I hope someday to have as much self confidence as someone who lists a “slightly shat” chair for $75.

Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.

Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of “human” in the company’s choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be “good”, or they leave.

Tried installing Windows 11. After a few hours screwing around trying to find the right drivers for everything, I tried a live USB of Mint. Everything worked great out of the box.

Also, the ads, and Microsoft’s insistence on forcing user accounts.

It was updated this year. They moved on from the mini-CD limit (50MB?) to a regular CD (700MB). Spiritual successor, newer target.

And won’t survive things like… getting sprayed with water.

We don’t need more than basic math in programming–anything else is application-specific.

Programming requires logic and reasoning, which is a common foundation for other areas (such as math and philosophy). But we often lump “logic” together with math, which is probably why people assume math is central to programming.

Programming is also a very broad field (when someone says “I’m a programmer,” it’s like saying “I play sports”). Some fields (like embedded software) require more math than others.

You might also enjoy a selection from Hark, a Vagrant.

Linux users be like

Easy access to a few key functions is nice, IMO. Though helping someone on their computer and seeing half the taskbar occupied with two dozen system tray icons makes me vomit just a little, so I get it.

When your mom says you’re not getting out of cleaning this time…

I’ll throw Alpine Linux into the mix. Not sure how well it supports older hardware, but it’s really small.

They obviously don’t have the features that Rufus has, but I’ve ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you’re just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

Even using bullet points can help a lot in these situations (I use them quite often in emails with non-technical recipients).

When people talk about Agile, they’re referring to one of two things: the manifesto, or the popular “agile” process.

Problem is: the popular process breaks a lot of the manifesto’s principles. The concept of “sprints” goes directly against the manifesto’s call to a sustainable pace. And in practice, the popular process tends to be documentation- and beurocracy-heavy.

This article is drawing some unsubstantiated conclusions from a very small sample size, and they don’t seem to consider many other explanations. For example, it may be that companies are more likely to use an agile methodology when they’re expecting changing requirements or limited input, so it makes sense they’d have a higher failure rate. Correlation != causation.

The article only touched on the real issue: companies that employ agile (especially the largely-ineffective popular process) are often the types that use it as an excuse to skimp on other areas. Agile or not, any project without clear direction and some documentation up front is going to struggle (and the manifesto’s emphasis on working software over documentation wasn’t referring to high-level requirements).

Overall, 2/10 article.

You can make most distros work like most others, with enough tweaking. The main difference at this point isn’t what you can do with them, but how they’re set up by default, which typically reflects their thing (e.g., Debian is super stable vs Arch giving access to the latest and greatest).

To be honest, I think the homogenization is a net positive. I doubt we’d have the diverse driver support that makes Linux a viable desktop OS if we didn’t have lots of similarities. And it’s a natural thing–it turns out that most people want computers to do a relatively similar variety of things, so all the major distros end up moving a similar direction. And with open source, when one distro implements a really nice feature, it makes sense everyone else would port it as well.

Welcome! I was actually in the same boat a year or two ago–every time I tried before that, there was a lot of finagling to get everything working. When I upgraded to Win11, and was having a rough time getting drivers going, I ended up trying Mint. Everything worked out of the box and I haven’t looked back.

1. I find it helpful to have a separate data partition (though I don’t actually use it for /home because I find that gets messy quickly). Separate data is nice in case you’re concerned about something getting messed up, or if you like to try another distros (I ended up switching to Manjaro a while ago). Not necessary, but whatever you do, I recommend keeping it relatively simple.

2. Can’t comment, haven’t tried.

3. Last I checked, there was no client for Google Drive or Proton Drive. Not sure about Dropbox. I’ve heard of rclone but haven’t tried it.

4. I usually try apt first, then check the GUI for a flatpak if needed. I personally prefer native apps/deb packages, but that’s a subjective thing.

5. I use the default terminal and Firefox install. I ended up moving my actual personal data out of /home and it’s been easier to keep it all tidy (there’s even a way to point the file manager shortcuts to an alternate location). Tip: if you happen to have an Nvidia card, there’s a GUI utility to switch to a non-free driver, which improved things for me. My other tip: especially if you have a separate data partition, give yourself permission to not get everything perfect, and that you might want a clean install somewhere down the road. Mint isn’t quite as easy to reinstall as something like SilverBlue, but it’s not that hard I’ve found.

Have fun!

It stops whatever is playing and starts playing the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Try Linux Mint. You set it up on a USB drive, and you can try using it before you install it. So load it up, and try doing a few things you’d normally do (check email, etc.). This way, you can get your feet wet without committing fully. If you find you like it, you can do an installation (and it doesn’t require any fancy terminal stuff).

Electricity makes dumb rock go brrrr

Electricity makes dumb head muscle go brrrr

Brain = rock, QED