FOSS Issues on Ivon's Blog

For an Open Source Digital Camera System, It Looks Like the Only Path Is an Android Phone + Open Camera

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:00:00 +0800

I thought about a question: does an open source digital camera system exist?

Does an open source photography image-processing workflow exist? There are open source image-processing programs like GIMP, Krita, digiKam, and darktable. But first we have to solve the problem of the upstream image-capturing device, right?

Those DSLR cameras and camcorders with apertures much larger than phones, such as the ones made by Nikon and Sony, all run closed-source OSes, don’t they?

Is it possible to have a digital camera whose low-level drivers and software are all open? I do not mean just a Raspberry Pi with a camera attached, that kind of toy.

A camera that lacks open source software makes me unable to bring myself to buy it. Actually, I cannot afford it either :P

It is just like how I refuse to buy home consoles such as the Switch or PS5 because I reject proprietary software. They have taken away the open source achievements of BSD. The Steam platform is barely acceptable. But playing proprietary Steam games on a PC is already enough inner torment for me.

Even Android camera photography technology seems to be controlled to a large extent by the algorithms of closed-source apps. Every phone manufacturer develops its own stock camera app, forcing us to depend on these closed-source apps.

Even though we have feature-rich open source apps like Open Camera, FreeDCam, and Photon Camera, they still cannot fully support the lens hardware features of every phone, such as 30x AI zoom or the algorithms behind photo beautification.

As for the algorithms that perform post-processing after a photo is taken, those are even more the trade secrets of the major manufacturers. Sony, Xiaomi, Pixel, and Samsung all have their own flavor. Even if you can port Gcam to other phones, you still cannot figure out what is going on with the algorithms behind it.

As a result, even if photos taken by OpenCamera are a notch below those from the stock camera, it becomes purely a matter of the image sensor’s hardware capability. You need more manual parameter intervention, or you save as RAW and then manually retouch with digiKam.

Still, Android is at least more mature than pure Linux when it comes to accessing camera hardware features. Look at the official AOSP documentation: at least Camera2API can adjust ISO, and Pixel even has official open APIs that let third-party apps use Night Sight.

If you try to drive IMX components in a pure GNU/Linux environment, it is even harder. On Linux, you should already thank heaven if libcamera can make the camera work normally. Nobody is studying the discipline of taking photos.

The guy responsible for writing the Megapixels camera app for PinePhone only barely managed to put together a pipeline.

In short, buying an Android phone with strong enough lens hardware, flashing it with LineageOS, and using Open Camera, just as I did with the Sony Xperia 1 III, is a more acceptable way to do open source photography. If the low-level drivers have to be closed-source, then so be it.

My First Unix Socks

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0800

They say that if you are a skilled Linux user, and you know how to operate unix sock(et)s, then you should wear unix socks. Your coding power will multiply.

Wearing this kind of long socks on a hot day is seriously so hot 🥵

Mm…… maybe my coding power is still not enough. These pink socks can only barely reach my thighs.

Also, the white hardshell jacket I bought a few years ago rather has the feel of Wubai’s Pure White Beginning album cover.

This year I bought this new blue jacket. It looks like an ordinary varsity jacket.

But if you deepen the color scheme a bit, doesn’t this become Tomori Takamatsu’s MyGO band jacket? (hallucination)

This clothing should work for both men’s and women’s fashion, right…? Somehow it feels like I cannot go outside without makeup. I kind of want to try cross-dressing.

Although I know some impressive engineers, some of whom are into cross-dressing and some of whom are transgender people, with my current identity and the people I interact with, wearing this outside would have a much higher probability of social death. So I only share it in cyberspace.

Hackintosh Is Dead, and That Is Fine. Using macOS Is Itself an Act of Promoting an Unfree System

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0800

Hackintosh is (kind of) dead.

Why use Hackintosh? Or rather, why use macOS?

Macbook and iPhone are prisons, yet users willingly accept Apple’s cage. It has even become fashionable, with people proudly identifying as Apple fans and forming commodity fetishism.

Borrowing what Richard Stallman said on RT, ordinary people were persuaded by Steve Jobs’s rhetoric. They feel Macbook is trendy and cool, and voluntarily run to the Apple Store saying, please put handcuffs on me!

Richard Stallman Talks About Free Software RT News (at 10:58)

Here we can add one sentence: engineers think Unix-based systems are convenient, so sacrificing freedom is fine. Give me a pair of handcuffs too! Look, I spent a lot of money buying overpriced handcuffs with my name engraved on them!

Worshiping Apple’s physical products is already exaggerated, but worshiping an OS is even more exaggerated. The Hackintosh community, formed to install macOS on hardware not officially sold by Apple, is a typical example.

In 2020, Apple began migrating toward the ARM architecture and gradually abandoned support for x86 Mac computers.

Combining Apple’s official information and media reports, macOS 26 should be the last macOS version to support the x86_64 architecture. In the future, even the highest-end iMac Pro, as long as it uses an Intel processor, will be unable to upgrade. From now on, only ARM-based Macs can be used.

So ordinary x86 computers will no longer have Hackintosh to play with. Hackintosh is (almost) dead. At least you cannot install the latest macOS. Although older macOS versions can still be installed on x86 hardware compatible with Hackintosh, mainstream software will slowly abandon support. At the current stage, the open source community’s effort to crack Apple Silicon has produced Asahi Linux, but macOS still cannot be installed on ARM devices not produced by Apple.

Actually, I think this is fine. Let people completely give up on Hackintosh. For more than 20 years, those running Hackintosh were essentially engaging in big-company bootlicking.

Let me tell a Hackintosh cold fact everyone knows: when installing Hackintosh, you usually need to add the following string to the bootloader to successfully decrypt the kernel and boot:

ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)applecomputerinc

This string is Dont Steal Mac OS.kext. Look how well they protect their own OS intellectual property! Running macOS on non-Apple-certified hardware is theft! And you actually want to cater to this company’s face?

