the current political system. I personally believe that view to be naive and concerns people who watch television, but still, that's not exactly what i'd call being "popular". Except for actual fascists from the big cities, i've yet to find a single person telling me they appreciate Le Pen's racist ideas or even just her person.
To be fair, when i'd say it's naive to vote for Le Pen, i think it's naive to vote for any candidate except maybe for Melenchon who's still on the center of the political spectrum. Otherwise, whether it's Hollande (who was elected with "finance is our enemy" then named Macron the banker as minister) or Macron (who was only elected due to looking less worse than Le Pen but ends up having exactly the same racist/capitalist policies) there's really noone on the political spectrum to propose "progressive" policies and actual implement them. I guess that's something we french people have in common with the US which has a very similar political system and is just as a corrupt and genocidal.
If that was the design, it produced the opposite effect! Lol.
But seriously, there is no grand design. The EU is the result of 60 years of compromises between larger and larger groups of countries which understand that, alone, they count for nothing in the age of continent-sized superpowers.
Did you read those pieces? They say the factors pushing up the French economy are one-offs that will soon fan out, and Germany has massive fiscal resources still to be deployed.
I don't have a dog in this fight, TBH I don't even think it's a fight - the two countries fundamentally need each other.
I don’t have anything to gain either from my position.
The issue with the articles (I can find more from earlier years) is that they’ve been saying the same thing using a variety short term rationale for decades.
imo The EU in general and even internally within Germany itself has fears of a resurgent Germany given its past, which makes sense
When German reunification was being discussed, right after the Wall fell, other European governments (France, Italy, UK) agreed not to oppose it in exchange for German commitment to the European Economic Community (as it was then called) and to adopt the common currency that was then being designed (the ECU was still a virtual currency). This was seen as "straight jacketing" Germany, forcing it to share its economic fortunes with the whole continent, impeding a resurgence of all-out competition with France, and hence ensuring peace. This has been reported by then-leaders who were literally in the room with Helmut Kohl as things were agreed: they called it "reunification (in exchange) for peace".
This approach has fundamentally worked: Germany doesn't, and cannot, see itself in any future that does not involve the EU, and them adopting the Euro ensured its short-term success. It did, however, work a bit too well for the German economy, which now benefits from a large market where other players cannot fix trade imbalances with currency devaluation. That is a structural advantage that they will enjoy for a very long time (possibly forever), enshrining their role as the biggest economy in the bloc. I don't see this changing anytime soon, as long as the Euro is around.
Thanks for enlightening me. Since it wasn’t clear, my question in my first comment was actually a question and not a rhetorical one i.e. I didn’t really know anything
This makes me really curious, doesn’t Github codespaces uses VScode under the hood ?
I had tested a web version of VScode through code-server self hosted.
It is not totally usable for me, there’s too much issue with text selection and scrolling, it works okay for a moment and in other it was barely usable.
I wonder if you have met similar issues or if you succeeded to overcome those.
I self-host code-server and I haven't had _many_ issues, but I'm also using a keyboard -- Magic Keyboard? Yeah, I think that's what it's called.
For background, I have a bunch of VMs on a Proxmox server and I set up code-server on each in a custom Ansible role.
It's very nice to be able to edit config files, etc on each machine through VSCode, and have a terminal emulator built-in.
It's not perfect, and I don't use it much since I also have a laptop, but it allows me to do quick tasks on a specific machine quite quickly and painlessly if I just have the iPad at hand.
