The unintentional theme of today’s Link-o-Rama is, apparently, tech nostalgia and why old tools are the best tools.
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The File Transfer Protocol is now 50 years old. 50. FTP has outlasted quite a few protocols in that time, evolved a great deal, and been used to transfer Heaven only knows how many files. I hope that Abhay Bhushan is basking a bit in the knowledge that his creation is still widely used half a century later.
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Email vs. Tool du Jour: a screed against adopting the tool du jour rather than sticking with email and discussion about levels of communication.
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FVWM(3) and the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop: Apparently FVWM(3) 1.0.0 was released last fall, which I completely missed. It’s been ages upon ages since I used FVWM, but it was my go-to desktop environment window manager in my early days of using Linux. Specifically, FVWM-95 back in my Slackware days. It just seemed so modern then. Now it holds a lot of nostalgia for me. It might be my equivalent to a ‘57 Ford Ranchero to my dad. “Yeah, we restored this 486/66 with a custom power supply and souped up VGA video card…”
These days I use GNOME + the PopOS tiling extension. I spend most of my time in a browser or terminal anyway, I want the desktop to stay out of my way. But I sometimes miss tinkering with the window manager and tricking things out. I’m a little tempted to throw FVWM(3) on a spare machine and try it for a while as a main desktop just to see how it’s evolved.
Speaking of Slackware, I hear there’s a Slack 15 beta making the rounds? I’ll definitely want to give that a test spin. It’s been a while since I really spent quality time with other distributions…