Ramin Honary @ Ramin_HAL9001 @lemmy.ml

Software engineer, functional programming enthusiast.

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4 yr. ago

Yeah, Trump was big into genocide too, of the Yemenese. He personally vetoed a bipartisan resolution passed by congress to condemn the Saudis for their genocide in Yemen

But then we see the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel happening right now, and Biden not only enthusiastically reiterates his support for Israel but works to punishe anyone showing support and solidarity with the victims.

And that is why Biden is polling so low right now.

I would go with Mint because it has the largest selection of apps. Of course you can run any Linux program on any Linux distro, but with Mint you are able to just install almost anything without difficulty from a package manager like synaptic, or the built-in Mint Software Manager. That includes game launchers like Steam and Proton. This is, in my opinion, what makes Mint OS truly the most beginner friendly Linux distro.

Fedora is good too, but you need to grant it access to other sources of apps before you see the wider selection of apps outside of the more limited, strictly FLOSS apps that are available by default on Fedora. And these extra steps of finding trustworthy sources and installing them makes Fedora a bit harder to use, at least for beginners.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the package manager, just worry about whether the distro has a good package repository.

download/updates fast and reliable. Also when watching git repositories for new software alternatives, you e.g. see often packages for good package managers, whereas you need to go some extra mile for “stable” package managers.

But I would say these are not features of the package manager software, rather they are features of the package repository, that is, the online service that provides the packages. It doesn't matter if you use Apt, DNF, Pacman, if the package repo is slow, fully of packages that haven't been built right, the package manager software won't do much to make it better.

But like I said, a few package manager are really unique, like Gentoo Emerge, Crux Prt-Get, and Nix and Guix.

I wouldn't worry too much about the package manager, just worry about whether the distro has a good package repository. If it has all the software you want to use, then use it. In my opinion, most package managers (dnf, apt, pacman, xbmp) are basically the same, and you would only notice a big difference if you ever tried to make your own package for your own software.

That said, a few package managers are very different from all the rest:

• Crux OS "prt-get": simple and stupid: just downloads and installs tar archives.
• Gentoo "emerge": builds all software from source code when you install it. This provides some guarantees that the source code was not tampered with by the distro maintainers, this is great if you need to review all of the source code that is running on your system, but terrible for most people who don't want to spend so much computing power on compiling stuff every time you do a software update.
• Nix and Guix: creates its own blockchain-like database of isolated package dependency chains on your system, allowing you to instantly roll-back to the previous set of installed packages if you ever install something that breaks your system. It also guarantees that the software can be checked bit-for-bit (using SHA hash) traced back to the exact version and dependencies of the source code that built it. Nix and Guix packages also live peacefully side-by-side with any other package manager since all Nix/Guix apps are completely self-contained within its own database. In a way, it is sort of like one big AppImage or Docker container, but you can just keep adding or removing stuff to it as often as you want.
• Silverblue, SteamOS, VanillaOS, BlendOS, CarbonOS: distributes "immutable images," so it is impossible modify the operating system at all. Updates will ship an entirely new operating system with all packages built-in. However you are allowed to install software into your home directory, and you can install FlatPacks and AppImages. This provides a great deal of security in exchange for a tiny bit of inconvenience.

My personal preference: I use ordinary Debian or Ubuntu to install the critical software that needs to be stable and reliable, and I use Guix OS on the side to install the bleeding-edge things that might break a lot.

Xfce. I have used it daily for at least 14 years and it has never crashed on me. I often forget it is even there, it is so reliable.

"In what world is Vscode not customizable?"

When I think of "easy to customize," I am thinking about Emacs in particular, but really any editor that includes a scripting engine which is used to program the entire editor user interface.

With editors like VSCode or Geany that I would say are "hard to customize," you can't just write a snippet of TypeScript or C++ into a file which you can just run right there in the editor process. You can write extensions in TypeScript, but they have to be properly compiled, linked against the editor libraries, and properly installed with a manifest and everything, in order to write your own code that runs in a way that modifies the editor's behavior. That or you have to run your TypeScript code as a text filter in an external Node.js process.

Geany does have Lua and Python scripting engines as extensions, but you have to understand the Geany API pretty well in order to do anything elaborate, it was never really designed for people to be able to script the entire GUI or define their own whole unique workflows.

