rodbiren @ rodbiren @midwest.social

Posts

4

Comments

142

Joined

2 yr. ago

You can always help their software QA by pasting in the entirety of the declaration of independence. A couple of things could happen. If they comment, why did you post that? You have a human. If they give a generic response, probably an AI. If it crashes then you know they didn't think anyone would post that.

You can also post zero width spaces. Generic chatbot will respond with something meaningless and a human might not even respond. You could also post text using typoglycemia. The language will confuse most models but can usually be read by people.

I get the arguments, but if the community or Linux wants to get larger market share everything should be done that is possible to make it so people never need to know about X11 or Wayland. Depends on the goals of the community of course.

I liken it to cars. I don't want to know the difference between a flat 4 and a V6 or an AWD and a 4 wheel. I want a car that gets me places without spying on me and being an unmaintainable pain. You are either a car person who wants to know a lot and do things yourself, or you just want something that works and you don't need to know a lot about. I myself straddling both worlds in Linux depending on the day.

I just love 90% of the defaults for Linux mint. People crap on it for not being Wayland or cutting edge in every regard, but it just puts so much old school polish on it.

I see that you are a person of culture

Linux mint give you great driver support and looks (in my opinion) like windows could if it wasn't run by an insane greed machine. It largely stays out of your way and delivers a truly boring Linux experience. If you want a heart racing experience you can try arch which will involve significantly more effort.

Like, if you are super into cars and love spending a bunch of time learning how each part works and reading manuals that is approximately what being an arch user is like. If you just want to buy a car and have it do car things you'll want a boring OS like mint, Ubuntu, or Pop OS.

It's a little pushy and it sometimes feels in the way.

The default for packages includes a lot more than I would enjoy. The package manager is also by default configured to install suggested packages which includes a lot of things I do not personally want. The default firefox is branded and is not the vanilla build which I don't like. It includes a bin folder in home which I have found no other OS do. There are dozens of other small quirks that just makes it enough different from other options to make me scratch my head every now and then.

Other than all that it is well supported, rock solid, and a reasonable option for an OS. Give it a whirl and discover for yourself the bouquet of reasons you do not personally enjoy it. The good news is every OS has solid reasons NOT to use it.

Discourse is FOSS and is fairly easy to host. I agree with sentiments that running right back to close source is probably not what the bulk of people here want. But then again most people use steam so I am a walking contradiction.

https://www.discourse.org/

Just to add an offering that is not KDE the beta linux mint includes gesture support which is good for touch. In terms of usability it depends on what you want. If you like phone UI than GNOME with something like Ubuntu or Debian will be better. If you were alive in the 90s and liked the "traditional" desktop than something like KDE or Cinnamon(Mint) will be more comfortable.

Could always install endeavouros and or arch if you prefer more work with btrfs and snapshots. Arch is mostly stable despite the laughter erupting from this post. Even if it does fall down you have the snapshots to fallback to in order to bail you out. Arch is like riding and steering a rocket but having btrfs is like having extra lives so crashing doesn't really kill you forever. Depends on what you want.

The good news is if you try arch long enough and spend hours tinkering with cutting edge software you too can come to the point where you are exhausted and just want a machine that does what the hell you want without screwing around with it. Or you can change your avatar to some sort of anime character and bask in the superiority of not only using arch but enjoying it like some sort of digital masochist.

Sure could be. I calls them like I sees them. Appears fast as a user and I wish myself to never learn about how dependencies are managed. Just wanna slam my keyboard with pacman -Syu and watch that pacman cross the screen fast so I can feel something in my life is under control by watching progress bars go places. Hence my chronic distro hopping. So many loading bars.

Anyways, I am sure I am wrong in creative ways. Just my experience for what it is worth.

Could be the newer kernel or the prolific enterprise support. Hard for me to say. My main gripes with OpenSUSE usually occur with Nvidia so it is probably safe to say my real issue is with Nvidia which regrettably controls AI stacks and Laptop GPUs with a vice. Yes yes I know you can run ML using AMD but it is a second class citizen with the poorly maintained docs.