The bootlickers here exclude those great people enthusiastic about making open source boot solutions, such as OpenCore and Clover. They have contributed a lot, studying the structure of macOS, writing piles of plist and kext files, making drivers not officially recognized by Apple run. Maybe they can truly help the open source community reverse engineer a completely free macOS someday. For example, ravynOS is a macOS-like system mixing the Darwin kernel with FreeBSD open source components. Its existence is somewhat similar to ReactOS, which reverse engineers Windows. Only using Hackintosh for this kind of research purpose is beneficial.

But I am mainly talking about the mentality of Hackintosh users. It is bootlicking, or perhaps calling them “apple” polishers is better? They satisfy their own vanity by cracking the things of a large company. But macOS remains closed source software, evil capital stealing the fruits of the BSD revolution. This is also BSD’s fault. Who told FreeBSD to use BSD license terms that make it easy to get cucked instead of the GPL? Pathetic.

Steam is a threat to FOSS and user freedom on Linux

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0800

Although Steam Has Contributed to Gaming on Linux, We Still Need to Be Wary of the Threat It Brings as Non-Free Software.

Why do users who pursue free software still play closed-source game programs? And help this kind of ecosystem do evil?

Honestly, I can no longer look at any game console casually. Game consoles are also a kind of computer, and they need software. After I learned that consoles such as Playstation and Switch all run on heavily modified BSD systems, and that they are non-free systems, I could no longer accept playing games on them. Game discs are often locked to specific platforms and are hard to circulate. Therefore this is not freedom. I more strongly support playing games on PCs. And when it comes to stores that sell games, the biggest one is Steam, which can also count as a console platform. Besides selling games, it is also a game launcher.

Although Steam has contributed to gaming on Linux, simplifying the pain of playing games through Proton and Steam Deck, it is in reality promoting a closed platform. This is no less than Google Chrome’s ambition to occupy the browser market. After all, it is still proprietary software, and it is driven by a commercial company. Cross-platform support is about expanding commercial reach and covering as many places as possible, not about putting concern for users first, right?

Playing games can easily corrupt the heart. According to the psychological temptation techniques set up by developers, it makes you fall into the traps commercial companies use to seduce you. I know! Not all games are like this, but for games to be fun, they need these mechanisms to tempt people. Psychology is very important in games! Otherwise you would not get addicted to having characters in games call you husband/wife in a daddy-flavored voice!

If Steam has not reached the level of openness of Flathub, then it is still an object we need to be wary of. Valve not doing evil at the current stage does not mean it will not do evil later. We can only hope Gaben lives a long life.

The deeper problem is: why can users who prefer free and open source software make an exception for games? Are games not also a kind of software? I think the discussion here is pretty good: Why are people here so worried about proprietary programs, but games get a pass?

There is also a meme describing this hypocritical mentality. Image source

Here I want to digress a little. Some free software developers have pretty sharp mouths. For example, early versions of Sway did not support Nvidia, partly because Nvidia’s Wayland support was very poor and required workarounds. Therefore, when launching Sway on an Nvidia graphics card, you had to add the --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia FLAG. After Nvidia support improved, this FLAG was changed to --unsupported-gpu.

Also, the author who ported Steam to FreeBSD: shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils, believes Steam has full read access to the home directory, and malicious programs could steal your SSH keys. Therefore, you should create a user account specifically for running Steam. Otherwise you have to add the “I am an idiot” environment variable: DUMB_PERSON_FLAG = '--allow-stealing-my-passwords,-browser-history-and-ssh-keys' before Steam can start.

XFCE Is Outdated. The Unix Philosophy May Not Apply to Graphical User Interface Design

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:00:00 +0800

XFCE is good, but it is outdated.

The current version is 4.20, and the interface is still almost the same as it was 20 years ago.

The so-called Unix philosophy may only apply at the level of system programming. It is not suitable as a guideline for graphical environments built on top of an operating system kernel.

Hot take: XFCE can only be a fallback when other desktops cannot be used properly, because it can still run well without GPU acceleration. Otherwise, this desktop would have been outdated long ago. If possible, you should use the KDE or GNOME desktop. Whenever I see people recommend users anything outside these two desktops, I think they are developers who do not treat users as users, but assume everyone is a kernel hacker. Either that, or boomer mentality is acting up and leaning on seniority.

Tell those anti-Systemd people who keep shouting that Linux should stick to the “Unix philosophy” to use FreeBSD, and they will shut up immediately. After all, in an environment where even graphics drivers can easily have problems, they might not even be able to get online to complain. As for those who can get past this barrier? They will quietly use the system.

If you use a BSD system in pursuit of simplicity, you will also face the fact that desktop environments are influenced by Linux.

BSD’s advantage over Linux is that the system is designed as a complete whole, with system software and third-party software well separated. FreeBSD keeps system configuration files and user configuration files separate; one is /etc, the other is /etc/usr/local/. And FreeBSD’s init has not changed from the past to the present.

This insistence on traditional values of course affects FreeBSD’s mainstream desktop choices. According to a 2022 poll, Preferred DE of the FreeBSD users, the mainstream desktops, aside from KDE Plasma, are XFCE. GNOME does not even rank here.

Some people may be perfectly happy using XFCE. It indeed does not rely so much on the latest Linux technologies, so it can be used across Unix-like systems. There are certainly still many people in the Linux community who prefer XFCE.

But for a user who did not live through the old era, XFCE just looks extremely ugly and outdated. Mate, Cinnamon, and LXDE are not much better. As for the design after GNOME 40, it is too radical. It feels like only zoomers who have had more exposure to mobile devices would like it.

If you dislike all these desktops and want to use a WM? Then it cannot really be called a desktop at all. You cannot say modern people have become decadent, can you, boomer? Nobody can really use a WM comfortably, even if they only use a browser to get online. Desktop functionality is missing here and there, so you install a bunch of independent little tools to fill the gaps. In the end, aren’t you just reinventing the wheel?

