DefederateLemmyMl @ SpaceCadet @feddit.nl

* Gen𝕏

---

Read more

Posts

1

Comments

584

Joined

2 yr. ago

The thing is, you are absolutely free to use a /c,/d,/e mounting scheme, but you are not shackled to it like you are in Windows. Personally I like to organize my data in one big root (/) file system on my NVME drive and then /data for my bulk storage on HDD and /nas for my NAS shares. I never have any problems knowing where my data is.

BTW, I notice all your complaints revolve around "OMG it's different" and "OMG the user can choose to do things differently... so complicated". That is kind of the point of Linux you know?

At some point you just have to accept that it's different and move on, or decide that it's too complicated for you and use something else.

BTW, I wonder why people never make this complaint about Apple devices? It also has a hierarchical file structure without drive letters, after all it is also a Unix variant.

I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

That's one of the things that semi-experienced Windows users need to wrap their head around, but I strongly disagree that drive letters are somehow inferior to a hierarchical file system structure. I mean, the A:, B:, C: ... convention was originally just intended for the first IBM PC with 1 or 2 floppy drives. It was never intended to support complex storage configurations, whereas the hierarchical file system was designed for Unix systems that had to handle multiple magnetic drives from the start. It is a much more flexible system to organize your file storage.

On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there.

That's because there is a difference between a block device and a mounted file system. Windows just obscures that difference from you with its archaic drive mapping system.

All your block devices and partitions on your block devices will be in /dev with a meaningful name. You can list them with the lsblk command. If a partition contains a file system that Linux knows how to use, you can mount it anywhere you like.

they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them

No that's not "convention" at all. Some desktop environments may decide to mount undefined drives there, but there really is no convention, ultimately you mount it where you want it to be mounted.

If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

If your unsure, df /home/documents/notporn should tell you exactly what drive it's on, but ultimately it's up to you to know how you've organized your storage.

BTW I've said this before, but Linux is probably harder for users who know Windows just well enough to be dangerous than it is for relative beginners, because there are so many concepts and things they take for granted that they have to unlearn.

So they put in a Gotek drive like I did with my retro PC?

It's from a Devo song called Mongoloid.

It goes:

Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid

Happier than you and me

Asian is called mongoloid.

One archeologist to another: looks like this person was ... happier than you and me.

( •_•)>⌐■-■

(⌐■_■)

Installing Linux has never been particularly difficult, not in the last 15 or even 20 years anyway. I've always found it easier and more straightforward than the contemporary Windows installation process.

The challenging part is wrapping your head around the Linux/Unix way of doing things when things can't be done through the GUI with just a few clicks.

How is that not enough? It's in standard ISO8601 format and can unambiguously be reduced to a UTC timestamp, which is all that matters.

I know what it theoretically is for, I still think it's a bad implementation.

1. It often doesn't tell you clearly what it is waiting for.
2. It doesn't allow you to checkout what's going on with the process that isn't responding, because logins are already disabled
3. It doesn't allow you to cancel the wait and terminate the process anyway. 9/10 when I get it, it has been because of something stupid like a stale NFS mount or a bug in a unit file.
4. If it is actually something important, like your Redis example, it doesn't allow you to cancel the shutdown, or to give it more time. Who's to say that your Redis instance will be able to persist its state to disk within 90 seconds, or any arbitrary time?

Finally, I think that well written applications should be resilient to being terminated unexpectedly. If, like in your Redis example, you put data in memory without it being backed by persistent storage, you should expect to lose it. After all, power outages and crashes do happen as well.

That’s what systemd’s dreaded “a stop job is running” is

The worst part of that is that you can't quickly login to check what it is (so maybe you can prevent it in the future?), or kill it anyway because it's likely to be something stupid and unimportant. And if it actually was important, well... it's gonna be shot in the head in a minute anyway, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it, so what's the point of delaying?

Even worse if you clicked "Update and restart"

X thing you want isn’t the devs job

Well, it is if they decide it is, and it isn't if they decide it isn't.

That said, I do appreciate devs who put up native deb or rpm repos for the most common distros.

It isn’t your computer, user license clearly states you’re renting the software

It IS your computer, it's just not your software.

Actually lot less than the browser. Under 300MB, I just checked, and that's mostly just the network buffer which is 150MB by default.

Sound typically (*) didn't require "drivers" or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.

It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.

(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.

Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time ...

The point is that your example use case of "YouTube 4k videos" doesn't need a browser full of bloated js garbage.

Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.

strange, mpv handles it just fine

I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.

It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.

most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers

Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn't even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.

Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM

You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It's the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were "Soundblaster compatible".

Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.

The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.

BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)

There are basically four positions you can take about this:

1. Jesus existed and was crucified
2. We can't know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (1) is more likely
3. We can't know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (4) is more likely
4. Jesus is a myth

I am on (2), as are most historians, and you put yourself on (1).