Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 3 Posts
  • 406 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • The number of steps on the side of the peel and the sides of the fruit don’t match, and why would the concave sections for the pit be on the convex sides of the fruit? Unless these are a bunch of individual square pieces that were pulled out individually and then lined up, so the part around the pit “collapsed” to the table, but the tops of the domed part are oriented wrong…it’s some kinda bullshit.




  • My experience with LibreOffice is it works fine if you’re doing straightforward things by yourself. MLA formatted essay? “Twelve point double-spaced Times New Roman or you get a zero” and they never noticed my papers were Liberation Sans? Sure that works. “Pick a partner and make a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation” is a nightmare because sharing files back and forth between Powerpoint and Impress doesn’t work very well.

    The more usable solution to that is Google Docs. I had a group project with four other guys, and we were all sat around a table typing in the same document at the same time on three different operating systems. Played perfectly well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Us Linux nerds who hate “the cloud” because “someone else’s computer” and Google because “Don’t Be Evil” kind of lurch at that one, but it functions.








  • I’ve often compared Gnome, KDE and Cinnamon, and it usually boils down to KDE is often too complicated and busy, Gnome is often too simple and braindead, Cinnamon sits somewhere in the middle.

    Gnome’s settings menu is missing a lot of things you’d think should be there. They don’t want you changing things, so you end up installing separate packages like gnome-tweaks to actually render the OS usable. They’ve got this weird attitude that they’re going to out-Apple Apple with a millionth of Apple’s budget, and where Apple offers “Just Works”, Gnome offers “Barely Does Anything.”

    KDE has the opposite problem, they’ve got a setting for literally everything, if you can find it in their overgrown single settings menu. A basic applet will have several tabs crammed full of options and UI elements, making it probably the best tool for whatever mundane task it was meant for but you have to stop and figure out how it works, and it’s all rendered in janky misaligned QT so it looks like an amateur reskinned Windows 98.

    Cinnamon inherits a lot from Gnome, but puts back in the shit Gnome gouged out. I tend to find things where I think to look for them, it tends to provide the functionality I need out of the box without excessive clutter. But, it’s a bit behind the times with stuff like Wayland, so it’s not the best choice for very modern hardware.






  • That is EXACTLY the path I took. I started playing with a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby, a Pi 1B in those days. Then my old laptop died, I bought a new one from Dell, which came with Win 8.1, and it kept dying. While going around and around with Dell’s tech support, I pretty much had to use that Pi for my normal work. I got a pretty good crash course in Linux, to the point it was more familiar to me than Win8.1. So I tried Ubuntu, it was okay, I tried Mint, and that was my home for the next ten years.




  • YOu didn’t (fully) fix it. This is something I don’t see a lot of people talking about regarding Windows/Linux dual boot.

    Unix-like systems like Linux set the computer’s built-in real-time clock to UTC and then do any conversions to local time on the fly. I think that traces back to UNIX’s origins as a minicomputer OS; it needed to talk to other minicomputers across time zones from the beginning.

    Windows, like DOS before it, is designed to sit on a desk by itself plugged into nothing but power and accept data one, maybe two floppy disks at a time. Why would the user care about anything other than the local time? Hell the original IBM 5150 didn’t even have a built-in RTC. It would forget what time it was when powered off and it would ask you when DOS booted.

    Either OS can be set to do it either way in the modern era; pick one to change so that they don’t fight. It’s done with a registry edit in Windows or a bash command in Linux. Do one, or the other, but not both. I recommend changing Windows, because Windows will reset the RTC every daylight savings time and on a mobile system every time it crosses a time zone, Linux doesn’t.


  • I mean, Ubisoft and EA both still have business models, somehow. It’s kinda wild what people will put up with.

    There’s a whole bunch of academic shitware that doesn’t work on Linux. Last time I was in college the math textbook came with a code to a website that wanted to install some Wolfram thing, I dropped out again, shit like that.

    A lot of engineering software and CAD isn’t present. You just turn up to the town council with the bridge you’ve designed in FreeCAD. See how that works out.

    Business software is a wild ride. It’s some mishmash of Windows software, AS400 software, web portals and iPad apps. I genuinely don’t know if I could rent a storefront downtown, fill it with merchandise, and successfully run a business with nothing but x86 machines running Linux.