FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi: you fell for it!

The idea is grand: running glorious (until lately) FreeBSD OS on the cheapo Pi hardware. Sounds great on the surface, but the genius implementation is, as always, flawed.

As you might know, FreeBSD out of the box comes with its most critical component missing, although bootstrapped to install itself on first use. I am referring to pkg

Problem is that there is no working repository for it on the FreeBSD servers and it has to be built from source, which takes countless hours on Pi hardware. But first one has to install and extract the ports tree, which in turn takes countless hours.

Both should come on the image OOB, but being genius, the maintainers follow the orthodoxy of their OS rather than common sense, wasting users' time and wearing down their SD cards. How typical!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Adobe kills Reader in one strike of a keyboard

Adobe reader used to be a Windows forms application with highly customizable toolbars. Not anymore. The new DC version crosses over 20 years of GUI application development and reverts to the pre-Windows95 static toolbars layout.

Why am I getting my pants in the knot? Should I? Well, for someone, who actually WORKS with PDFs, it is kind of important for me to view 2 pages of a PDF file side by side at 100% zoom level. I own 1920x1200 pixel 24 inch monitors specifically for that single purpose. So what is wrong with the Acrobat Reader DC, you ask?

The static tab bar and toolbar of the DC take too much space on my monitors and no longer allow the document to be viewed on them at 100% zoom - exactly as they would look on paper. Adobe should have known better for crying out loud.

Adobe, why do you have the urge to destroy the value in your products and replace them with sad caricatures on them?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Firefox never releases memory which it allocates

A family member's machine which is running 24/7 became slow. I took a look and found that practically every task which used to be instant now took a long time to complete, freezing along the way.

The root cause: Firefox, open for the last month or so, allocated 5+ GB of RAM with about 8-10 tabs open. It has been my experience with Firefox that it allocates but never releases memory, and when it allocates, it does so lavishly, using incomprehensible amounts of RAM. This is what it currently looks like on the machine from which I am making this post:

Notice the allocated memory from only 6 tabs! Fortunately I have 16 GB available and do not feel pressure at the moment.

Mozilla developers are clearly genius, but they are exactly who never give a f__k about usability. And that is why you should never hire genius open-source developers: they will leave you ruined as soon as they would become bored or you pressure them for quality of code.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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