The only X11 desktop heavyweight that can look modern while preserving the multifunctionality of a traditional desktop is still KDE Plasma 6. Some people may wonder: did I not install BSD in pursuit of a simple system? Would installing such a huge package of a desktop like KDE not seem to violate the philosophy? I think some people’s obsession with KISS has already reached a pathological level. They always criticize modern desktops as “bloated”, but modern desktops have long since stopped being made from such simple components. They have many services that need to run in order to provide users with a good experience. They have to handle changes across all kinds of different monitor parameters without making users manually write xorg.conf, and that inevitably increases complexity. Otherwise, just use tty.

GPL Is Better Than BSD for Software Licensing: Insist on Militant Democracy and Talk More About Free Software Than Open Source Software

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0800

What makes GPL better than BSD licensing is that it is a kind of militant democracy.

Positive Freedom Beats Negative Freedom
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Adapting the concept of militant democracy (Wehrhafte Demokratie), GPL is a secret formula for protecting the free software movement so it can continue for the long term.

Therefore, software development should use GPL to preserve the spirit of freedom and carry through the free spirit of Copyleft, rather than permissive terms such as BSD, MIT, and Apache. If you are going to use this kind of license that is almost no different from releasing copyright into the Public Domain, you might as well just use WTFPL and be done with it!

We should talk more about Free Software rather than Open Source. GPL does not restrict the freedom; instead, it protects the freedom!

Although both are open source operating systems, where BSD systems fall short compared with GNU/Linux systems is that they lack the spirit of the GPL. Without this moral appeal, the power of the whole community is weakened, becoming pure volunteer labor and a system that lets others take whatever they want.

To put it harshly, the BSD License is basically a “Cuck License,” a cuckold clause. The GPL license is: I let you ride my wife, but your husband also has to let me ride him. The BSD license is: you voluntarily let your wife get ridden by others, receive nothing in return, and still think it is fine!

An image describing the consequences of the Cuck License. The rough idea is that the professor who originally developed Minix released it under a BSD license with the attitude of doing good, never expecting Intel to take it and make Intel ME, a massive surveillance software at the CPU low-level.

From Luke Smith’s website

The hacker community alone is not a powerful enough weapon against the capital of large corporations. It also needs the guidance of the free software movement to protect software freedom. Compared with BSD license terms, GPL can guarantee the healthy future development of software, meaning that after software opens its source code, it must provide equal contribution back, preventing the software from being easily monopolized. GPL itself is unfriendly to existing business models, and the name “free software” is also not as business-friendly as the name “open source software.”

This is built on a high-risk gamble: only if the first company is willing to invest in this rule and spiritually identify with the spirit of GPL can it possibly succeed and develop a complete ecosystem. At present, Linux’s great gamble back then seems to have succeeded. Companies really are willing to support Linux development, with RedHat as a typical example.

Although many companies are now trying to technically bypass GPL, stealing or parasitizing the achievements of the Linux Kernel to develop their own closed-source products, the impact brought by GPL is still enormous, ensuring that the center of Linux is forever free and open source.

A Brief Look at the Similarities and Differences Between Arch Linux and SteamOS

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:00:00 +0800

It is necessary to correct the myth about the relationship between SteamOS and Arch Linux. The two cannot be equated, and using SteamOS does not mean you can say “I use Arch btw.”

Recently, while playing Galgame on Arch Linux, under almost identical testing conditions, Steam games’ Proton kept crashing for inexplicable reasons until I was annoyed. Going back to Debian made everything fine, so let me talk about this issue.

In my humble opinion, rolling-release distributions such as Arch Linux & CachyOS are not suitable for gaming. Semi-rolling releases such as Fedora & Bazzite are not suitable either. Only battle-tested Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS are trustworthy. I really do not know how I dared to play games on Arch Linux in the past, but now I use Debian.

Another consideration is that when reporting game compatibility to ProtonDB, I hope to use a traceable and stable system version. The testing platform should be stable, not a system that keeps changing.

According to information from the SteamOS official website, although SteamOS after 3.0 is indeed developed based on Arch Linux, SteamOS is an immutable system. Users cannot, and should not, modify system files. Every system OTA update downloads a new image to overwrite the old version. Also, SteamOS is not a rolling release. The system update schedule is decided by Valve, a commercial company, not by Arch Linux’s rolling updates.

Valve has its own Steam Deck & Steam Machine product experience to take care of. It wants SteamOS to become a reference console platform, so updates cannot be too aggressive. For example, in 2026, the stable SteamOS 3.7.8 desktop mode still uses KDE 5.27, while Arch Linux’s KDE 6.0 was released back in 2024. KDE 6 in SteamOS 3.8.0 is still in beta. At present, the strategy of SteamOS’s main screen compositor, Gamescope, is to run X11 games through XWayland while also enjoying Wayland HDR support, a stitched-together strategy. Whether it can move toward pure Wayland in the future remains a huge question mark.

Valve must ensure the “entire” SteamOS system and Steam client are stable before releasing updates.

On the other hand, according to the Arch Wiki, Arch Linux’s software update schedule is not fixed. Each piece of software has different maintainers, and the open source community releases it when they think it is stable, letting the whole public beta-test and catch bugs. The testing time is not long enough.

The benefit of this approach is that problems can be discovered and fixed quickly. The downside is that nobody can guarantee whether the current system is completely stable, because there are too many variables.

Arch Linux in its freshly installed state has no graphical interface at all. There is no so-called “default”, no “whole”, and therefore it is hard to do comprehensive testing before releasing updates. A small package update may blow up the KDE desktop.

On Arch Linux, the Steam client is modified by the open source community based on the installer released by Vavle. Even though the Steam client itself has its own Runtime to satisfy Proton execution and tries not to depend on OS libraries, components of the Arch Linux system still affect the Steam client, and random problems can occur.

Brief Review of the Beginner Linux Reference Book Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Is there a Chinese book I can recommend to beginners for learning about Linux, but that is not entirely about server operations and maintenance knowledge?

Recently, while attending a Software Liberty Association Taiwan member meeting, I learned about Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes written by member Chao Wei-lun, so I downloaded it and took a look. I found it pretty well written.

Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes, written by Chao Wei-lun (bluebat, FSF member) and published by the Software Liberty Association Taiwan, is a very detailed Linux reference book. It combines a bit of computer science basics with operational knowledge of modern Linux systems, helping readers understand how Linux runs.

