The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.
I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.
It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.
I’m pretty cool with being forgotten most of the time, especially in general “stir the pot to make people fight over stupid shit instead of building guillotines for the real problem” kinds of stuff.
But yes, I drank (and do sometimes drink) from garden hoses. It’s just tap water delivered with more volume and outdoors.
It’s just more right wing media distraction from The List not being released and keeping us from noticing encroaching fascism across the US.
Come to the Open Source community for ideology, stay for the better life. It’s a learning curve to get in. After that it’ll open more doors and be much more relaxing to run OSS operating environments than you think.
The real fun is when you’ve been on Linux for a few years and are forced to do some tasks on a Windows machine. It’s amazing how bad the Windows UI and tooling is, but it’s hard to see until you can look with some perspective.
I usually start a desktop on Mint since it’s got at least some new drivers and a few more tools with Cinnamon desktop.
If the hardware is finicky or there’s odd devices a distro doesn’t handle, I often just try a different distro instead of driver hacking. It’s a very big hammer, but I’d rather have things work with the distro configs instead of maintaining it myself.
Servers? Debian.
Desktops? Mint (prettier Debian out of the box)
Otherwise? Use what works with the least effort.
“a lot more people everywhere live paycheck to paycheck as migrant workers than you probably think”
The percentage of Americans living paycheck to paycheck is insanity. I haven’t seen Canada’s numbers, but the US is barely surviving.
Brilliant! Let’s also plan on self driving cars to increase total throughput and completely block out pedestrians on the street so the cars can go zoom zoom… Until induced demand locks it all up again.
Sample size: 1
That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.
It’s also California: the weather is usually really good. Maybe this “Becker” should add an amendment that requires bike roads to be built instead of parking spots.
I assume he’s against being proactive in problem solving, though.
According to one of our adjuncts: “Windows just works for dev, why are we teaching Linux at all?”
He didn’t last.
I did the same thing with the Linux machine there, but we got it up and running with a sweet potato using a patch set for the kernel and cross compiling it from the basic potato release. We did find the drivers for the VGA card we salvaged from a scrap pile too! Got it up to the full 640x480 supported by the card.
You could say it was a sweet setup.
I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.
It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!
I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.
Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!
Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.
They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>
#! Linux was amazing. So simple in the UI, but plenty of features if you wanted to set them up.
Been there! It was Avery different time.
The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.
I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…
I was given a logging on a RedHat server in 1997. It was operated by a fellow student in the dorm.
My school taught the engineers how to use SunOS for class, so it wasn’t a huge leap to start using a telnet connection to a local Linux machine.
Within a few months I was dual booting an older desktop Linux/Win95, and away I went. Since then it’s been about 90%+ of my daily computer use on Linux machines.
Back when a PROM really meant something.
You could also drop into a serious bios-style motherboard manager to really control booting and hardware configs.
Wow. I haven’t seen a Sun keyboard like that in … geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.
Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.
I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can’t build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.
It’s been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.
Basically, I’ve been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it’s doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We’re a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.