palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally reg

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2 yr. ago

Is YaST still a thing? Surprised Randall hasn't touched/included SuSE. Then again, maybe the joke was already long enough.

Perl calls to you. Admire its beauty.

Caution: Finding something that one hates more than one's self does not take away the initial self loathing. Attempting to mollify or subdue the lesser by observation or interaction with the latter may result in something greater than the sum of its parts and oh boy, Jeffery Christmas, now we're in for a bad time.

To some extent I think they're thinking of people who are in the Windows/Mac situation of wanting a stable OS that doesn't require getting hands dirty (so to speak) every 5 minutes to do basic things, and who generally call in a relative or friend who knows what they're doing (and is almost certainly the person who installed Mint in the first place) when things really need changing.

There's never more than two LMDEs active at any one time, so while they are giving themselves a little extra work, they're also managing the main Ubuntu-based Mint derivatives at the same time so they're bound to have some kind of streamlining at their side.

As for 5-to-6 upgrades, they've provided an official tool that will work for most people and will require very little admin user interaction once it's off and running. A sensible sysadmin would like to have a backup anyway, just in case.

My initial comment was aimed at the odd rare case like myself who isn't always up for sysadmin work (it's why I'm on Mint after all), or doesn't have the time. There's no immediate rush to use that official tool. Take your time. Make your backups, etc.

If you want bleeding-edge rolling updates, Mint is not the distro for you (though LMDE is a little closer to that than regular Mint).

Do they keep up with security updates and patches, though? Yes. Very much so.

In Perl, eval can do similar things, but symbolic references are "better" (I'm fairly sure it's where PHP got the idea, and the syntax, from.) e.g.

    
$foo = "bar";
$$foo = "potatoes"; # $$foo = access the variable named in $foo, i.e. $bar
print $bar; # prints potatoes


  

Reading other responses, it seems like Python's globals object is not entirely dissimilar, especially if you know how Perl deals with symbolic references under the hood.

But just because you can doesn't mean you should. If you use strict; in Perl, it will fail to compile most of this nonsense. Use a hash / associative array / dictionary / whatever your language (natural and/or programming) calls them instead.

And I'm pretty sure that even without strict, local variables can't be accessed at all the symbolic way, which is probably for the best. (NB: local is a subtle thing in Perl. By "local" here, I mean the so-called my variables that aren't accessible outside their scope. local variables are actually localised globals. Enjoy that thought.)

That sounds like one of the "especially must-have" features I was talking about. Maybe I was thinking about less serious things when I said it (gotta have that shiny new program that only works in 6 or whatever), but it still fits.

Copypasting: (source)

The cautious approach for LMDE5 users: If your system is working fine and there are no especially must-have features in LMDE6, there is almost certainly no rush to upgrade. Take your time.

Make backups. Test backups. Play games. Work. Do things entirely unrelated to the distro.

You could even almost (aaalmost) completely forget about LMDE6 (but do keep an eye on the LM blog).

The Mint team haven't announced an EOL date for LMDE5 yet, but if past dates are anything to go by, it'll be at least 18 months before they pull the plug. Even then, LTS updates might still filter through from Debian proper.

[How many people will actually see this message and how many it actually applies to out of them might well include me and literally one other guy somewhere else on the planet, but if you're that one guy, breathe friend. No rush.]

I have a very old Nvidia GPU and am on LMDE5. The official legacy driver works fine for me. Can't speak for the open-source one.

Going to assume that LMDE6 will be similar when I get around to upgrading.

Linux Mint has Software Manager, that is pretty close to an app store.
It's installed by default. Some other distros might have something similar.

(Versions since that article was written can have an "ad" picture at the top for a recommended package, which, somewhat bizarrely, does make it look even more friendly than the interface shown.)

True, it's not a Linux-wide common interface, but then the gap between two distros can be as wide as between commercial operating systems, and it would be foolish to expect their app stores to have a common interface.

Yikes. Your comment was very easy to take out of context.

Until I read back, it looked like you were saying Hank's cancer was somehow back stronger than before (which would have to have been practically fresh breaking news), and not a comment on post-chemotherapy beard growth being different, perhaps stronger, than before.

Follicular cancer doesn't sound like it bodes as well for a beard as other kinds of lymphoma (like Hank's was) but hey, you might still be right.

(RMS is a controversial character in some regards. While I wouldn't strictly wish the loss of a greybeard's beard as cosmic correction of controversial behaviour, I'd much rather that than cancer. That'd be too far, Universe.)

Maybe the warming and freezing will cancel out and the much smaller islands that will be left after the sea levels rise will still be temperate and worth living on.

Edit: This is not an "I'm alright, Jack" comment. I'd rather this wasn't even a vague possibility and that the planet wasn't warming out of control.

Huh. I should probably shave this beard.