The subject of this book is not the operating principles of the Linux kernel. Instead, it analyzes problems encountered when operating Linux in practice, and explains how to debug system services. Compared with 鳥哥的Linux 私房菜, this book talks more about situations you encounter when actually dealing with hardware.

The book uses the latest Fedora 43 as its example, explaining the operating principles of Linux boot flow, graphics systems, audio systems, network connections, power management, and more. After briefly introducing the principles, it supplements them with actual command operations, using Systemd as the main means of system management. Users interested in everyday use of Linux free software can treat this as a practical reference book and consult it to understand what commands can help debug the system when something goes wrong.

However, the author’s explanations are still mainly command-based. Although the FreeDesktop XDG standards are mentioned, there is relatively little discussion of graphical operations in Linux desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE Plasma, which is quite a pity. And to a large extent, it still discusses operations in the X11 environment, without saying much about Wayland technology as the future trend.

The Linux desktop environment with the highest market share is GNOME. Although the GNOME desktop often randomly moves UI positions in every version update to mess with users, I think the desktop workflow has already “settled” after GNOME 40. It should be possible to explain GNOME’s characteristics a bit; there should not be too much difference caused by Linux system version updates.

This book is published in both print and electronic editions, and the full text can be obtained on GitHub. The book is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Source code: https://github.com/cc-books/testnotes

Buy the physical book: 電腦上試跑Linux: 硬體測試筆記 - 天瓏網路書店

Notes from the SLAT Software Liberty Association Taiwan 2026 Member Meeting

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Because I met Hsu Chia-chun at the KaLuG 2603 meetup and was pulled into SLAT’s exclusive Mattermost small-circle group, I stated that I would definitely attend this year’s Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) member meeting.

March 28, 2026, happened to be the day of the Students’ Information Technology Conference (SITCON). Because traveling from Kaohsiung to Taipei takes too much time, there was no way to make it.

This time I went north to attend the SLAT meeting, but because of Ubus I arrived two hours late. As a result, the meeting ended early and everyone had already run off. GG. I could only awkwardly chat with the people who stayed behind about what was fun at SITCON.

I looked at the agenda on SLAT’s NextCloud. It was mostly sharing what members had done, including the practice of introducing free software into medical systems, and two new books to be published soon, one of which was the printing of 《電腦上試跑 LINUX：硬體測試筆記》. Mm-hmm, it seems… I probably did not need to rush to take the bus early in the morning and suffer from Ubus delays. If I had known, I would have just bitten the bullet and taken the high-speed rail.

After having the experience of attending KaLuG, I knew that although I did not have much to say, I had to gather courage, overcome social anxiety, and not run away directly like two years ago. I had to talk with people. It is a bit of a pity that I did not get to talk with Professor Hung Chao-Kuei.

The main thing was exchanging experiences with Bo-Ren Lin about using reMarkable 2 e-paper. Wow, it is color e-paper. The matte screen makes writing notes feel just like writing on paper. They claim this is an open Linux system that provides SSH and Root privileges, but it is not completely open either. You need to use their proprietary format to install APPs, and you cannot install Linux desktop software. Also, although it supports color, the PPI is low and the colors are dim… at most it prevents you from being unable to distinguish dark tables when reading. Looking at it this way, the NT$20,000 price seems worse than an iPad. I originally thought it could install a Debian system by itself like the Pine64 PineNote, but reMarkable 2 seems to be cut from the same cloth as mainstream e-paper manufacturers.

At this point, Wally Lian came over and told us the story of how their company developed a Jin Yong novels e-paper device and failed miserably.

I also asked Bo-Ren Lin about Ubuntu contributor packaging issues. And where translations should be contributed: if I want to fix missing translations in the GNOME desktop, should I report them upstream or to LaunchPad? I found that even though Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has been out for a long time, there are still incomplete translations. He briefly described the development process to me and said that if it is Ubuntu’s own thing, then contributions should probably go to LaunchPad. Bo-Ren Lin previously noticed that the GNOME desktop’s new-folder action could not use iBus to input Chinese, and helped fix Mutter. So impressive. I think it is because GNOME desktop upstream basically does not want you to put things on the desktop, and Ubuntu applied its own patch, so almost nobody noticed.

Linux Has Become Too Mainstream, So I Considered Switching to BSD or Systems That Follow the Unix Philosophy

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0800

Linux vs BSD for desktop, which one?

Lady Suwako told me that Linux has become too “mainstream”, so should I switch to a BSD system to inherit the Unix spirit? For the past week, this thought has kept appearing. After comparing Linux with BSD (or systems that follow the Unix philosophy), I kept wanting to switch over.

While writing this article, I felt that my digging into these rabbit holes had gone a bit too far.

Life is a well of delight, but once the rabble comes to drink from it, all the springs are poisoned.

The Systemd Controversy: Once Again Standing in the Eye of the Storm
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When Systemd first appeared in 2010, it was heavily criticized by the Linux community. It was merely an init system, yet it tried to cover everything. But time has passed, and now it has become the common standard of mainstream Linux distributions, almost an indispensable system management tool.

Systemd has made everything too complicated, and the spirit of traditional Unix philosophy is disappearing. Systemd’s design affects every aspect of Linux, permeating major distributions and influencing developers’ future decisions. We, domesticated by modern technology, can no longer understand the principles by which operating systems work. Switching to a system without Systemd seems necessary.

Recently, in order to cater to age verification bills being promoted by U.S. states, Systemd developers added an OS-level age verification mechanism: userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records#40954 This PR was quickly approved by Lennart Poettering and others, and they refused to revert it. Presumably Systemd 261 will officially include this feature.

This caused people’s grievances against Systemd to erupt again. Although Systemd’s age verification field is not mandatory and merely provides a field for other programs to access, some users with extreme pursuits of freedom and privacy believe this is the beginning of mass surveillance. The system’s low level fundamentally should not store sensitive data about user identity, and some people are extremely disgusted by public authority intervening in the issue of “os-level age verification.” Systemd manages too much, replacing many system services and violating the Unix philosophy. Now, it is aligning with the interests of large companies and governments. People are forced to swallow it, because Systemd is already the common standard of all major Linux distributions, and upstream changes quietly affect everyone downstream. Anyway, whatever function upstream wants to add, Systemd developers have the final decision-making power. What, you are not convinced?

