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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I think it comes from diminishing experience windows provides

    An example, since a few windows versions I can’t get to install an old HP printer because they haven’t written the drivers for it. On Linux it works fine.
    You don’t want ads and your os to be sending your passwords who knows where? AFAIK ATM no long time support version of windows provides that.
    My gaming buddy is rather well versed in computer stuff, he’s the person that writes and hosts our discord bots. He can’t make sound drivers to work as he wants. Sometimes things go loud without reason, sometimes mute doesn’t work, sometimes sounds play on an output that according to Windows is muted… Crazy stuff


  • That’s why I wrote it’s another unpopular opinion. Somehow the internet claims Arch is hard when to me it’s been the easiest distro I’ve ever used

    • No GUI bs, unless you install it yourself, that you never know what it does under the hood. The config file you find in man is the config file that governs the thing - easy
    • You deleted a little bit too much? You just reinstall package, like in Slackware - easy
    • You need something from outside the packages? Arch is very well prepared for you building things from source and install it in a sane way, instead of pure make install, like Gentoo - easy
      And PKGBUILD is easy to understand, RPM and DEB package creation is black magic
    • You don’t have a lot of crap in the system that you are not sure you need. Since it comes rather plain, you either install something you want, or it gets installed as dependency

    But, of course, YMMV
    And I’ve tried “easier” distros in the past. Sooner or later it always felt like I need proprietary set of keys to unscrew the lid to flip one small cable


  • I was mocking around with GPU drivers in order to make Podman containers to access the GPU. (…) I don’t have much spare time and I would like to play a game, I used to play before, without spending hours/days fixing issue that didn’t exist last time I played it.

    And

    I had other, non-regular user issues with those

    I think, you should keep these two things (messing with containers accessing GPU and “just play a game”) separate. I mean on separate boxes. Because now you can’t “just play” because you’ve been elbows deep in OS internals. You can’t take apart your fridge and then expect it to just cool the water the next day

    “optimised” for KDE

    Then I’m guessing these might need some KDE envs

    Yes, I use it on a daily basis but there’s no easy way to get it working on iOS/iPadOS.

    Ah, you’re trying to breach the non-open wall. Is there an app on i* that allows you to set up an ftp/http file sharing server on the device? You probably could set it up as rclone upstream


  • started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I’ve been using Fedora

    Another unpopular opinion:
    That’s because you’ve been using distributions that are either behind the times or have a lot of wonky crap added to them that looks like user friendliness when it works and is like fixing windows when it doesn’t (I’ve been through similar path, just with a few other distros along the way)

    Start with Gentoo or Arch (maybe Slackware). These are close to the grass, so the way to set things up is the way to fix things up

    some apps don’t respect desktop scaling

    are these gtk based apps? Different toolsets require different envs

    syncing

    Have you tried syncthing?


  • what happened is the programmer made assumption based on the illusion created by the libraries: writing application on arduino is just like using a library on a unix-box. (which is not correct)

    That is why I have become carefull to promote tools that make things to easy, that are to good at hiding the complexity of things. Unless they are really dummy-proof after years and decades of use, you have to be very carefull not to create assumptions that are simply not true.

    I know where you’re coming from. And I’m not saying you’re wrong. But just a thought: what do you think will prevail? Having many people bash together pieces and call in someone who understands the matter only about things that don’t. Or having more people understand the real depths?
    I’m afraid that in cases where the point is not to become the expert, first one will be chosen as viable tactic

    Long time ago we were putting things together manually crafting assembly code. Now we use high level languages to churn out the code faster and solve un-optimalities throwing more hardware at the problem until optimizations come in in interpreter/compiler. We’re already choosing the first one





  • That can become an issue but IMO the person in your example used the tool wrong. To use it to write the boilerplate for you, MVP, see how the libraries should be used sets one on the track. But that track should be used to start messing with it and understand why what goes where. LLM for code used as replacement is misuse. Used as time booster is good. Unless you completely don’t want to learn it, just have something that works. But that assumption broke in your example the moment they decided to add something to it

    I have a very “on hands” way of learning things. I had in the past situations when I read whole documentation for a library back to back but in the end I had to copy something that somehow works and keep breaking it and fixing it to understand how it works. The part between documentation to MVP wasn’t easier because I’ve read the documentation
    For such kinds of learning, having an LLM create something that works is a great speed up. In theory a tutorial might help in such cases. But it has to exist and very often I want something like this but… can mean that one is exploring direction that won’t address their use-case

    EDIT: A thought experiment. If I go to fiverr asking for a project, then for another one, and then start smashing them together the problem is not in what the freelancers did. It’s in me not knowing what I’m doing. But if I can have a 100 line boilerplate file that only needs a little tinkering generated from a few sentences of text, that’s a great speed up


  • Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?

    Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is

    And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like





  • wrote a library in BASIC for screen / window applications in DOS. (you know, pop-up text-windows and so on). How do I do that on linux (in C)?
    (…)
    I know there exist things like QT and ncurses

    So it’s graphical interface we are after or text based?

    For text, I agree with others, ncurses

    For graphical

    • pyGTK
      basically everything you need, some learnig curve as it’s big and versatile. But to be honest, when trying to achieve something I’d suggest to start from GTK reference to me it somehow conveys the logic better than the PyGTK reference
    • Kivy
      haven’t used it, but might be fun to use
    • wxWidgets
      very cross-platform. Not only you can use it to write UI that will require minor fixes to have the same code for Windows and Linux at the same time, you can also tell it whether the toolkit used under the hood on Linux should be QT or GTK
    • Tk
      old, simple (more fancy things need some gymnastics) but simple (easy to use) and supported in Python out of the box (you don’t even need to install anything)
    • QT
      I’m putting it here just for fairness. I don’t like it, don’t like its signal-slot design, I think it’s hogging up too much resources. But last time I used it was ~10 years ago and in the end, it does in fact work






  • Gentoo unstable was a little bit tiring in the long run. The bleeding edge, but often I needed to downgrade because the rest of the libraries were not ready

    Gentoo stable was really great. Back then pulseaudio was quite buggy. Having a system where I could tell all applications and libraries to not even link to it (so no need to have it installed at all) made avoiding its problems really easy
    But when my hardware got older and compilation of libreoffice started to take 4h, I remembered how nice it was on Slackware where you just install package you broke and you’re done

    Arch looked like a nice middle-ground. Most of the things in packages, big focus on pure Linux configurability (pure /etc files, no Ubuntu(or SUSE?) “you need working X.org to open distro-specific graphics card settings”) and AUR for things there are no official packages for. Turned out it was a match :)