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2791
Joined
2 yr. ago

Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • My experience with LibreOffice is it works fine if you're doing straightforward things by yourself. MLA formatted essay? "Twelve point double-spaced Times New Roman or you get a zero" and they never noticed my papers were Liberation Sans? Sure that works. "Pick a partner and make a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation" is a nightmare because sharing files back and forth between Powerpoint and Impress doesn't work very well.

    The more usable solution to that is Google Docs. I had a group project with four other guys, and we were all sat around a table typing in the same document at the same time on three different operating systems. Played perfectly well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Us Linux nerds who hate "the cloud" because "someone else's computer" and Google because "~Don't~ Be Evil" kind of lurch at that one, but it functions.

  • Kernel-level anti-cheat, it's not just for gamers.

  • Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. 3rd person shooter designed for controller.

  • Hang on, did Hitler actually fart a medically significant amount or is "cure him of his flatulence" a somewhat disrespectful way to say killed someone?

  • I won't be. I've set up my old rig, a Ryzen 3600/Radeon 7600 mini-ITX machine on my television running Bazzite. AFAIK it's quite a similar experience to SteamOS (Launches in Steam big picture mode, can switch to a KDE desktop, immutable distro with flatpak apps), from what they've released, it seems my machine has relatively similar performance, it's about 3 times as big, but...I don't need a Steam Machine.

    I might spring for a Steam Frame headset though.

  • I mean, just now I was talking about dual booting Linux and Windows, and they fight over the RTC, Linux wants UTC, Windows wants local time. It's a line of bash to set Linux to use local time, it's changing a registry key in Windows.

  • "They told me to type words into a black screen with green letters, and the mere suggestion burned down my house and killed my family."

  • I just ordered thebparts for a ~$900 gaming pc that boils down to Ryzen 7500F and Radeon 7600. I'll believe "priced like a PC" to mean that.

  • I'm especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it'll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says "Format Drive." There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it'll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.

    KDE's USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it'll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it's got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.

    Cinnamon's USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a "full wipe", and that's about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon's design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it's from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu's fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can't memorize "for the formatter, type "USB" and hit enter, for the writer, type "USB" press down and enter." They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.

  • When I was in school in North Carolina, you could be on different "tracks." Almost like a college major.

    "University Prep" was for the AP kids who were going to graduate with a 5.0 GPA and half a semester of college credit. They took up through Calc 1, sometimes at the local community college, they did two extra semesters of English class (11th and 12th grade English were full year courses) and such.

    "College Prep" was the "Hope you get good SAT scores" tier. A bit more room for electives, you were usually in "honors" classes, and graduated with no college credit to your name but ready to start in the fall as a Freshman at a state school. You typically took up through pre-calculus Algebra in college and Trigonometry or Calc 1 would be in your first semester of college. Two semesters of a foreign language were required, which is why I can kinda sound out French.

    "College Tech Prep" was "Sew your name to your shirt because you're going to trade school." They had their own math classes which I think got most of the way through Algebra 1 and 2. They took shop classes, which didn't trust the student to have ever been awake in a math class in their lives, hell I've gone to trade school at a community college, the first week they spent "teaching" us addition of whole numbers. Or, you were in JROTC.

    "Career Prep" was the "You're gonna be a parent before the end of high school, knock over an Advanced Auto Parts when you're 20 and spend the rest of your life in and out of prison" tier. These were the kids that did eight semesters of PE, some of them could read.

  • Is there any part of Gnome that isn't "minimal and not distracting?" In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says "Do Nothing" in the top bar.

  • I don't know, I played with it years ago, didn't need it and haven't really touched it until now.

    I use Syncthing for several things, especially syncing photos between my phone and desktop.

  • dammit I like Syncthing. does kdeconnect do a decent job at syncing files?

  • task failed successfully

  • To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just "Fork it, then we'll have our own Linux."

  • And the very fact that there’s a million forks doesn’t make it better

    Yeah I try to steer folks around the Popular Distro Of The Month because this is the kind of shit that invites. You get some minor gimmick in exchange for several janky reimplementations of software that worked perfectly fine (often package manager GUIs) and significantly poorer googlability when something goes wrong.