Governments and corporations always love squeezing people’s freedom. When commercial companies develop software, they seem to like rushing to push new technologies and force everyone to swallow them. This is called Agile development or whatever. They only pursue 90% usability, not 100% stability. Anyway, after release, they keep iterating, exhausting users, and thereby achieve their goal of monopolizing the final right of interpretation. Then, in order to respond to commercial competitiveness and cater to so-called trends, they often make technical changes without regard for user experience, and so individual freedom is sacrificed. Users who have come into contact with the free software movement will surely be dissatisfied with this phenomenon.

You Are Right, but Linux Is a Brand-New Open-World Adventure Kernel Developed In-House

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0800

Question: Does a computer god who is good at programming and releases source code count as a kind of Genshin?

I forgot the beginning, forgot the middle, forgot the ending… ah, it is Linux.

People often say Windows is easy to use, and Linux is hard to use……

My Adapted Version
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You are right, but Linux is a brand-new open-world adventure kernel independently developed by Linus, forming a free operating system together with GNU software. This system takes place in a hacker world called “FOSS”. Here, those chosen by the gods will be granted “GCC”, guiding the power of open source. You will play a character named distro-hopper, wandering around among major Linux distributions. During your free journey, you will encounter open source software with different personalities and unique abilities, defeat powerful proprietary software enemies together with them, and recover the scattered .so files to solve no such file or directory errors. At the same time, you will gradually uncover the truth of RedHat controlling the Linux world……

Original
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You are right, but Genshin Impact is a brand-new open-world adventure game independently developed by miHoYo. The game takes place in a fantasy world called “Teyvat”. Here, those chosen by the gods will be granted a “Vision”, guiding the power of the elements. You will play a mysterious character called the “Traveler”. During your free journey, you will encounter companions with different personalities and unique abilities, defeat powerful enemies together with them, and recover your lost sibling. At the same time, you will gradually uncover the truth of “Genshin Impact.”

Notes From the KaLuG 2603 Open Source Meetup

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:00:00 +0800

Today’s theme continued the lightning talk format. It had been two months since the previous meetup.

At Kaohsiung Student Union, we continued borrowing a free venue in the name of a student club (totally real).

Notes are on HackMD.

First, Shawn shared the development prospects of RedHat OpenShift, explaining the upstream and downstream development relationship between OKD and OCD. He clarified the relationship among Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL, which made me understand that CentOS Stream is not actually that unstable. He thinks its positioning is close to Ubuntu LTS. CentOS Stream still has major version numbers and locks the kernel version. RedHat still sends fixes to CentOS Stream, and then the open source community helps test for bugs. Shawn believes this can form a healthier ecosystem. But I feel that if that is the case… then I might as well just use Ubuntu LTS.

He also introduced the benefits of Fedora CoreOS, which heavily adopts bootc and deploys systems in an image-based way. He mentioned that when the time is ripe, rpm-ostree may be replaced by composefs in the future, which can effectively use the Linux kernel’s erofs mechanism to handle system files. But what I want to ask is: now that there are already products implemented with bootc such as uBlue Bazzite, their biggest problem is that it is hard for users to manually install .rpm files locally; they can only rebuild the system image, called local layering. So how will composefs solve this problem? The two of us did not discuss our way to a satisfactory answer, and this technology is not finalized yet either. We can only wait and see in the future. Honestly, I do not want to manually build an image in the cloud and pull it down for deployment every time I want to install some extra package on the system.

Then I, with my shallow knowledge and limited learning, went on stage to demonstrate Phosh, introducing the development process of the Linux phone ecosystem and the possibility of replacing Android. For the slides, I used the Phosh desktop introduction I made a few months ago. Although everyone present was quite interested in the Poco F1 (postmarketOS) and Pinetab 2 (Arch Linux ARM) I brought, as someone who was tortured by these devices for a long time and finally resigned myself to using an iPad, I had all kinds of mixed feelings… Phones and tablets that can run Linux are indeed very interesting toys, but they are only toys.

Hsu Chia-Chun from the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) demonstrated the AI features of Nextcloud Office. They had already launched Copilot-like assistance features similar to Microsoft Office at the end of 2023, mainly implemented by connecting to external language model APIs such as ChatGPT. However, he mentioned that this cannot be processed asynchronously, and even running a simple text translation takes a long wait… It seems there are still many rough edges. This kind of web-based AI solution should really learn from Google Docs. It is truly a blessing for lazy people.

Explaining the Systemd Controversy Through Literature: I Was Defiled by Systemd

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0800

The book Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter will tell you just how evil Systemd is… or perhaps, let you be seduced by Systemd’s charm?

I was defiled by Systemd… Systemd, this new-generation Linux init system, tramples the dignity of traditional MIS underfoot.

This book really exists!

Amazon purchase link: Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter by Michael Warren Lucas

Just from reading the synopsis, the character that came to mind was the S-type character from Prison School, Meiko Shiraki.

The novel has no illustrations, so I southern-style Photoshopped this fantasy image from my head myself.

Adult version

1. Brief Introduction to the Novel
#

You are in the server room. This is not an ordinary Friday night. Seriously, this is not normal at all. Terry is the stereotypical old-school Unix system administrator. He cares for every server with a delicacy verging on mysophobia, while keeping a safe distance from all “latest-trend garbage technology.” Running a KDE or GNOME desktop on a server? Please, stop screwing around. Want a GUI? Then obediently go back to the FVWM window manager: clean, sharp, no bullshit. And one of the “latest trends” Terry rejects, the one almost the entire world has quietly accepted, is precisely the thing that claims it will replace traditional init: Systemd. Then… Systemd shows up at the door. Wearing absurdly tight leather pants. Yes, this is really not a normal night in the server room.

2. Plot Summary
#

The PDF version can be found online.