With Emacs, or any scriptable text editor, you just write a few lines of code and run it (even without saving a file), and the code actually alters the state of the editor itself. While you could write an entire app, like a Matrix or Mastodon client, as you would like a VSCode or Geany extension, you can also easily write a few lines of code to do any random thing at all. You can write code to suit any workflow imaginable, no matter how ridiculous: code that changes the color theme of the whole editor at certain times of the day, or code that opens certain kinds of files always in 3 separate windows, each window scrolled to a particular section of the file. You can run processes or alter the filesystem or transform entire batches of files in response to any event.

And you can do all of this without compiling or installing extensions of any kind, and often with no more than a dozen lines of code. There are no limitations. This is what I consider to be "easily customizable."

I want to like geany. However, its just not customizable and it lacks support for a lot of things.

I would say it is customizable, but I think it is relatively difficult to customize compared to a lot of other editors (e.g. Emacs). I think Geany is a nice, free/libre alternative to VSCode, and about as difficult to customize as VSCode, but does not have quite as many extensions available for it due to the fact that unlike VSCode, Geany is not supported by a multi-billion dollar company with the goal of embracing, extending, and extinguishing all other competing editors.

Geany Extensions are written in C which is not a scripting language and so unlike in Emacs you can't just write a quick 2 or 3 line script like you would in Emacs to solve some unique text-editing problem.

Geany does have extensions for Python and Lua scripting, but there is almost no ecosystem of Lua or Python scripts, and trying to access the editor features from Lua or Python requires deep knowledge of the Geany Gtk3 API. Compare this to something like the "Lite" text editor which has the whole user interface written in Lua, and therefore you can write fairly elaborate text editing scripts and user interfaces entirely in Lua. You just cannot do this with Geany.

Mastodon does not have an algorithm to recommend content. Instead it provides you with a feature to "follow" hashtags, and will populate your feed with any posts that have these hashtags.

Begin by searching for hashtags on topics you are interested in, e.g. #fediverse. In the search results it will list matching hashtags and matching accounts.

1. If there are any matching hashtags, click on the hashtag search result,
2. then at the top of the next screen you should see a button that says "Follow this hashtag"

Repeat these steps for every hashtag you think you might like to see.

The advantage of following hashtags is that you will see all posts from all people that post with that hashtag, even if you are not following those people. This allows you to discover people who regularly post content that is interesting to you.

Should just be each instance has its own ads and transmits them to the stream you’re listening to

But no one will buy ad space on your instance unless they can confirm that their ads are reaching your audience.

The best way I can think of to sell ad space is to put digital markers in the stream to denote an ad. Then the advertiser can retrieve the stream, search for the markers in the stream, and confirm that the ad was broadcast to the audience, and how often. Or you could just use machine learning now to detect whether your ad was played, but using markers is probably way simpler and cheaper to do.

The hard part is getting everyone to agree on the technical details, like the stream protocol, of how markers can be included in a stream and how to detect them.

That’s why I talked about ads so they also have an incentive beyond donations if they want to monetize.

Ads are a technical challenge. It is easy to track how many users are listening to a stream, and therefore how many users hear an ad. The hard part is keeping instance admins from faking these results to overcharge for ads, since they have full control over the computing equipment that are tracking listeners to ads.

It is very typical of package management schemes for various software platforms. Java is like this, and so is Android. Prior to Gtk v3 (I think) the GConf Manager utility also organized app configurations this way. The DBus inter-process communication mechanism also uses this scheme to create a namespace for all possible applications in the system that might want to use the bus service.

It is what it is, I neither like it nor dislike it.

Better Wayland support across the board, but also more Wayland compositors and window managers from which to choose. I'd make my own but I know so very little about Wayland right now and it would take me a while to learn.

Also, I have always wanted desktop environments to be more like Emacs, i.e. to be fully programmable in a Lisp language like Common Lisp or Scheme, where you can just whip-up a GUI app for anything you want in a few minutes with a few lines of code. Operating systems like that existed back in the 1970s and 80s, but went extinct when Windows and Macintosh took over everything, which were never designed to be programmable by end users. It sucks because there hasn't been anything like it ever since.

