November 11 2025 End of Windows 10, INDI, Dlang and Python, JPEG 2000, systemd, UNIX V4

John reported that the person for whom he had installed Linux Mint following the end of Windows 10 support was very happy with the result. He only uses his laptop for emails, the Internet and his camera, for which John had installed Shotwell. In response to a question about why he had not gone for OpenSUSE, John said that OpenSUSE is dropping support for the earliest versions of x64 chips in OpenSUSE Leap next year and his laptop would not have been able to use OpenSUSE Leap thereafter.

Bernie gave an update on the INDI terminal program which he is developing. He showed some of the segments of code which he had used, noting that, because SQLite can do concurrent reads but not concurrent writes, he had specified that everything uses a single thread. If no database is available, the program creates one.

Each segment is enclosed in a <div> and John commented that the HTML elements are really aimed at text documents whereas the segments are parts of a process rather than a text document; so this seems an appropriate use case for <div>.

The web server is Uvicorn — the name arose from the use of uviloop — and the templates are the Mako templates for Python.

Darren is planning to do his final OU project on a comparison between Python and Dlang; he is also interested in the value of Ternary logic computing. David commented that it is trivial conceptually but its only advantage is in power consumption and he wondered if that would make it worthwhile.

Darren also mentioned that Okular cannot handle JPEG 2000 images; John noted that there appear to be no KDE programs which support it whereas there are Gnome programs which do.

This led into a discussion of how inferior approaches can come to dominate an area of IT because people are not prepared to abandon what they already know.

David mentioned that there had been a recent dispute within Debian when the Debian committee overruled the Debian maintainer in relation to a systemd update. John noted that OpenSUSE had also declined to use some aspects of systemd.

David also mentioned the 52 year old data tape that could contain the only known copy of Unix-V4.

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