captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

In my 10 years around the Linux ecosystem, I’ve never seen anyone recommend Red Hat to new home desktop users.

Ubuntu has joined Red Hat. It’s a corporate server distro now.

Go look at their website. More corporate logos than a Cup series stock car. Just figuring out which version you should download so you get a “normal desktop” is a task bigger than it should be. Back on the stupid bad old website I came across a guy who said he “installed Ubuntu but it didn’t come with APT” and I’m like “wtf…did you install Ubuntu Core, their Snap-only IoT thing?” And he stopped responding.

Actually I’m going to accuse Fedora of doing this too. You kind of have to know “Fedora WorkStation” is the Gnome version which is considered the default, “Spins” are the versions with other DEs, and “Silverblue” is the immutable file system version.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullshit about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

It has been my experience that it is a bigger pain in the neck to install Windows. Something you can try is practice it in a virtual machine using something like VirtualBox.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Yeah I can’t detect how they’re sorted here, for a minute I was thinking “alphabetically by first name? Andrew Jackson is before Barack Obama, but no there’s no George section…”

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

I’m kinda hoping that with an actual American in the White House this time any and all rioters that attempt to enter the Capitol building this coming January are met with volley fire and bayonets.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

They got a lot worse after 2010 when “thin” happened. I’ve got an NEC laptop from 1998 that has an excellent keyboard.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

There’s this expression, it refers to a piece of information that is often spread as wisdom but has no basis in fact or truth, that expression is “old wives tale.”

Old wives be trippin’.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Advice I have heard is decline an exit interview, because those are for the company’s benefit and not yours.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

If you’re being laid off I don’t know if that works.

It is my understanding that they’re going to try to get you to say something on the record or worse sign something they can deny your legal rights over.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Does this mean that the earth no longer makes coal? That since there are now microorganisms that break down cellulose logs don’t just stack up for millions of years?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

hoisin sauce.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

The manual to A Link to the Past contains basically the franchise’s design document. Go read the little lore section at the beginning of that manual and tell me they haven’t been just pulling nouns out of it to make games out of for the last 20 years.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Well whatever this is about needs to be Streisanded. Find out who is responsible and why, and then make it a household name.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

This makes me want to point out that it is SG-1 canon that a clone of Jack O’Neil in the body of a teenager actually went back to high school, pretty much specifically to hit on teenage girls.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Side question: SG-2 was Kawalski’s command in the pilot episode, and then I don’t recall ever hearing that number used again. Did they retire the number from the sport?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

No I don’t think I ultimately would, for a bunch of reasons.

I’ve said it before in this community, the 2 decades of “gritty realistic” heartburn drama ushered in by Battlestar Galactica cured my love of television. I don’t currently subscribe to any streaming service and as they get more numerous, more expensive and worse I don’t think I’m going to pick the habit back up.

I think I’m developing a contact allergy to resurrected IPs. Upon reading this I don’t think “Oh boy a chance for more of my favorite adventures” I think “oh brother, some business suit with a neckhole infection has detected an IP they aren’t monetizing hard enough.” The most recent TV show to catch my eye was The Good Place, which is an original property. It was made because someone had an idea. “Do you think you’d watch a new Stargate show” sounds to me like “would you buy the industrial slop we’re going to churn out anyway if we dye it the color of a thing you liked 20 years ago?” The one thing no one has there is an idea.

It’s also just one of those shows where I don’t know what you’d do with the setting. Star Wars and Star Trek, those settings are open enough to where you could go 90 lightyears to the right and still find cool stories. Shows like Stargate, Farscape and Babylon 5 are so character-centric that I don’t know if I want to watch just another show made in that setting. Like, you could make me a Star Trek show that doesn’t have the Federation in it. Set it on a Romulan warbird or something, it would work. There have been numerous works set in the Star Wars universe that didn’t have to do with the Jedi or Rebels or Empire or whatever. What would you make out of the Farscape universe without Moya and the gang?

No, let it rest on what it achieved.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

See I knew someone was going to bring up TNG, that the original show was really Kirk-Spock-McCoy character centric and that was a big criticism aimed at TNG at first. And “Then TNG came out and it was fine” No it wasn’t, the first two seasons are pretty rough, the show really found its footing in the third season.

I think trying to create a new Stargate show would be like trying to create a new show in the Hercules/Xena universe. Because they have basically the same problem: They ran out of ancient gods to kill before the series finale. I think they’ve already kinda proven they milked SG-1’s setting dry because both spinoffs went “Meanwhile in another galaxy, something almost completely unrelated is happening.”

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I’ve done a whole NTSB breakdown on that incident before, but here’s what I hope is the short version:

He was using Pop!_OS. Pop!_OS’ desktop environment was at the time kind of a fork of Gnome. I think now it outright is a fork of Gnome.

It just so happened that a version of the Steam .deb package went out with a buggy set of prerequisite data such that if it encountered a “weird” desktop environment it would declare itself incompatible with this which would make APT uninstall the entire GUI stack, right on down to Xorg. It wouldn’t happen to distros using more mainstream desktops like Gnome or KDE or xfce, but it did effect weird things like Pop!_OS.

This bugged version was apparently the latest version published when the Pop!_OS install image Linus used was made, so that was the version in the apt cache on Linus’ Pop!_OS machine.

In the time between the creation of that install media and the filming of the episode, the bug had been reported and an updated version pushed to the repo.

At no point during the install-first boot process, or while launching the Pop!_Shop did Pop!_OS update the apt cache.

Linus tried to install Steam via the Pop!_Shop’s GUI. behind the scenes it saw the error about incompatibility with the desktop and threw a dialog box that said “Failed to install Steam.” The system was not harmed or altered in any way and continued working correctly.

