Re: The First Distro To Offer XLibre

On 01/07/25 5:43 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

More than that, plaintext is amenable to automated tools for finding
differences and applying those differences as patches. Those are things
you would not want to do just by eyeballing it -- not at the scale at
which many Open Source projects work these days.

Plaintext is just human-readable information codified into a binary
format for the hardware to parse / store / transmit. Automated tools to
track differences such as Git work well with plaintext since it is an
uncompressed format, with Git being opinionated about delineation (using
CR / LF / CRLF to split points of difference), assisting tools like
`diff` that SVN couldn't do.

The difference between “computers” (by which I assume you mean the
hardware) and the software that they run isn’t that clear-cut anyway. It’s
all abstract machine built on top of abstract machine, at least until you
get to the GUI. Then you’re stuck.

Software is explicitly binary where it connects logical pathways etched
in hardware for electric current to flow in a certain way.

Abstractions are for us humans to make sense of the whole thing; i.e.
how and where to transmit signals and information to do a specific task.
At the hardware level, there is nothing but binary. At the end of the
day, a computer (specifically micro-processor) is nothing more than
billions atom-sized switches interconnected to each other in specific
patterns.

Also GUI is just one of the many paradigms of computing interfaces. Just
because we as humans parse our world in a visually `object-oriented'
manner, we connect better with graphical objects such as files and
folders over text commands. Although, the desktop metaphor is slowly
being obsolete, and app-based interfaces are taking over; thanks to the
proliferation of smartphones.