The protagonist, a greasy middle-aged system administrator who follows the Unix philosophy, meets a woman named Systemd while handling things at the office. She knocks on the door in the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence, and only then does the protagonist let her in. Then she immediately kisses him.

I Am Not Interested in Bazzite or Omarchy; I Prefer Assembling My Own Linux System

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0800

Bazzite attempts to imitate SteamOS to achieve an out-of-the-box Linux gaming experience. But I think one problem with this kind of atomic distro is that the system is too bloated. And this still makes users who jumped ship from Windows 11 feel that their computer performance improved? That shows what kind of monster Windows itself is.

These Microsoft developers live in a future vision but forget present needs. They only care about realizing what they think is the best design, valuing ideals over reality, which makes them contemptible.

After using Linux for these few years, I have become a user who likes picking my own dishes www I can install the software I want and remove the software I do not want through a package manager.

Maybe my mental state has already left the realm of normal people.

Users should not fear their systems. They should know how to adjust things themselves, rather than having someone else shove something at them and decide what they must do.

I do not really like that kind of “opinionated” Linux distro, just as I do not understand why a bunch of people recommend DHH’s Omarchy. You are not going there purely because the author is anti-woke, are you? Or because of some macOS-like vibe? This is a Frankenstein mashup of Hyprland plus the author’s own dotfiles.

Bazzite’s bloat mainly lies in having lots of preinstalled software, not that the kernel and system services are packed with too much. The developers preinstall a pile of Flatpaks that gamers may need, plus a pile of scripts beginning with ujust, treating you like an idiot and forcing you to swallow their system design. The level of domineering is close to ChromeOS. Since installing Bazzite, I have already removed no fewer than 10 packages.

Although my impression of Bazzite is not that bad, at least it is not deepin with a pile of spyware, I still lean toward the faction that configures things myself.

Because of their system deployment mechanism, immutable distros always have to stuff one huge lump into you, and users have a hard time changing the system structure themselves. I believe GNU/Linux has never had the kind of best “defaults” that Android AOSP has. Even with LineageOS, I have some dissatisfaction, so creating an immutable system that claims to be “standard” does not have much meaning. This is especially true for x86 desktop computers. We do not have as many bizarre drivers to coordinate with as ARM mobile devices, so pursuing a system optimized for one piece of hardware is really unnecessary.

So I prefer the system installation model of Debian and Arch Linux. Traditional Fedora is not bad either. After installing from the ISO, you can pick the dishes you like. They are also bigger names and have more users.

I am too lazy to customize an ISO with debootstrap or deploy a system with bootc. I install everything according to whatever the distribution’s ISO provides. You may say, if you like assembling systems, why not use Gentoo? My skills are too bad.

Thanks to Google Docs for Benefiting Linux Users and Letting Me Almost Never Need Microsoft Office for Office Work

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:00:00 +0800

It seems that young teachers nowadays do not often use Microsoft Office. Most directly use Google Docs to share files, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, class assignments, and so on. But from what I see, older professors are still used to opening Word and PowerPoint in class. Maybe the sample size is too small.

The places I mainly interact with are public and private educational institutions, where there is a lot of document exchange.

In the past, probably more than five years ago, when Windows was still my main system, I used Microsoft Office more. Price was not a problem, because I could always get the whole suite through discounts or educational institutions. Many people also took Microsoft Office formats for granted when exchanging files.

But after switching to Linux as my main system, the occasions where I used Microsoft Office dropped sharply. I began using Google Docs heavily.

Now, sometimes I have to thank the evil Google Docs for letting me almost never need the even more evil Microsoft Office in educational settings, and for giving me a usable option when LibreOffice is hard to use. Because Google Docs only needs a browser, and Chromebook is basically a computer born for this. Also, the Chrome browser, which has the best compatibility with Google products, also has a Linux version, so when working on my main Linux computer, I do not need to open a Windows virtual machine for weird Office documents. I know certain versions of Microsoft Office can run with Wine, but there are many problems. Even though Microsoft Office has launched a web version, its features are so crippled that one might as well use Google Docs.

What about LibreOffice and OnlyOffice? These free software projects have good intentions, but they are useful only when running locally, which looks somewhat outdated in this modern cloud era, and I am lazy. Web-based cross-platform solutions are immature. Not many people have the ability to self-host web-based Nextcloud Office, so Google Docs is the best compromise. Now I probably use Google Docs for 90% of cases, and only very occasionally open LibreOffice when I need to handle complex layout.

Now, for cross-platform office work, no matter what operating system you use, you can work through Google Docs: computers have browsers, and phones have APPs. The benefit is that you are not tied to a single system and software. But the potential downside is that you are tied to a cloud service that is even harder to leave, and Google Docs is not free software. Also, although Google Docs appears compatible with .odt and .docx file formats, it actually mainly uses its own file format, not native .odt, and due to business considerations chooses to lean toward better .docx support. Therefore, after downloading and converting, there is no guarantee the layout will not shift, and interoperability with LibreOffice is not 100%. To fully preserve Google Docs layout and open it in other software, saving as .docx is safer.

I think this has been Google’s layout over the past decade: through a cloud-native-first strategy, paired with Chromebook, it has captured the next generation of office platforms.

Too Many LOSING Wayland Compositors! Is It Really Necessary to Keep Reinventing the Wheel?

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:00:00 +0800

There are really too many losing Wayland compositors! Sometimes when I see someone using a WM instead of a DE, I think they are pretty impressive, but this is very hard to popularize. Not to mention there are even people teaching students in class to install IceWM. Is Linux desktop fragmentation still not serious enough?

Every time I see a new Wayland compositor appear, be like:

Do you not think so? After the Linux desktop gradually migrated to Wayland, at least more than 20 Wayland compositors have already appeared. Besides the better-known Weston (Wayland’s official reference implementation), GNOME Mutter, and KDE Kwin, there are also a whole bunch of Wayland compositors developed based on the wlroots or Smithay libraries, such as Hyprland, WayFire, Niri, Labwc, River, dwl, Hiakri, Miracle……and so on. Many of them cannot even constitute a Desktop Environment; they are just compositors, and you have to find other components yourself to assemble a desktop.

