I’ve been looking for a native Mac video client for a long time. For the most part, let’s be honest, VLC fits the bill. But this one is cross-platform and not really a native solution. That’s where IINA comes to play (literally). It’s a gorgeous, modern Mac app that integrates and supports all the things you’d expect from this kind of application. It comes, among others, with the built-in support for Safari, Touch Bar, Dark Mode, Picture-in-Picture etc. If you were missing a well made Mac app to play your videos, or other sorts of multimedia for that matter, look no further.

There I was, wanting to write these every six months… Maybe I will better outline them now that I discovered the absolutely fabulous¹ app named Folding Text. It’s been already over a year after last status post and boy, oh boy, a lot has happened during that time. I’ve got the impression that last eight months everything accelerated so much that it’s hard to keep up.

A new and shiny major release of my favorite backup software. There I was, hoping for the magical 1.0, but hey, it’s not the version number that counts in the end. Last time, back in November last year, I said the following:

This release brings no spectacular changes nor features. Which is good, I don’t want my backup solution to have exciting releases – I want bug fixes and small changes and minor enhancements to its matured, stable state. 0.9.6 bring exactly that[…]

And it’s exactly right – the only thing I forgot was that it was already sixth minor version of the 0.9 release – of course there were no ground breaking changes 🤷🏻‍♂️ This time it’s slightly different, there are plenty of bug fixes squeezed in as well as tons of enhancements and new features. I’m not going to list them all, their release notes are exhaustive enough, but I’ll say this: I’m really excited for the multiple speed optimizations coming in.

Enh #1680: Optimize restic mount
Enh #2195: Simplify and improve restore performance
Enh #2598: Improve speed of diff command
Enh #2773: Optimize handling of new index entries
Enh #2786: Optimize list blobs command
Enh #2790: Optimized file access in restic mount
Enh #2840: Speed-up file deletion in forget, prune and rebuild-index

Meanwhile restic remains my favorite backup solution that I default to use in production and otherwise.

Here’s for the great new release! 🎉

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year already since I covered the private beta opening. I’ve been invited to participate some months later and I did commit to it full-time on the 1.0 release. For my needs it’s fully feature-rich, native, very fast and perfectly suited for the modern Mac. No wonder, it’s made by the fine folks at Panic. Be sure to check very helpful docs and extensions library. I highly recommend to give it a try!

Also props for rewarding beta testers with special offer – very nice touch! 🙌🏻

Vermaden writes:

When you install a Linux system its just a bunch of RPM or DEB packages. For example of you install CentOS 7.8 Minimal variant you end up with several hundred RPM packages installed. After a week or month many of these packages will get updates sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable (recent GRUB Boothole problem for example).

“Sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable[…]” and sometimes it simply works, updates & upgrades just fine and serves for years to come. Look, I know it’s easy to bash on Linux these days and showcase FreeBSD as a remedy to all worlds problems. You can have an awesome experience using Linux and shitty using FreeBSD or the other way around – it’s not the OSes fault how they are being used or misused. I get it, I very often wholeheartedly agree and nod my head when reading articles praising UNIX over Linux, but I do have a problem with setting these two in opposition.

The moment where you focus on comparing every single good part of FreeBSD to every single shitty part (which is very often subjective) of Linux, you are not making any favors to the former. To me it’s admitting that Linux has won (because it did) and the only way to showcase how good BSD is is to bash¹ on Linux. I don’t think it’s right. I think focusing solely on the virtues FreeBSD has is good enough. Otherwise it tends to get tedious to read how something is so much better than in Linux. So what if it is? There are plenty of things done better in Linux, does it prove anything?

There are good reasons and good places to use Linux and there are good reasons and places to use FreeBSD – or any other UNIX really. SmartOS always comes to my mind whenever I think about virtualization – I don’t think there ever was an OS that solved this problem cleaner than them, PowerVM coming second place.² Does this make bhyve worse? No, it has no impact on the quality of it. I also find Solaris Zones to be the best container solution ever made. Does it make Docker worse? Or jails for that matter? Not really.

Overall it’s a great article and source of good parts of FreeBSD (and also good reasons to use it), well worth reading 👍🏻