Some of this shit I think would even catch out a technical person. Like there’s “technical” and there’s “is intimately familiar with optical media DRM software as packaged by Red Hat based distributions.”

The TL;DR here might be “Look this is user unfriendly even for me.”

Okay, we’re going to compile something from Github because I’ve got a weird piece of legacy hardware I want to get running and there’s some guy with a hobby project. Build instructions: sudo apt install something something-lib, something-common fleep, fleep-utils, tonerag. Okay, I’m on Fedora, so change apt to dnf, not found, not found, already installed, not found, not found, tongerag will take up another 162kb, continue y/N? And I’ve had it do that with instructions written for Fedora. Either because the developer didn’t test on Fedora and made the same “just turn apt to dnf” mistake without testing it or it’s an Apple psy-op to make people hate open source.

Some of those are even words.

…because it outright can’t do things? Like, if the flatpak version of VLC doesn’t come with the libraries it needs for DRM…oh well. My washing machine can’t play DVDs either.

https://xkcd.com/1200

I held down the shift key, thank you very much.

Takes ten years and turns out to be a disappointment? That tracks.

I haven’t gone maximum rainbow vomit, but mine is a Fractal Pop Mini Air with RGB case fans, and yeah there were a few more little wires to run. The case actually has a built-in RGB controller, and I used that for awhile, but I got kinda curious and started playing with the onboard RGB, and I’ve got an aurora effect I like through OpenRGB. I think it’s doing that by Linux sending the motherboard’s RGB controller data constantly over I2C so it’s tying up some of my system RAM but fuck it it’s fun.

I have yet to build a computer that didn’t POST on first boot, with one minor exception: My cousin’s Ryzen 5600 machine. I built that in a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini, which has a front IO reset button, and I wired the Reset and the Power buttons backwards. I pushed the power button, nothing. I pushed the Reset button, it booted to the BIOS setup.

I THOUGHT I had a problem with my uncle’s computer; but no, the monitor I was testing with chose to die during first POST. That monitor is behind three different trees now.

So, you joke about that, but there was a time when that was absolutely the strategy. Right around the Pentium 3 era, there was an enthusiast motherboard that came out with two sockets, and the hot advice was to get that motherboard and a pair of Celerons rather than a Pentium 3.

The physical act of assembling the computer isn’t the hard part. Picking out components that will work well together is the tough part.

Hey, that’s a personal question.

Okay but why is it inherently funny though?

So we’re just doing food items with no other context as memes? What’s it gonna be next month? Pasta?

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

My thing is, a dumb phone has the features I would like to do without on my smart phone. Telephone and SMS ARE THE GODDAMN PROBLEM. If people who were not explicitly whitelisted by me out of band had no method of contacting me, that’d be great.

My problem is people keep infecting the world with software designed with Gnome’s “Mac with Meningitis” style sheet.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

I aim for 10 years with a mid-life upgrade. I even do this with my laptops; my Inspiron got a new battery, a new CPU fan and an SSD for its 6th birthday. It’s 11 now.

My Ryzen 3600 rig is an HTPC now.