------------------------------- Wed Apr 15 06:58:34 PM EDT 2026 ------------------------------- Transcript of Chat box from BLU meeting, Wed, Apr 15. 2026 Meeting held online via Jitsi Meet In attendance (10 total): Speaker(s): * Chris Allen BLU officers: * John Abreau * Jerry Feldman * Bill Ricker Attendees (named): * Anastassia Curry * Arnie * Brandon Vogel * Jeff Gold * Mike S. * Randy ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Anyone see the news out of France this past week? https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/ 19:07 Brandon Vogel says:Finally the year of the Linux Desktop (hahaha)?! 19:07 ------------------------------------------------- Jeff Gold says:Good progress, if it happens. 19:08 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:So I'm heading to VCF East this weekend in Wall, NJ. I wonder if they will have any 'vintage' Slackware running on anything. 19:12 Brandon Vogel says:Info here if interested: https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/ 19:12 ------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:I remember back in 1994 wehn I first heard about Linux, the first few things I saw recommended the SLS distribution, but when I went to install it, it failed miserably. John Abreau says:When I posted a question to usenet, every response I got pointed me to slackware. 19:14 ------------------------------------------------- Anastassia Curry says:Nice! 😄 19:20 ------------------------------------------------- Mike S. says:A neat thing about Slackware is that up through 14.2 (what would be old-stable if they used debian terminology) it had the version of the man package that Federico maintained instead of the usual man-db. 👍 19:22 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:FSF (Free Software Foundation) link: https://www.fsf.org/ 19:40 ------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:Vendors used to differentiate themselves with what they called "Value Added Services". UNIX users wanted compatibility across different vendors' UNIXes, and I liked to refer to the era of UNIX fragmentation as "Value Subtracted Services". 19:41 ------------------------------------------------- Jeff Gold says:Has anyone tried to follow what became of Solaris? It's wild. 19:42 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Here is an original thread on the announcement of Linux from 1991 - second message in the thread is the actual announcement: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html 19:43 ------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:thanks Brandon 19:48 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Great talk, Chris! 19:54 ------------------------------------------------- Mike S. says:(no mic) I've gone through it. It's interesting but laborious. Kind of karate kid wipe on wipe off way of learning. I'm tempted to go through again, but I'm finding an obscure distro named sorcery to be more of a happy medium. 19:56 Mike S. says:Source Mage, that should be. 19:57 ------------------------------------------------- Anastassia Curry says:Chris, How do you see AI changing the overall development lifecycle in Linux/Unix environments, from architecture and long term system maintenance? 19:58 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Recent news about the Linux AI policy for kernel submissions / PRs: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-and-maintainers-finalize-ai-policy-for-linux-kernel-developers/ 20:01 ------------------------------------------------- Anastassia Curry says:Thank you! 20:05 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:The actual AI guidance given by the kernel peeps: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst 20:07 ------------------------------------------------- Mike S. says:(C vs. asm hello world): but how much of the overhead for the C was fixed cost, e.g. setting up runtime maybe running ld.so ? 20:09 ------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:I'd be interested in a python compiled version (.pyo) 20:14 ------------------------------------------------- Anastassia Curry says:would you guys agree that your lack of confidence comes from the risk of bad code , security vulnerabilities or the possibilities that developers stop thinking critically 20:15 ------------------------------------------------- Mike S. says:Just started using it to check shell functions I write, after running shellcheck (a static analyzer / linter) that is more predictable. It reminds me of things sometimes that shellcheck cannot by its nature, which is handy, but it misses obvious things too. And I'm getting the sense if I refine a function two or three times, no matter what I do, it compliments me profusely saying this version is super robust and I am a programming god. So emotional support dog? 😂 20:23 ------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Could everyone but the speaker mute for this part? Getting terrible echos on the line. 20:29 Brandon Vogel says:Yeah, we are in the baby stages of this still with popular adoption, commercialization, and finding the correct uses of this - reminds me of the dot-com bubble in many ways. 20:32 ------------------------------------------------- meeting ended at 8:49 pm