squaresinger @ squaresinger @lemmy.world

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4 mo. ago

I'm using Linux professionally since ~15 years and my private PCs are on Linux since ~5 years.

Registry hacks are still much, much easier than what you sometimes have to do on Linux.

The main reason is variability. There are at most 2-3 different versions of Windows in support at a time, with about a billion users between these 2-3 versions. That means, you will easily find a detailed fix for your problem that will work just fine. You can blindly paste it into the registry, and it will do what you expect.

Linux on the other hand has 2-5 supported versions per distro, and each distro tends to have between a handful and a dozen flavours, so the chance of some random guide on the internet actually applying to your setup is much, much lower. If you use Ubuntu 24.04, chances are quite high to find something, but even with Fedora you are often stuck having to translate solutions to your distro. Sometimes it's as simple as searching through your package manager to figure out how that package is named for your distro, but at other times it means you have to compile stuff from scratch, or the solution might look like it would apply to your setup but it just doesn't work.

The registry is a nice centralized place with one set of rules how it works and how you interact with it.

Linux on the other hand has thousands of config files strewn over hundreds of directories, written in dozens of config file languages, and some configs aren't actually even done via config files (or shouldn't be done via them) but instead use random config tools instead.

Registry is easy mode.

switch all your critical apps to the one available on Linux first.

Gimp and stuff is a nice toy for people like me who don't need anything, but it's a long shot away from being competitive with commercial software for professional use.

Didn’t hear about issues with Office Suites in more than a decade. Microsoft famously manipulated their docs to hamper third-party apps in implementing docx support, that’s quite a time ago though.

This is still a thing. Open up MS Office docs in LibreOffice, and more often than not formatting will be messed up.

Ok for personal use, unacceptable for professional use.

Nope. Seriously nope.

Yes, it has a bash shell if you need it, but Windows does too.

Yes, it's based on an unixoid kernel, but that kernel is not Linux and the average user has no idea what a kernel is, nor would they want to.

Having a MacOS device means it comes pre-setup by the manufacturer with an OS that's 100% compatible to the hardware, where you don't have to think about drivers at all, where all the software needed just runs without any hacks or hassle. There's none of the tinkering involved that you'd need on Linux.

And I say this as a Linux user who can't stand touching Macs.

But these two OSes are not at all in the same category.

This.

When switching to Android/iOS/ChromeOS/... people also aren't expected to "learn" that OS.

and my personal favorite: constantly trying to trick people into using FOSS software by telling everybody they’re as good even in cases where they’re clearly not (bro please use GIMP it’s actually really good bro as soon as you understand its archaic 1998 user interface it’s just as good as photoshop bro please)

This. So this.

But coming from a position of nativity, it's even almost understandable. For someone with a software development background, Linux is easily on-par with Windows and for many stacks even a lot better. There are a few cool pieces of software that don't exist under Linux (e.g. Sourcetree) but there are decent replacements that are maybe a little bit less convenient.

So if you are a software developer and a very light user of stuff like Office, graphics/audio/video editing and similar stuff, you might actually believe that the FOSS alternatives in these areas are also decently good enough.

I mean, for me GIMP and LibreOffice are totally good enough, because I do next to nothing with these tools, and for the one children's birthday party per year that I make, GIMP and LibreOffice are totally enough.

The actual hubris here is to think that my noob-level experience with these tools allows me to judge whether these tools are good enough for professional use.

 python

    
import sys
import random

inFilePath = sys.argv[1]
outFilePath = sys.argv[2]
damagePercentage = float(sys.argv[3])

with open(inFilePath, "rb") as f:
    d = f.read()

damageTotalCount = int(len(d) * damagePercentage / 100)

print("Damaging "+str(damageTotalCount)+" bytes.")

dList = [ x.to_bytes(1) for x in d ]

for i in range(damageTotalCount):
    pos = random.randint(2000,len(d)-2)
    dList[pos] = random.randint(0,255).to_bytes(1)
    if (i%1000 == 0):
        print(str(i)+"/"+str(damageTotalCount))

d = b"".join(dList)

with open(outFilePath, "wb") as f:
    f.write(d)

  

If you run it, the first argument is the input file, the second one is the output file and the third is the percentage of corrupted bytes to inject.

I did spare the first 2000 bytes in the file to get clear of the file header (corruption on a BMP file header can still cause the whole image to be illegible, and this demonstration was about uncompressed vs compressed data, not about resilience of file headers).

I also just noticed when pasting the script that I don't check for double-corrupting the same bytes. At lower damage rates that's not an issue, but for the 95% example, it's actually 61.3% actual corruption.

Public domain is 70 years after the author's death. None of us will be around for that, and it won't matter a long time before public domain.

Pay her to burn her books. I'd guess she's fine with that deal.

M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.

Do you know that these caps can be overextended? They have a second open position, where they are opened at ~180°. At that position they don't flop back closed and are quite well out of the way.

What is kinda stupid is not understanding how LLMs work, not understanding what the inherent limitations of LLMs are, not understanding what intelligence is, not understanding what the difference between an algorithm and intelligence is, not understanding what the difference between immitating something and being something is, claiming to "perfectly" understand all sorts of issues surrounding LLMs and then choosing to just ignore them and then still thinking you actually have enough of a point to call other people in the discussion "kind of stupid".

Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.

At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.

While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.

Just to clarify though, owning your own car and stereo falls under personal property, not private property. See my comment here for a brief distinction of the two: https://feddit.uk/comment/18187961

Yeah, ok, I see that distinction, it does make sense.

Debatable. They are an island next to Europe. But apart from that, you just stumbled across the joke.

Well, I guess the great depression never happened, correct?

Go, read what I wrote, then come back.

Tbh, I don't even think the first two points apply.

Ownership by the state, especially a state that the people have no control over, isn't really ownership of the people. The main point of ownership (also under communism) is control. If I own something, I control it. I can decide what happens with it. Under capitalism the worker doesn't own the factory, because the worker has no control over it. The worker has no say over what or how or when the factory produces, so the worker doesn't own the factory.

Under the USSR system, the worker also has no say over anything regarding the work. The only difference is that the owner isn't another person but the state.

Something like the early stock corporations would be closer to communism. There each worker owns stock in the company and thus can vote on what the company does.

Same goes with social classes. There certainly was a class difference between party member (or at least high ranking party member) and non-party-members.

Private property also still existed, just on a lower scale. People still owned their cars, their stereo systems and all the other items of daily usage.

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to reinforce the point)

fallacy fallacy

I have to admit, a did not know that one. It's even more fitting than the strawman argument! Thanks for sharing, TIL.

(Though I do believe the fallacy fallacy is a subcategory of the strawman argument.)

Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.

If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.

Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.

We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.