The FOSDEM speakers are sent emails to review and approve the video recording (this involves rudimentary stuff like reviewing the start and end time, if the automated system didn't get it right; choosing one of the three audio channels etc). The recordings that have been reviewed and approved would be online by now.
Look forward to ye olde uncle Lennart's old-timey sales pitch.
I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel (keeping that typo) support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.
Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).
This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.
The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.
It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.
I do not share your view of old timey sales pitch, at least for the talk about systemd nspawn OCI container support.
If anything, that talk was a tad low effort, with even dismissive answers — "Yes" and "No?" as full answers to audience questions, with no follow up?! Still very informative though!
The Varlink talk really was very salesy for a Fosdem presentation. Shouldn't be long until the recording becomes available, feel free to tell me I was wrong after watching it.
It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM.
Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.
> It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
He held a similar talk at All Systems Go I think (I missed the talk here at FOSDEM).
> It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk.
Varlink isn't something he just made up, he mearly "adopted it" (started making use of it). It existed before, but I don't know anything that really made use of it before.
The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.
An announcement post [2] from later in 2017, by Harald Hoyer, says that the varlink protocol was created by Kay Sievers and Lars Karlitski in "our team", presumably referring to the systemd team.
So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?
While I guess you aren't wrong, I also wouldn't say you are entirely correct that Kay is a systemd developer. He use to work on udev, but hasn't been active in any meaningful way on it for 2 years before varlinks release[1]. For what it was made I can't really say, but Lennart hadn't start integrating Varlink until a while after its release (I think I remember it being like 2021 or so when he started making use of it, after another check it seems the start of varlink stuff in systemd was 2019[2]).
Kay Sievers' Wikipedia page cites a blog post by Lennart Poettering [1] which says that systemd was designed in "close cooperation" with Kay Sievers and that Harald Hoyer was also involved, so it seems pretty clear that he's on the team that develops systemd, the team that Harald Hoyer referred to as "our team". All three of them gave a talk [2] together in 2013 about what they were developing.
If Lennart Poettering "adopted" varlink, he seems to have done so from members of his own team ("our team") who created varlink and who are also fellow co-creators of systemd.
Hehe, I'm eagerly waiting for this one as well as I'd be extremely happy to replace some hack to run docker images with `systemd-nspawn` served from the nix store.
> The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys.
FOR NOW. Policies and laws always change. Corporations and governments somehow always find ways to work against their people, in ways which are not immediately obvious to the masses. Once they have a taste of this there's no going back.
Please have a hard and honest think on whether you should actually build this thing. Because once you do, the genie is out and there's no going back.
This WILL be used to infringe on individual freedoms.
The only question is WHEN?
And your answer to that appears to be 'Not for the time being'.
I remember my parents doing online banking authenticating with smart cards. Over 20 years ago. Today the same bank requires an iOS or Play Integrity device (for individuals at least. Their gated business banking are separate services and idk what they offer there).
I don’t see much Wayland hype. It’s boring plumbing for most people, isn’t it? Most of us are just going along with whatever the volunteer plumbing community decided to put together.
I'm also not a big fan of Wayland, to be honest. But that's the way the winds are blowing. X11 has its problems, but even if they are fixable, no one seems to want to work on Xorg anymore. I'm certainly not prepared to maintain it and push it forward. Are you?
Depending on Xorg today is more or less ok, but I do expect distros will stop shipping it eventually.
Are you willing to write accessibility support for the new xfce only wayland compositor? How will you get every other wayland compositor to support your non-'wayland core' accessibility extension?
People like to frame things like the waylands are some sort of default and nothing is being lost and no one is being excluded.
Everyone has settled on an accessibility standard (Matt Campbell's). So it's not "your" accessibility protocol, it's already "the" accessibility protocol. This is working as intended IMO: allow things to compete and future in the wild and then pick the fittest.
Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter, and GNOME's DE's userland as of this last 6 months. I would very happy to hear about even this extension supported under other wayland compositors and software. Do you know of any?
Since you seem informed perhaps you can clear something up for me, when Cambpell says "push full accessibility tree to trusted clients" does that mean you get the entire desktop tree, or only for that application?
Because if you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is highly incompatible with existing solutions. They say it is compatible because application developers can create a new virtualized thing themselves. But that's not compatible. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user I am someone. I am a human being.
And Campbell's assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by arguments informed from problems that don't even apply generally. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children
If the XLibre project appears to be making enough fairly-consistent progress for you to be comfortable tossing around some cash, then do gather up some likeminded folks to hire a dev to follow the guidance here [0] and help out!
Do note that I've never tried to croudfund a programmer, but that's something that I have to believe is possible to do.
Given that FDO [0] has been screaming about how Xorg is dead and Wayland is (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) ready for everyone and every use case for the past like ten+ years, I remain somewhat wary about their opinions regarding Xorg development.
Maybe XLibre will be a damn trainwreck, or maybe it'll be to xorg what xorg was to XFree86. I intend to find out through the testimony of users of XLibre.
[0] ...or maybe just a very vocal subset of the folks at FDO...
Some cognitive dissonance going on here. The vast majority of current Linux Desktop users are on Wayland, and X11 is phased out across the board. Calling it hype is absurd.
I'm so surprised to see that folks rediscover Unison in 2026 :) It is a unique piece of software which has been around for 20 years or so. The two way sync is great but also a bit scary since it can wipe files.
I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces.
I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS.
I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is, in a comfortable 3rd place.
>I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces.
Wrong. Linux is open-source: if you don't like it, you're free to fork it and do it your own way. If some forces tried to make Linux too Windows-like, surely someone would do this. We already have a bunch of different desktop environments because Linux people can't agree on one (one distro, Mint, even replaced Gnome with not one, but two different DEs: Cinnamon and MATE).
"Corporate forces" aren't going to somehow take over Linux and make everyone use a Linux distro that looks like Windows 11 (or worse, Windows 8). They can try of course, and they might get a ton of new people using Linux that way, but it isn't going to kill off the more traditional distros, just like Android didn't somehow kill off Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Mint/openSUSE/etc.
>I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS.
Like Android?
>I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is
Programming is essentially automation. You tell the machine what to do character by character, and if you get it right, the machine will be able to correctly interpret your intention, transform it into a lower level code, and then execute it.
AI is also automation but the instructions are given in a higher level language.
You still have to know how to automate it. You need to instruct the machine in sufficient detail, and if done correctly the machine will once again be able to interpret your intention, transform it to a lower level code, and execute it for you.
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