Re: The First Distro To Offer XLibre

On 01/07/25 8:20 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

But you said “computers can’t understand plaintext, they understand
binaries”. But if they’re the same thing, then why would computers
understand one but not the other?

The characters or glyphs we see are ultimately mapped according to the
encoding format, which represent a numeric value for that character or
glyph. The computer can't understand the glyph; we do. It can only use
the numeric value associated with it to store / parse / transmit it.

So do “microcode” and “firmware”. Are they part of the “software” or the
“hardware”?

Microcode is software, and so is firmware.

It’s the one layer of abstract machine that is not designed for additional
layers to be built on top.

GUI is one of the paradigms of user interface, just like the CLI is. You
can't build an interface on top of a CLI. A program using a
pseudo-graphical interface such as Emacs on the terminal does not build
``on top'' of the CLI -- one loses the ability to pipe and redirect data
that they can do on the command line. Likewise a file manager such as
Dolphin isn't build on top of KDE. They are both different ways of
interacting with the computer. Pseudo-terminals are akin to remote
desktop clients -- they connect to a ``session''.