The cautious approach for LMDE5 users: If your system is working fine and there are no especially must-have features in LMDE6, there is almost certainly no rush to upgrade. Take your time.

Make backups. Test backups. Play games. Work. Do things entirely unrelated to the distro.

You could even almost (aaalmost) completely forget about LMDE6 (but do keep an eye on the LM blog).

The Mint team haven't announced an EOL date for LMDE5 yet, but if past dates are anything to go by, it'll be at least 18 months before they pull the plug. Even then, LTS updates might still filter through from Debian proper.

[How many people will actually see this message and how many it actually applies to out of them might well include me and literally one other guy somewhere else on the planet, but if you're that one guy, breathe friend. No rush.]

Jeremy Hunt, current Chancellor of the Exchequer, literally co-authored a book on how to dismantle the NHS and replace it with a health-insurance based system.

He was Secretary for Health at one point too, and his policies didn't exactly rule out that he might be following the game-plan of that book.

There's no tinfoil hat needed here. The Tories are all but open about what they're doing at this point.

Gonna guess OP's probably not the artist. Too much doesn't line up.

Either way this is one of the artist's older comics because she stopped drawing stars in eyes a while back; something she explained at some point not too long ago either on Twitter or Instagram. I don't think she's ruled out bringing them back at some point though.

Her handle hasn't been cropped from the image and is still valid. Can recommend.

Recent posts have been fairly mental health related which may or may not be your cup of tea.

Different applications may have their own keyboard shortcuts that are not system-wide, although, importantly, system-wide ones generally override these.

Mint Cinnamon has a Keyboard applet in System Settings that shows the system shortcuts in the aptly named Shortcuts tab. (Xfce is GTK, if not completely GNOME based, so I am assuming it has something similar.)

Unfortunately, at least for this purpose, they're not in one monolithic list, but in a tree view sorted by category.

If I have any sort of recommendation, the number pad is rarely used for shortcuts, especially not with chorded modifiers (e.g. Shift+Ctrl etc.). The closest I'm familiar with are Ctrl-Plus, Ctrl-Minus and Ctrl-0 for changing zoom levels in things like web browsers.

Using lots of modifiers at once is also pretty rare.

Also also, if you have a keyboard with working multimedia keys (or something accessible via an Fn key), these might be detectable with modifiers as well.

Personal examples:

Shift+'e' (a multimedia key, not the letter) = start Firefox with a different profile configuration. Without the Shift is the out-of-the-box default behaviour and the regular Firefox profile. I rarely use this and tend to use launch icons instead, but it's nice to have around.

Super+NumberPad5 = Resize the current window to full height, centred with 4:3 proportions. Another web browser one. I was Internetting on 4:3 monitors for a long time before 16:9 windows were commonplace and browsers still look weird to me at full width.

Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Super+Break = wtf = "Can't hit this by accident" = "Vulcan nerve pinch" = Suspend the computer. I tend to mash Ctrl, Super and Alt at the left of the keyboard where they're all in a line and then hit right Shift and Pause/Break with my right hand.

(I don't have a cat, but I have considered that it's vaguely possible that a keyboard-walking cat could theoretically hit this. Something to think about if you think it's a decent idea but have a cat!)

Sounds more like a dirty tactic by Microsoft. As suggested elsewhere for other purposes, try spoofing the user-agent header and see if it still keeps logging you out. The UA header shouldn't have any effect whatsoever, but if it "fixes" the problem, it's yet another case of Microsoft being Microsoft.

(Their excuse will be something like "oh, we don't support other browsers because we can't be sure the software will work properly in them", which skips the fact that 1: it lets you log in using a "bad" browser, which it shouldn't do if it's that dangerous and 2: they're a massive multinational corporation. If they can't put a bit of money towards making things work in the small handful of alien browsers, they're doing it wrong. Probably on purpose.)

Message two can also be caused by packages (or rather, package creators) with delusions of grandeur that only think that the system will stop working without them, so they rig things to threaten to uninstall the system.

Or else someone has created too heavy a dependency on something that ought to be removable, but isn't thanks to malice or incompetence (or both).

We still mock Microsoft for putting too heavy a dependency (or at least removal FUD) on whatever web browser they bundle with their OSes (first IE, now Edge), and here we might have a package creator trying the same damn thing.

Whatever the highest rank is.

Arch- usually indicates the highest form possible without utter transcendence into a different form, or at least a, well, overarching rank of some sort. (Semantically related, but not etymologically, apparently. At least not directly. But I digress.)

It is, after all, why the name of Arch Linux is what it is (so sayeth Wikipedia). The creator wanted it to be the best with no equal.

An arch-vegan might be one best at not only avoiding animal-based produce but also convincing people to convert to veganism, as well as making normally well-adjusted vegans feel that they're not being a good enough vegan.

Isn't our species wonderful? All races, religions and creeds; every single one of them has absolute nutjobs.