This inevitably makes people think of the glorious scene of the many X window managers in the X Window era. Users of different X11 desktop environments could switch the Window Manager and Compositor to achieve the window effects they wanted. There were at least more than 20 X window managers. However, times have changed. Wayland desktop users should not replace the window manager alone. Either replace the entire desktop environment.

Although the following image is slandering Wayland, it explains very well the role Wayland compositors are now supposed to play. The architecture is simply different from X Window. Therefore, creating multiple Wayland compositors appears unnecessary.

Hyprland author Vaxry discussed this issue in We don’t need more Wayland Compositors. He pointed out that Wayland’s structure is different from X11’s. Because there is no unified X Server now, Wayland only has a set of standard specifications, and it must rely on compositor implementations. Today’s Wayland compositors are responsible for far more than X window managers were. Besides arranging windows, every Wayland compositor also has to handle complex operations such as screen recording and interaction with graphics drivers.

So after many Wayland desktops mature, they will have their own XDG Desktop Portal, so they can implement the common standards defined by FreeDesktop. If you want the kind of simple mechanism and configuration that dwm had in the X11 era, Wayland has already made that very hard. Even Sway, which advertises itself as imitating i3wm, has to develop its own XDG Desktop Portal.

He believes many Wayland compositors are reinventing the wheel, using different code to implement almost the same functions. Some projects may end up buried in the sand before long, and may even have trouble opening a terminal.

If I were to put it more extremely, there are only two desktops in the Linux world worth making serious efforts to improve: GNOME and KDE Plasma. Other desktop environments are not as important as they are.

In the end…the solution proposed by Hyprland’s author is that everyone should just develop based on a small number of desktops as a baseline. For example, develop plugins around Hyprland, allowing users to modify Hyprland’s window arrangement method and replace the role once played by X Window Manager. Instead of writing a pile of Wayland compositors from scratch. But well, Hyprland is written in C++, which does not satisfy some people’s fetish for Rust’s future.

There Are Too Many Linux Distributions and I Do Not Know How to Choose as an Existentialist Philosophical Reflection

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +0800

Why there are so many Linux distros? It is hard to make decisions! Is this a Existential Question?

There are too many Linux distributions, dazzling to the eyes, considered as an existentialist philosophical reflection.

I am surely not the only one who feels this way: why does Linux have so many distributions, and why can they not be unified? This is messier than the Balkans. How is anyone supposed to choose?

This is due to the inertia of open source culture. Let us first not discuss the causes of this phenomenon, or how to solve this problem. We can instead try to think about what meaning this current state brings to people.

Choosing a Linux distribution has never been merely a technical decision. We can think of it this way: in essence, it is a profound existentialist crisis. The moment you bid farewell to the closed greenhouse carefully built for you by Microsoft or Apple and step into the open source world, you become a technical “existentialist.”

This is a philosophical metaphor, from an existentialist perspective, for the distribution choices faced by Linux users.

1. “Existence Precedes Essence”
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Self-construction beginning from a blank terminal.

In the world of Windows or macOS, the “essence” of the operating system is a priori: Apple and Microsoft have already decided for you what the system should look like and how it should operate. You are only a “user.”

But in Linux, especially systems like Arch, Gentoo, or Linux From Scratch (LFS), existence precedes essence. When you finish installing the base system, what you face is only a black terminal interface with a blinking cursor. This is pure existence. It is still nothing, until you make choices: do you want to install GNOME or KDE Plasma? Do you want to use Systemd or OpenRC? Every time you type sudo apt install or pacman -S, you give this computer its “essence.”

You are not using the system. You are creating it, defining what your system means.

2. “Thrownness”
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The dizziness of facing freedom.

“Man is condemned to be free. Because once thrown into this world, he is responsible for everything he does.” – Sartre

When a beginner opens the DistroWatch website and sees hundreds of Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, Arch Linux…), he deeply experiences what Heidegger called “thrownness.” He is thrown defenselessly into an open source universe with no standard answer.

There is no Apple Genius Bar here to tell you what to do. This absolute freedom of choice inevitably brings the “Vertigo” and anxiety described by Sartre. Because freedom means absolute responsibility: if you add the wrong PPA repository or update the wrong graphics driver and cause the system to fail to boot (Kernel Panic), you cannot blame Cook or Bill Gates. You can only face the crashing code on the screen and take full responsibility for your choice.

Debian Is Stable, Fedora Is a Toy. Also on the Immutable Distro Trend

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:00:00 +0800

Debian vs Fedora, which one is more stable?

The answer is Debian with stable updates; Fedora with rolling updates is a toy. Comparing the two, the answer is obvious.

I want a multifunctional and beautiful desktop as my daily system, so I have always been a KDE Plasma fan, staying away from the anti-human GNOME and refusing to use the outdated XFCE. Let me say something intense: GNOME is not the people’s father, so why does it have to be chosen every time!

People keep trying to recommend rolling-release distributions to me, but I refuse!

In a previous article, Can a Linux Desktop Distribution Really Be Both Latest and Stable? Starting From Migrating From KDE Neon to Debian, I said that after these years of difficult exploration, I believe blindly chasing the latest KDE desktop plus the rolling-update Linux distribution model is a total disaster. After using Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora (including Kinoite), and KDE Neon, I did not have a good experience.

Something breaks every month. The desktop breaks, drivers collapse, typing stutters, games freeze, horses jump. This is not something that can be solved simply by backing up and rolling back.

So I went to use Debian Stable + KDE. It does not matter that this KDE version lags upstream by one or two years, as long as Wayland is at least usable. My hardware is not very new, and I do not need to keep updating the latest GPU drivers just to improve performance by 1%. I am also not so idle that I play with the system all day; there is no need to chase the latest KDE features every month. In addition, there is no Snap to make trouble. I have used it for about half a year now, and I feel peaceful.

My life is already chaotic enough. I do not want the only operating system I can control to also be in an unstable state, requiring constant vigilance over what has broken. I want to be a user, not a tester.

