One of my favorites!

All 3 books in the first uplift series work fine as stand-alone stories. But book 1 (Sundiver) does kinda read like a prequel to the rest of the series. The inciting incident of Startide Rising is what sets everything else in motion for all subsequent books, and Sundiver takes place before that. But it does have a bunch of world building that is helpful context for the other books (and is still a fun story).

I recommend you read Startide Rising first, then circle back to Sundiver if you are enjoying the world and the author’s style.

You said that Xorg being abandoned is the problem. How should we interpret that, other than a criticism of the decision-making process of the devs?

I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.

FYI

Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.

Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.

Then the problem is that it’s abandoned, not that it has stagnated

By all means, feel free to start working on it!

All the people who developed Xorg for 20+ years decided that creating and working on Wayland was a better use of their time. But I’m sure you know better…

The problem isn’t that Xorg is spaghetti code (it’s pretty good for a large C project, imho). The problem is that the X11 protocol was designed to expose the capabilities of 1980s display hardware.

Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

Pioewire handles audio and video pipelines between applications.

Previous to the switch to snaps, Ubuntu was providing the latest version of Firefox built for each supported Ubuntu release. I’m sure this was more work, but the older system library version issue was not a blocker.

Edit: in fact, Mozilla still provides an apt repo with Firefox deb packages built for each supported Ubuntu release.

Smart card support is still completely broken. I kinda need that to use Linux for my work PC.

The install images that included the non-free-firmware were marked as “unofficial”.

You see the problem?

No. I just looked at that instance’s front page. If the lemmy.world admins didn’t take action, I don’t see how I could continue to trust their judgement in enforcing their code of conduct going forward.

If you trust the judgment of the (admins of the) sites you are syncing with, this isn’t a problem. If you don’t trust that, don’t sync with them.

For instance, if I wanted to run my own server, I would absolutely sync with lemmy.world’s block list. I agree with their stated defederation policy, and have seen no evidence of the admins disregarding it.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding what this tool does?

If the single user on such an instance is so obnoxious as to be defederated from multiple larger instances, making them spend time and money to come back is a good thing.

Having a dream journal (and a habit of using it) can help you retain the dream at least long enough to record it.

It might be possible to trick the app’s activation function. But before you can do that, you’d have to understand how it is checking for virtualization, so that you know what aspect of the VM’s behavior to tweak.

Someone on Lemmy might be able to help you with that, if they knew what app you were trying to use…