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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • Snaps bundle dependencies and sandbox applications. The dependencies aspect is what matters more to me, but apparently there’s also security benefits if you were to try to install a malicious program.

    You can remove snapd, doing so also removes a number of built in apps. But at that point you may start questioning why you’re not just using Debian stable and add the stuff you want. Both of these options pretty much defeat the point of what Ubuntu was.



  • I get what Canonical was going for with snaps but wow did they ever ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It used to be the clear choice for anyone who wanted a generic Linux where you don’t have to configure everything yourself. Sure some people didn’t like Unity but the core distro still worked well and was stable. With snaps, package management has become more complex than other distros while decreasing performance if memory limited (and who isn’t nowadays). The number of times I’ve had something not work in the “stable” snap package is far too many, and it’s pretty much always fixed by installing the same package with apt.

    I get the reasoning for sandboxing applications, but they needed to wait until it was more stable to make the default. At this rate I doubt we’re ever going to get a truly mainstream desktop Linux distro rivaling macos and Windows…


  • Power management could still be a lot better for Intel laptops (though admittedly over the past decade it’s come a VERY long way). On my Chromebook running Ubuntu the powersave governor noticably stutters as it decides whether to boost the clocks, but all the other governors significantly hurt battery life. Somehow Windows managed to solve this battery problem with all its bloat, and Chromeos also has while also ultimately running Linux under the hood. Laptops could really benefit from the same level of driver maturity as desktop platforms.

    I’d also point out touchpad gesture support as a secondary point which is lacking. I love that pixel perfect scrolling and gestures are integrated into many desktop environments now, but they lack configuration for sensitivity and in some cases leave it to the applications themselves to control. Scrolling in Chrome is way too fast and Firefox way too slow for my trackpad, but unlike the cursor speed/acceleration, there is no setting to adjust the sensitivity of pixel perfect scrolling in supported applications.



  • Every company I’ve worked at has “annual” raises for cost of living. But sadly according to management they now average 2% when throughout COVID they were closer to 5%. Further, this company has made excuses to delay the review cycle 3 of the past 5 years I’ve been there, meaning they’ve now done 4 review/raise cycles over a full 5yr period. Employees definitely work less hard now, and many have left. I was also going to leave but just got promoted (with a whole 6% raise!)… So maybe I’ll stick around another 6mo?


  • This process pretty much summarizes why I’m scared to try changing companies lately. Presumably these measures are to make sure you’re not cheating with AI, but then if you get the job they expect you to use AI.

    I like in-person interviews most, they totally resolve the trust concerns. And to other engineers interviewing you using fewer MS products is typically viewed as a good thing. But getting to the in-person part is difficult in this market even if you’re willing to put up with all their spyware from what I hear.












  • I’d argue it already is an actual alternative so long as you’re following more general technical content rather than niche local stuff. Most of us the people here have Reddit’s API shutdown for third party apps to thank including myself. At least for me the last time I tried using the first party app it had major issues playing gifs on my Galaxy A52. Combine the bugs with the general closing of the platform and it was quite an easy switch. Lemmy is certainly smaller, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I waste less time on it than I used to on Reddit which feels more healthy.


  • I operate my hard drives totally external to my old PC’s case with a 3D printed holder keeping them together (with a little space between each drive for ventilation). It’s a little ugly, but it lives in a closet so I don’t really care how it looks. More importantly with my old Neatgear NAS I didn’t realize just how much speed I was missing out on. I guess with a modern Synology unit with a SSD cache you’ll likely get similar performance, but it’s so convenient to be able to run Docker containers and VMs on the same machine.