Why Is Debian’s Development Model Stable?
#

Given the bad experience Fedora brought me, it is hard for me to recommend Debian Testing. I naturally dislike developers treating users as lab rats. Even adding immutable/atomic mechanisms cannot solve this problem. Upstream features change all day long, and I do not have time to accompany them in this tinkering. They seem very eager to imitate Windows and build a competitive, future-oriented system, so they adopt the rapid iteration update method of commercial software rather than taking user stability into consideration.

Refer to the lengthy Debian package lifecycle in the Debian Handbook, and you will know why Debian is so stable. On my main computer, I would rather use Debian KDE than Fedora KDE.

A development process that easily causes misunderstanding: Debian Sid -> Debian Testing -> Debian Stable. This development process easily makes people think all three are developed separately for a period of time before being passed down, right? No. Debian Sid is updated almost every day, with no version-number distinction.

Ubunchu! Learn Linux Through Manga and Understand Free Software Community Culture

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0800

The world’s first! Ubuntu school romantic comedy manga.

Ubunchu!, whose Chinese translation calls it Wubangchu, is a manga drawn by Japanese manga artist 瀬尾浩史. It was once serialized in Ubuntu Magazine Japan and has now ended.

The manga introduces the Ubuntu system in a light and humorous tone. Whether you are a newbie or an old hand, you can experience the fun of Linux from it.

It does not use the technique of operating system anthropomorphism (OS-tan). Instead, it truly acts out how Linux is used in daily life.

This manga was published in 2009. The system that appears in the manga is roughly from the Ubuntu 9.04 era, and later the heroine spends an entire day and night upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10. Perhaps because of trademark issues, the manga uniformly calls Ubuntu Ubunchu?

Although it is old, the things it talks about are still applicable today! For example, GNOME still occasionally fights with X Server and crashes. ( ~~Just cut X11 support directly and switch to Wayland, then you do not have to worry about this problem~~ )

Compared with Linux comics drawn by Daniel Stori and xkcd, Ubunchu! does not talk about too many technical things. It mainly talks about Linux and free software community culture, as well as the real-world difficulties encountered when promoting Linux to Windows users.

1. Ubunchu! Characters
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如月あかね: President of the System Administration Club. A fanatical Unix believer who prefers browsing the internet from the command line and did not know desktop graphical systems existed until high school.

御堂マサト: A Windows user, vice president of the System Administration Club, and Kisaragi’s archenemy.

椎名里沙: A Macintosh user and natural airhead, but also the first person to promote Ubuntu to the club members.

篠崎あきは: President of the Computer Science Club, opposed to free software solutions.

2. Resources for Reading Ubunchu! Online
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Official website of the manga’s original author: うぶんちゅ！ - 株式会社架空線

This manga is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, and users may freely modify and share it.

English translations (the translators obtained authorization from the original author):

Chinese fan-translation resources online are incomplete.

3. Episode Summaries of Ubunchu!
#

Although this manga series can be freely reposted, for length reasons I only include the covers.

Episode 1: Ubunchu Appears!

うぶんちゅがやって来た！

Linux CLI hardcore faction vs. Windows user vs. Mac user.

Unexpectedly, it is the Mac user who first wants everyone to try Ubuntu? By the end, even the Linux CLI hardcore faction is shocked by Ubuntu’s friendly interface.

As long as you have Wine, you can even play Windows bishoujo games!

Episode 2: CLI and the Little Sprites

ＣＵＩとコビトとお姉さま

Introduces Linux command-line concepts.

In this episode, Shiina Risa treats Linux commands as little sprites working inside the computer, and the Linux desktop environment GNOME happens to mean a small sprite in English.

The Hardest Problem in Programming Is Resisting the Temptation of the Evil Nigger - Terry Davis on Software Development

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:00:00 +0800

Terry Davis - The Hardest Question In Programming

This is the question Google will ask you in an interview. You must answer.

Transcript Translation
#

You must answer: is this the temptation of the evil nigger, or God’s holy wisdom?

That is my question. Uh, I will stop here and leave the rest for you to answer.

You know Google asks interview questions, and the problem I encounter at work is: is this the temptation of the evil nigger?

Is this too much black magic for our mission statement? Our mission in developing this system is to become a modern version of the Commodore 64.

Is this black magic? This is…… this is…… this is black magic.

The question is: is this black magic? This is the hardest question you may encounter in programming.

Here, this is the hardest question. This is the hardest question in programming.

For the temple of the next ten centuries, is this too much black magic?

(For the coined words niggerlicious and voodoo, I did not know how to translate them. Google suggested this is “the evil nigger is tempting you”, so I adopted that.)

Interpretation
#

Some people believe the meaning of Terry Davis’s unclear passage above is: is your code too complex, to the point that it cannot achieve its original purpose, and will people in the future be unable to understand it?

(Note: the title of this article is slightly exaggerated and modified. This sentence is not Terry Davis’s direct meaning.)

When writing programs, we should be careful not to complicate things. If we can use the simplest solution, use it.

In the video, the problem Terry Davis is solving is a HolyC loop.

His goal is to use a switch statement inside a for loop to print numbers, but with a special requirement: add brackets [ and ] before and after the interval from numbers 3 to 6.

The expected output should look something like this:

0 1 2 [ 3 4 5 6 ] 7 8 9

He brings up this example because in the code in the video, he tries writing it like this:

switch [i] {
 case 0: ... break;
 case 1: ... break;
 case 2: ... break;
 start: // label
 '['; // he wants to print the left bracket before entering case 3
 case 3: ... break;
 case 4: ... break;
 case 5: ... break;
 case 6: ... break;
 end: // label
 ']'; // he wants to print the right bracket after case 6 ends
 break;
 case 7: ...
}

The problem is that the low-level operating mechanism of switch involves the C language’s low-level branch table (Jump Table). When i equals 3, the program directly jumps to the memory address of case 3. This means the code written above case 3 is skipped. The CPU does not pass through there; it directly goes to case 3. This code sandwiched between case blocks is called Dead Code in C language logic. Unless you use a very dirty goto instruction, there is no way to get there.