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From: Not Necessary <not@necessary.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: The First Distro To Offer XLibre
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 07:59:31 +0530
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On 01/07/25 5:43 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> More than that, plaintext is amenable to automated tools for finding 
> differences and applying those differences as patches. Those are things 
> you would not want to do just by eyeballing it -- not at the scale at 
> which many Open Source projects work these days.

Plaintext is just human-readable information codified into a binary
format for the hardware to parse / store / transmit. Automated tools to
track differences such as Git work well with plaintext since it is an
uncompressed format, with Git being opinionated about delineation (using
CR / LF / CRLF to split points of difference), assisting tools like
`diff` that SVN couldn't do.

> The difference between “computers” (by which I assume you mean the 
> hardware) and the software that they run isn’t that clear-cut anyway. It’s 
> all abstract machine built on top of abstract machine, at least until you 
> get to the GUI. Then you’re stuck.

Software is explicitly binary where it connects logical pathways etched
in hardware for electric current to flow in a certain way.

Abstractions are for us humans to make sense of the whole thing; i.e.
how and where to transmit signals and information to do a specific task.
At the hardware level, there is nothing but binary. At the end of the
day, a computer (specifically micro-processor) is nothing more than
billions atom-sized switches interconnected to each other in specific
patterns.

Also GUI is just one of the many paradigms of computing interfaces. Just
because we as humans parse our world in a visually `object-oriented'
manner, we connect better with graphical objects such as files and
folders over text commands. Although, the desktop metaphor is slowly
being obsolete, and app-based interfaces are taking over; thanks to the
proliferation of smartphones.