Re: The First Distro To Offer XLibre

On 02/07/25 3:51 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

So where does the “computers can’t understand plaintext, they

understand binaries” come in?

The computer does not understand the `glyph'; we do. Plaintext is the
glyph that we read and write with. Digital computing devices can only
use the encoding for the glyph, based on the software it is provided to
do so.

What if it’s in ROM? What if it’s in the ROM of a power controller or
management-engine chip that’s built into the motherboard or even
integrated into the CPU die, that needs to start up before your CPU

can even work?

You are conflating two different concepts: A sequence of zeros and ones,
even if it is etched permanently on to any integrated circuit is still
software; they are instructions, not pathways. Current can only flow
through pathways. Instructions, even if they are part of the circuit
design and integrated within it, is low-level software.

Sure you can. It’s all abstract machines on top of abstract machines:

you can build a more special-purpose CLI on top of a more
general-purpose one.

Can you name a special-purpose CLI on top of a general-purpose one? The
only ones I can think of are multiplexers like tmux.

And at the final step, you can build GUI front-ends to CLI tools.

You are using a CLI tool as an API for your GUI front-end. There is no
interaction with the command line.

I’ve got news for you: Emacs has long had the option to run in its own

GUI windows, independent of any terminal (though it can still work
through a terminal). It also includes the basics of a GUI toolkit, for
you to create custom interfaces to an Emacs extension.

I'm not referring to the Emacs GUI interface. Emacs can also be used
right on the terminal itself. Fedora, Arch, and Debian pack it
separately as `emacs-nox'.

No you don’t. Emacs can run CLI commands that take input from editor
buffers and return output to editor buffers. And of course there is

copy and paste between editor windows and terminal windows.

If you use the terminal version of Emacs, you enter into the Emacs
editor interface, where you cannot pipe or re-direct data to the
terminal. You are bound to the Emacs terminal interface. You have to
`freeze' the program to escape back (Ctrl + Z) to the command line
interface.

You *do* realize KDE is just a framework for implementing Dolphin and
other apps, right? So yes, they *are* built on top of KDE!

I hope you know that Qt is the framework; Dolphin uses KDE as a UI stack
to standardize user interface elements such as menus, menu placement,
icons, colors, etc. You don't need the KDE Desktop (Plasma shell
nowadays) to run Dolphin; it can run the same on GNOME or Openbox (even
Windows once upon a time!) just fine.