First of all, they were developed around the same time; second, no one said that a protocol should remain unchanged for 35 years. And lastly, the people in “what’s wrong with these people” are the people pretending gopher is any good today, and a reasonable alternative to the web, which factually isn’t the case as apparently it did remain unchanged for 35 years. And if it didn’t remain unchanged but did not add certificates, it would just make things look even worse.
Wait, gopher didn’t use certificates? What’s wrong with these people? And of course these are going to be just gpg certificates, not authoritative I imagine, or it would defeat the entire decentralised thing.
I really don’t get this stuff. If you want pure text websites, just make them, you are allowed to use pure html, you don’t have to use JavaScript if you don’t want to. You can get real certificates for free from Let’s Encrypt, and you can use any free DNS service you want
Is this just yet another gopher protocol? Or does it come with anything interesting
Mainly two reasons, one about architecture, and one about vendors
In the PC world, the entire ecosystem is designed to be modular, and people expect to be able to put windows/Linux on any pc and have it work despite the manufacturer. The kernel just wakes up on one of the cores, figures out the CPU, wakes the rest of the cores, and from there it figures out the rest of the computer. By contrast arm systems are tightly integrated, each SoC is unique and there’s no way to figure out the rest of the system, the kernel wakes up on one of the cores, reads out what SoC this is, and mostly has to already know the chip and any additional hardware connected to it.
But, sure, there are only so many SoCs (kinda), and displays, cameras, and touchscreens are mostly similar, you are bound to find a way to tell the kernel what hardware is running on and have it work, right? Except a lot of phone hardware is proprietary (duh) and requires bespoke proprietary drivers, google pretends to encourage vendors to submit their drivers upstream, but this doesn’t really happen. Now, if you are familiar with running external drivers on Linux, you probably know how picky the kernel is in what to load, but android’s kernel is specifically modified to be less picky, to allow vendors more slack. Mind you, the API is not more stable, the kernel is just less picky.
Bonus: running Linux on arm laptops is indeed proving kind of a challenge (nothing impossible, but resources are limited), that’s because they are built like a mobile phone.