Instead of googling “popos failed to install steam” to see if there’s a way to fix it, he instead threw a small bitch fit about how Linux doesn’t work and you have to use the terminal for everything. He googled for “how to install steam with the terminal” or similar, and found the command “sudo apt install steam.” Most guides online for installing things using APT tell you to run an update and probably an upgrade command first, I do not know if Linus found instructions that omitted that or if he skimmed too aggressively.

Running the command “sudo apt install steam” printed a lot of STDIO to the terminal including a large list of things it was preparing to uninstall, followed by a plaintext warning in bold text that read (paraphrasing) **WARNING! This operation is very likely to seriously damage your computer. You should not do this unless you REALLY know what you are doing. To continue, type “Yes do as I say.”

It is my belief that Windows trained Linus to ignore such warnings, because Windows constantly throws errors about “this may harm your computer” basically every time it asks for administrator privileges. Linux does not do this; Linux usually accepts a ‘y’ or even just hitting the enter key with no input to mean “yes proceed,” sometimes when it wants you to really stop and think it’ll make you type the whole word “yes.” Having to type that whole sentence feels almost like “update your last will and testament to continue.” I think a lot of users learned it would do that from Linus’ video.

He did so, the computer dutifully uninstalled the entire GUI stack and dropped him into a terminal.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I would agree. If you watch the video, you’ll see that Linux Mint’s onboarding process walked Luke through using the Update Manager. Pop!_OS didn’t. Also apparently Pop!_Shop doesn’t or didn’t perform an apt update upon launch for reasons beyond my understanding. Anyone familiar enough with Pop!_OS to know if that was or still is the case?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Naw man just turn it 15 degrees or so.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

As a woodworker I am compelled to point out that milled lumber is available in much larger nominal dimensions than 2x4. There’s no need to limit yourself.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

What about a 4 inch thick whole trunk bark on slab like they make those ridiculous trendy “river tables” out of?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

There it is wearing four coats of spar varnish. I’ll post one last picture once it’s got some plants on it.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/3cfe3063-1e4d-4486-9968-86b7be24b364.jpeg

Welcome, by the way, into the tiny garden shed into which I have crammed an almost feature complete furniture shop. I still haven’t found a place to put a lathe of any useful size. Maybe I can do something different with the whole router table situation?

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Okay, some feedback from having used this little tablet PC in a wood shop use case:

First of all I don’t have anywhere to put it. a piece of paper can just sit on my workbench surface and who cares if I get boards or tools on it, a tablet feels more precious than that. This may be less of a factor in a larger shop.

MEMS sensors were a mistake. Take me back to 2007 when my convertible laptop had a button on the bezel to rotate the screen.

While we’re turning off automatic features, turn off automatic screen off/suspend. This machine takes a full 8 seconds to wake back up, and when I’m in “Okay that step is done, next step, how long do the rails need to be?” mode I’m pretty sure I could chew through my own forearm in the time it takes the screen to come back on. Like I say, easy solution is don’t turn the screen off. It seems to have enough battery life.

I briefly tried three DEs with this little touch screen, Mint Cinnamon is not up to it; it’s 100% a desktop UI that will let you click on things by poking a laptop touch screen, it is NOT mobile friendly. Fedora KDE is willing to try but it’s still desktop first, Gnome is a tablet OS that remembers when it was a desktop OS slightly too much. I would honestly rather have the “switching between apps” workflow you get from Android than the “workspaces” of Gnome because it doesn’t leave enough touch gestures for applications. Just trying to scroll through a PDF, it wants to click-drag-highlight rather than just scroll.

FreeCAD continues to be second only to GIMP as “FOSS software that is amazingly powerful at what it does with the UX of a colonoscopy.” It works surprisingly well on touch screen. It’s not even in the same time zone as good or usable, but “works surprisingly well.” It starts up, runs, opens files etc. quite competently but it’s outright combative when it comes to looking at different parts of a model, switching modes, switching workbenches, looking at dimensions, selecting geometry etc. I’ve had it not accept input from an onscreen keyboard, so I outright couldn’t change a dimension.

I’m a little tempted to build my own furniture CAD package in the Godot game engine. I don’t know how to do 90% of that but I’m about to try.

The core of the idea does work though: it has been very nice being able to take measurements in the shop, put them in CAD right there, walk into my house, and then that file is just on my desktop. My favorite thing about the whole experience is Syncthing.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Yeah I’m with you; I’m also in the resurrecting old hardware with Linux club.

If I treat the little Lenovo tablet like a laptop, well…it is one. it’s a small, low-end x86 PC. Standard install images work fine, it installs .rpms and flatpaks just fine, FreeCAD launches and operates correctly…with the keyboard attached.

Snap the keyboard off and it performs a heartfelt but untalented impression of a tablet. Gnome is still Gnome, it still wants to be a mouse and keyboard UI, but it has had touch support bolted on after the fact and it works about as well as tits on a fish. It’s got a lot of the problems Windows 8 had in trying to be a desktop OS that can also run on tablet, but without the schizophrenia. A lot of the UI elements are still quite small even when upscaled to 200%, you can tell by the way certain UI elements fail that it doesn’t like being scaled like that especially in portrait mode, and it still interprets touch inputs largely as mouse inputs. So if you try to scroll through a PDF file, you might scroll, you might highlight a bunch of text which causes it to scroll strangely.

FreeCAD has paid even less attention to touch compatibility, I’ve noticed that sometimes interacting with some elements via touch will cause the view controls to break until the app is restarted. The UI isn’t built for fat fingers, a lot of stuff is designed for shift+clicking or for keyboard only controls, and I had a dimension dialog box refuse to accept input from the onscreen keyboard.

The hardware might be able to do what I need, the software almost certainly can’t.