To see what I am talking about, check out the historical preservation projects for Lisp Machines like the InterLisp Medley desktop environment or the CADR ZMacs editor.

I would recommend The Next Generation or Deep Space 9 first.

The Original Series is pretty campy and low-budget. I don't think Star Trek really became Star Trek (as we know it) until Roddenberry had a second crack at it, which was The Next Generation. Be warned, both of these series start out pretty rough.

The first 2 seasons of TNG is a little corny, although they have some very good episodes, like one planet they visit which is a matriarchal society, and they show the male-female gender roles reversed. In my opinion, their 1940s nostalgia episodes (played out in the holodeck) really did not age well, fortunately they stopped doing that in season 2. Dr. Polanski gets a lot of hate, but I thought she was a fine character. I think season 3 of TNG was by far the best, with some of their boldest political statements. One episode, Picard is accidentally seen as a God by a pre-industrial society, in another, Commander Data is judged by Starfleet to be a person of a race of a single individual, and is granted personhood. In yet another episode, Mr. Data creates a child for himself which Starfleet deems to be their property, and results in one of my favorite Picard quotes of all time: "Hold your ground Mr. Data. (To the admiral) Order a man to turn his child over to the state? Not while I'm captain." By season 6 and 7 they clearly start running out of ideas though.

In my opinion, Deep Space 9 was the hardest to start, but probably the best series of all I have seen. The first 17 episodes were so boring I could barely get through it. But starting with Season 1 episode 18 (titled "Duet") and every single episode after it was consistently very good. They also, I think, make many more, and much bolder, political statements than The Next Generation ever did.

Yeah, and also according to Deep Space 9 lore, the massacre in skid row the sanctuary city of LA was publicized in the media and led to an outpouring of public support for policy reform that improved the conditions for the underprivileged.

In this timeline, that seems incredibly optimistic to the point of being impossible.

See if you can just re-install a desktop environment. Try sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome (or maybe cinnamon-desktop-environment, whichever you prefer). Then reboot, see if that does anything.

Bell Riots took place in 2024, so less than a year away now.

Edwin

Edwin an Emacs-like editor programmed by some of the guys who maintain the MIT-Scheme programming language, which is (I think) the original implementation of the Scheme programming language developed by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy Steele (or a predecessor of it). To this day, MIT-Scheme continues to be one of the fastest Scheme implementations, producing extremely efficient binaries for a high-level language.

It is Emacs-like in nature, except instead of scripting it in Emacs Lisp, you use Scheme. Unlike Emacs, there are very few extensions available for it, so no Org-Mode, no Magit, no nice themes. The GUI version of it is so antiquated, it uses its own widget toolkit that is similar to the Athena Widget Toolkit.

Although I use Emacs for everything, I still love Edwin just because I like Scheme as a language better than Emacs Lisp. I wish I had more free time, I would like to help modernize Edwin. Although at this point it would probably easier to write a whole new Emacs-like editor using Guile Scheme instead, since there is a very active user community around Guile Scheme, especially among the Guix OS clique.

What am I missing out on by not trying out different editors?

Linux and Unix systems have historically always been designed to be easily configured and controlled with human-readable text files. Most apps you use on Linux can be scripted. So the better you get at using every-day Linux/Unix apps, the more you might want to tweak them to make it easier for you to use. To do this, you need to learn a little bit about how to write configuration files, and how to write simple scripts. This also helps you to automate things on your computer more easily, since all applications can talk to all other applications using a human-readable programming language. For managing all of this, a good editor is extremely helpful.

When you take things to the extreme, you can start using Emacs, which contains an entire Lisp programming environment for manipulating text. You can replace all of your configuration and scripts with a single programming language (Emacs Lisp). And Emacs can replace almost every single app on your computer where text is involved, from simple scripting and configuration all the way up to web browsing, chat, and email.

Just curious, why do you want to replace SublimeText with an alternative?

Another nice thing about ed is that it is sometimes easier to use than sed when you want to edit a file programmatically, since you can navigate lines at random (forward and backward directions), and you can still run regex find/replace like with sed. Just

        printf 'i\nstring of ed commands\n.\n' | ed file-to-edit.txt


  

and pipe the commands into ed, although it is really an esoteric way to write scripts.