I have not. My fear with void is that I may run into plentiful issues where when I follow documentation tailored to the popular package managers that I am obligated to think and make decisions which I use all available effort to avoid. My battery supplying power to make choices on things is critically low due to having two kids under 5 so I have pigeon holed myself into using something I can reasonably expect people to have already done the work for me. Ignore that I am on arch and a walking contradiction. I have built my own cage forged of the irons of rolling distribution preference.

Most recently I got a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i and tried tumbleweed on it. Installed drivers according to documentation and I get a blank screen on boot now. I alt F2 my way to a terminal and startx to get in but now my background is mysteriously a black screen. I fart around with kernel arguments to try and fix the issue but give up after awhile. Install arch as distributed by endeavouros with KDE de and install using their installer. Works without issue and usb-c display port works great.

To be fair stock mint with xanmod and 5.15 both failed to work properly with the driver. Could not dim the screen. Apparently an issue with cinnamon.

I assume GNOME would work fine but GNOME working fine is an issue for me because I am a child of the 80s and like computers provide me nostalgic feelings of a start menu and desktop regardless of the fact I could use some keyboard shortcut powered DE and be significantly cooler. Coolness has given way to comfort and I prefer Cinnamon or KDE in that order.

I have been a chronic distro hopper and I have to say Zypper did not appear appreciably faster than dnf for most operations. Fastest package managemer I have ever found is pacman on arch, which is not an advertisement for arch.

I have a love hate relationship with OpenSUSE. Everything they do feels like the uncanny valley of Linux. Just a little different than the others. Sometimes in a good way where everything is autosnspped into backups and the OS is nearly indestructible. Sometimes in confusing ways where their is a bin folder included in you Home folder by default and I haven't found a good way to get rid of it. Or that installing packsge suggestions is on by default. Or that the included Firefox includes branding for OpenSUSE and getting the correct repo of Firefox without branding takes additional effort. It keeps going with the strangeness. It will look and feel like Linux but with just enough quirks to confuse you.

All that being said I highly doubt the package manager will be the time suck you will face with a given distro. Your milage may vary but I have found OpenSUSE to be a great server distro but s lackluster desktop experience especially with drivers and any gaming. So it depends on what you are looking for. The best non answer their is.

Arch wiki to the rescue. I swear the forms of arch Linux must just be riddled with references to the wiki. Eventually I'll learn that it just knows. Thanks for the response.

Computers are essentially rocks we have tricked into doing math.

I played Valhiem early in its launch for like two weeks on my own server. Once I finally got my friends to join they were dismayed as to why I had dozens of broken copper pick axes in storage boxes.

I had no idea you could repair things and kept mining barely more copper than was needed to make a copper pickaxe.

The game got a lot easier after that.

Love me some Cinnamon. Specifically what comes out of default Linux Mint. It isn't trying to do more than it already is. As cool as tech is I wish I didn't need to care about Wayland or X11. I just want it to launch applications, feel like the windows I used as a kid, and stay out of my way. Cinnamon does this all for me. And since freaking high school mint has been there trying to do that.

I'll do you one better. The hardest part of making crap people like is the damn people. I have been a product manager for a decade and I can confidently say if I deliver exactly what the customer asks for I would be an utter failure. Requirements and software that fulfill what a customer says they want will ultimately lead to them asking for something they previously didn't realize because it actually turns out they have no idea what they want, have an agenda, or the conditions have shifted from under you and what they said no longer holds water.

I could go on a tirade about this but my two cents is you gotta listen to what everyone says, but assume they are a human at the end of the day. It's too damn easy for me to suck up dev time with what people want. Hell, just one word can keep a dev team busy for a long time. Internationalization! Boo!

I also need to build an environment where the dev team doesn't despise the business due to a history of constantly shifting goalposts, borderline abusive metrics, and expectations that just create a battered development team. For some reason hiring a PM aligns with an org hitting the point where the original dev team has lost critical members because of terrible burnout and a culture of blaming people and not process. Takes a lot of therapeutic communication to remedy that.

TLDR; People. People are the reason all things are difficult.

Scales directly with the amount of radiation present. Because the visual inspection happens in the water the radiation levels change a lot depending on where you are. Water is excellent as a radiation shield. I can't remember the halving distance (thickness of material needed to halve the radiation levels) but an active fuel bundle only needing 6 feet to drop down to safe levels is an insane drop. Something on the order of 1000 Rad/hr or something coming off the bundles.