    Several of the cheese holes* in the YES DO AS I SAY fiasco did exist are because System76 couldn't leave well enough alone.

    The bug was actually in the .deb package itself, not the software in it. The dependency data was made in such a way that if it didn't see one of the normal, standard Linux GUIs, it would threaten to uninstall the entire GUI. This worked fine on Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, xfce, LXDE, MATE and Unity, but Pop-Desktop was a weird mutant form of Gnome that didn't quite match. So this bug pretty much only effected Pop!_OS users. APT is designed to detect something strange like that and offer a very stern warning, and GUIs built on top of APT usually detect that warning and automatically say no and just throw an error message to the user.

    This happened to a number of Pop!_OS users, who saw and reported the error to...probably both System76 and Valve. A patched version was released which worked.

    The Pop!_Shop was one of those janky reimplementations of software that worked perfectly fine. For some very Apple scented reason, the Pop!_Shop doesn't do an apt-get update when launched. I'm not sure why they made that decision, if they were relying entirely on the update routine to do it on a schedule, but in most Debian-based systems it's typical do do an apt-get update before upgrading or installing anything. And that it doesn't happen at any point during the install process, it means that between a fresh install and a scheduled check for updates you could have an apt cache that was last updated when the installer ISO was packaged, which may have been weeks ago.

    That's what happened to Linus. The bugged version was in his apt cache, and neither he nor the system performed an apt update before he started installing stuff.

    What is Linus' fault is how he reacted to that error. What would happen if some Windows setup.exe had failed? Would he have opened up Powershell and tried to force it to go? No, he'd google "SoftwareName failed to install on windows" and find instructions pertinent to his problem. So why didn't he do that here? He didn't google "failed to install steam on popos" which would have turned up discussions of the problem and the correct solution of updating and trying again. Instead, he copped an attitude about how Linux GUIs don't work (it did; it detected a potential catastrophe and prevented it) and instead googled "How to install steam in terminal". The page he found, he either skimmed a bit too fast, or was faulty. Because most instructions for installing something on .deb based systems will instruct you to do an apt update and apt upgrade first, which would have prevented the problem. But either someone wrote it wrong, or Linus skipped that part, did an apt install, ignored the dire dire warning, and watched X die.

    Now. Remember a few paragraphs ago when I called the Pop!_Shop "Apple scented?" In another episode of LTT, Linus was reviewing a set of AirPods. They were playing audio out of sync, and needed a firmware update. The process for performing this firmware update was to pair them to an iPhone (no other Apple device would do, ONLY an iPhone), put them in their case with the lid open, on the phone go to into the settings to the version number page for the AirPods, and wait, they should update. Linus, and me, bitched about that. At the time, the only way to manually perform an apt update through the GUI was to launch the Pop!_Shop, go to the Installed tab, and wait. No "Check for updates" button. So even if it occurred to you to try, it wasn't apparent how.

    *The Swiss cheese model of accident analysis works like this: for an accident to occur, usually multiple factors have to line up just right, like the holes in random slices of Swiss cheese.

  • The only support I've ever been given with Windows was "go in this menu, click this button" or "open the Run dialog, type regedit, and change SOME_RANDOM_REGISTRY_KEY from 1 to 0." And editing the registry happened more and more when I left 7 for 8. What's the difference between typing a bash command and clicking some button in some menu?

  • "Goodbye" used to mean that, though we've started to take it to mean "our relationship is permanently severed, I expect to never communicate with you again in my life." Which, kind of amazing we felt the need to have a word for that.

  • "Twelve ninety-nine, first window." is what usually happens. I'm not the kind of dork that repeats it as "One Two Decimal Niner Niner." The ham bands are full of geezers that'll happily play that game with me if I want.

    So, per the Pilot/Controller Glossary, "OVER" means "My transmission ended; I expect a response." Because the communique at the speaker is finished and I don't expect a response, "OUT" would be more appropriate, meaning "Conversation is over, I expect no response." Though on the air you'll often hear "Good day" which isn't in the P/CG but I think is nicer.