In 2026 instead of "Here's some stuff we wrote that you won't read." it's "Here's some slop we couldn't be bothered to write but why don't you read it."
I gave it a quick go and very few things work at the moment. None of the programs you listed do.
From the README:
At the moment it can render simple applications that do GLX, EGL or Vulkan graphics (fully hardware accelerated) nested in an existing X server.
And that sounds about right. As far as I can tell it doesn't yet have a lot of the core X11 stuff that "normal" clients expect. For example xterm doesn't start because requests like X_AllocColor, X_OpenFont, X_PutImage (a few picked at random from the error output) are not implemented yet.
It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!
There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.
Datahand user, for me switching back and forth between the DH and a regular keyboard (a Thinkpad for the most part) is not a problem at all. It doesn't even feel particularly annoying, I think it's because it almost feels like a different input device category. Kind of like playing the same game on the Steamdeck with controller input and then later on the desktop with keyboard and mouse. I might prefer one but I am fine with the other too.
BTW, I've played about 15K matches of my favorite MOBA on the Datahand, works surprisingly well for that, I imagine the Svalboard would too.
I am a longtime (25+ years) Datahand user. I have converted my units to a USB capable controller long ago and I have some extra ones as spares/parts but it might be difficult to get another 25 years out of them.
Haven't tried the Svalboard yet but it's the only obvious way forward that I know of so happy to see any new information about it. I'd be especially interested in the opinion of other Datahand users regarding the Svalboard, specifically the hardware, the switches and overall feel.
Ex-Datahand user, current Svalboard user: (Disclaimer, I work on their firmware as a volunteer, they send me hardware.)
The designer was 100% dependent on his Datahand, now he uses a Svalboard.
When I got sent my first Svalboard, it was so close feel wise that my old muscle memory came back instantly and I started complaining that the layout wasn't the same as the old Datahand Dvorak layout. I ended up doing a faithful port of that layout, then ever time evolved it to the layout I use today.
If you doubt, order a test cluster. You'll see how close it comes.
On the discord some users are willing to meet-up with people to let them try a board in real life.
The Go toolchain is a nice illustration of this approach working in practice. It fully bootstraps in 90 seconds on my aging laptop and since it's fully self-hosted it doesn't even need a C compiler unless you want cgo support.
LLVM takes 2 hours to build on the same host and zig (with the LLVM backend) is another 20 minutes. It will be awesome if that can be brought down to 2 minutes or less.
> Is that building Go with Go? Or actual bootstrapping?
Normally it's just Go with Go. Besides the Go compiler you need bash if you want to use the normal bootstrap script but not much else. You can build your way up from C by building an old enough version of Go that was still C based but that's not usually done these days.
Sometime after Minix 3 but before it had attained the critical mass for a self-sustaining community, compilation times went from 10 minutes on low-end hardware to ~3 hours, and the answer to the question "Why?" was "LLVM/clang".
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