I wanna give a shoutout to Manjaro, an arch based distro with a cascading testing cycle for better stability. That being said, I am using Arch and Manjaro for about a decade now and never really had any stability issues (in contrast to my tries with Ubuntu). The arch wiki stays one of the absolute best resources for Linux users on the internet, the rolling release ensures cutting edge Software, the AUR makes it very easy to provide community built packages. And then there’s Debian. Definitely my choice for servers.

Haha. 🤣 Made my day

Tbh, I understand the problem. There are just so many volunteers for making newer developments work on every platform. Streamlining the development and easing the load on the volunteer devs seems a good idea. Having that said, it’s ofc a pity to drop support for devices. At least the LTS kernels will support the current support for a while and the vibrant Linux community will find a good way to work it out, I have no doubt. Many machines, in particular old ones, run with very old kernels to begin with…

Most ML development is done in Python to my knowledge. The reason is mostly the readily available side packages like torch, scikit-learn, etc. And Python, although not constructed as such, does indeed support a functional style. A quick search revealed a HowTo:

https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html

Appreciate the KISS perspective.

For me, the project management features of a forge are extremely helpful. Setting milestones, assigning issues to them, defining timelines and regularly reiterating the planning has proven to accelerate our work as a team significantly. This experience refers to huge code bases (climate models) and medium to large team sizes, though. And probably also my bad memory 😵‍💫

I suppose it’s always good, though, to evaluate how much management a code will actually need in the end, and what tools correspond to that need.

That’s a great recommendation, thanks! The pay per use model seems very fair and I like their approach to sustainability matters very much.

Thanks! Will have a look

While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.

Schleswig-Holstein therefore follows the general strategy to move towards an open source driven administration. In fact, several federn institution already migrated to the openDesk administration bundle (https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/). Great!

There’s many pathways to get there. In my case it’s a classic science career. Whether that is better for the WLB is likely open for debate. 🙈 There’s a growing understanding in science that there’s a need for tenured scientific programmers supporting the compute infrastructure and development. These roles are quite rare though and thus there is tons of competition. Long story short: It’s a challenge. The good thing is that there’s many jobs out there with the meaning we seek.

I’m involved scientific programming tasks (climate models) and we are largely using a mix of prototyping, feature-driven, and big bang models. It’s a result of the requirements for our work. Important is, that our “user base” is extremely small and in the beginning of a project mostly ourselves. The required features are given by the scientific questions and timelines dictated by project timelines from soft funding. Iterations are thus mostly more like “that didn’t quite work, I need another method” kind of arguments. Hence, the implementation of modular and fast evolving design is important and often we try to build our software such that fast development can be done on individual models.
Sometimes theres an idea on how to solve a problem more efficiently or with better performance. And then it’s all about coming up with any proof of concept.

Finally, there is not really anything like a management in our line of work. The professor is usually satisfied if the results work out and papers go out quickly. The rest ist largely up to the group of devs.

The initiative to build FOSS alternatives for the administration in Europe goes back years. In a nutshell: Corporate software is getting very expensive for the administration and poses security risks. As an alternative, FOSS Software is put together to replace the administrative systems. The reason there is so many news now is that the first Software bundles are being released and are coming online in databases.

To give that more context: The BundesMessenger is developed for secure communication in the German army (named Bundeswehr in German). So it’s most likely not only about cash but also about security. It’s e2e encrypted, can be federated to several locations, etc. Seems a smart move to me. Edit: Actually I’m mistaken. It’s for the whole public administration. Not only the army. Not sure how I got that impression. Argument holds, though. 🙈

For some reason I don’t find it very bizarre. I’d even speculate that a random human mind isn’t any less weird. Surly, the pathways of my thoughts are often very bizarre. 😅