Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • 2K was my jam.

    The death of the DOS line of Windows (3.x, 9x, ME) lead to the decision to inject clown DNA into NT in order to appeal to the masses and that’s how we ended up with XP.

    Vista was an attempt to eradicate the clown, but it was still there, people hated it and because Microsoft thought they had eradicated the clown, they thought people wanted more clown, and that’s how we ended up with Windows 8.

    What about 7? The clown gene skipped a generation.



  • Sounds like a job for a USB trial run on a rainy weekend when you’re not doing anything else.

    Nvidia supply OEM drivers for the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint), if not others, assuming the open-source drivers don’t cut it for you. Microcode updates are released for both Intel and AMD.

    You’ll probably run into issues with some games. Things are getting better on Linux, slowly and steadily, but many games are written specifically for Windows with no Linux port available. Steam’s store, for example, shows which games are SteamOS compatible, which usually means they’ll run on Linux too.

    For other games it’s worth checking the Internet - e.g. www.protondb.com to see if anyone else has a particular game running under Linux. You’re probably aware that there are programs that attempt to provide some layer of Windows behaviour that form part of the solution. Some of the solutions may or may not involve command line use.


  • This is one of those situations where explaining why I said what I said, when I said it, in the way that I said it, and bring into question whether I could have worded any of it better takes way more time than a glib aside. Something adjacent to the Bullsh*t Asymmetry principle, if not an instance.

    Anyway, I was trying to encompass those folks who tend to set their system time to 12hr, and wasn’t really saying anything one way or the other about whether the person who made the screenshot (OP it seems) generally has their system set that way or not. It was more pointing out that having it be 24hr (or leaving it that way) makes the time look a bit like a year in the not-too-distant future (2028), and thus could form part of the date that is otherwise displayed.

    It could be that the whole thing is a coincidence, but I was pointing out that it could have been part of the joke.




  • AMD graphics drivers might be an example of this. They’re made by AMD for Ubuntu specifically, not Debian. They work* on LMDE, so I assume they will also work** on Debian, but they weren’t specifically developed for that platform.

    Installing them was a bit hairy, but they’ve survived at least one kernel update so far, which is somewhat reassuring***.

    * on my specific hardware.

    ** for some hardware combinations, including mine, if not all.

    *** but not completely. FrankenDebian is the word I use for it.



  • Love it or loathe it, systemctl is trying to do the right thing with regard to stability and data preservation.

    If you really mean it, the manual offers a few levels of strength beyond the plain one: -i (don’t check for busy processes, which is what’s going on in the meme), -f (force, presumably asks even less nicely), and -f -f (don’t even ask, just do it now, preservation be damned).



  • Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

    That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

    Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

    If there is a difference, is it the fact it’s a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where’s the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

    (Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save “Letter to Grandma.txt” it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won’t suddenly change to “LETTER to Grandma.txt”, despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you’ll get the same file.)


  • You can try asking a process to round up its dead children, but unlike the quit signals, the number varies by platform. For most Linux users it’s -17, but using the text version -CHLD is probably a better choice (unless you’re on a really old system that absolutely has to have a number, in which case check the local documentation.)

    If it’s a well-behaved process, that can do away with the need to kill it. In other cases, there might be some kind of restart mechanism built in that can be called instead - assuming sending it a SIGCHLD doesn’t trigger that behaviour anyway.

    Case in point, the Cinnamon DE has at least a couple of ways to restart it, and at least one of those gets rid of its zombie child processes. It’s fairly rare that I need to do that, and I haven’t tried sending it a -17. I might do at some point.


  • I think I’ve seen a couple of their videos, and have no idea which of them Adam would be (can’t even call any faces to mind right now to be fair), so I’m pretty sure those phrases are in my head from elsewhere.

    The “Please stop” is pretty generic, but got a lot of traction that time Hyperbole and a Half told a story involving it. “Hey! Quit it!” is probably Lisa or Bart from some episode of The Simpsons. “Stop it! NOW!” is probably something that was actually said to me at some point as a kid.

    Never got shot though, so I must have started behaving at that point.

    (For legal reasons, that last part is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I am also using “for legal reasons” mostly humorously. Mostly.)


  • Linux has at least four levels of decreasing pleasantry: -1, -2, -15, and -9, aka HangUP, INTerrupt, TERMinate and KILL or “Please stop”, “Hey! Quit it!”, “Stop it! NOW!” and *loud gunshot*.

    Sometimes processes will clean up after themselves and leave when asked nicely. Or sternly told off. Of course, if you don’t need or want that, load up your, uh, -9 shooter.



  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldTrue?
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    3 months ago

    I’d prefer the “ain’t nobody got time for that” woman for Mint (and so speaking about the more hands-on distros), but I can’t say the existing image isn’t accurate.

    … not that I can say that it is accurate either. And the demographic in the Threadiverse allegedly has a heavy skew towards that picture, Mint or not, so it might be counterproductive to run a poll here.