GIMP (at least in v2) does have a vector path tool and stores the paths with the image! Thing is, they kind of work like selections and you have to explicitly stroke the paths on bitmap layers. It’s a bit more complicated than necessary and not easy to grasp at first.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.

I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)

Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.

Long ago, I used Debian on my main PC but decided to go with Ubuntu on the laptop because it was easy to set up.

Later I switched to Debian on the laptop, too, because ultimately I felt Ubuntu was just Debian with extra steps.

Funny thing, I used Xfce pretty much everywhere. When I recently had a work laptop I tried KDE seriously for the first time ever, and I was like, oh, this is just a sensible desktop nowadays.

Clearly meant for nice hardware though. Sometimes a bit slow on my Raspberry Pi 4. Might switch back. But otherwise, no complaints.

Bah. Me, I’ve been using Debian since 1997. I’ve tried Ubuntu (and, what was it called, Progeny?) a few times but decided it was just Debian with extra steps.

In addition to the stuff already listed:

In the Swedish film version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, Lisbeth and the hacker dude use Ubuntu, especially in the scene where they recover the stuff from Lisbeth’s broken laptop. (In the US version, they decided to use Macs instead. And included a scene where she goes to an Apple store with the broken laptop and they helpfully tell her shit’s unfixable. Realism.)

rm -rf / can brick your system

Well good thing there’s basically no legitimate reason to ever even use rm -rf / anyway so GNU version is perfectly within its rights to refuse to do that by default, am I right? If you know what you’re doing and want to nuke partitions, that’s what cfdisk and mkfs are for, dammit

It’s funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).

I’m not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven’t checked. I’ve mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack

Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)

Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren’t a thing

Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn’t actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.

Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.

It’s more like a turtle and its shell.

Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!

Salmo has two AI packages commanding him to take five loaves of bread to the Two Sisters Lodge at 10am and to the West Weald Inn at midday, but the packages never execute as he has no bread in his inventory and the packages are of “escort” type, meaning he doesn’t actively seek any out. It’s possible this bug was introduced to avoid another, more serious one: if bread is given to Salmo using the console or CS, he will walk to one of the inns as commanded, take a bite of bread, and the game will crash. (UESP)

Right, this is classic Bethesda stuff right here.

Plot twist: the “wolves” are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

A “hbox” in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it’s a line of text. “Underfull hbox” means “I couldn’t stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing”. “Overfull hbox” means “Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f.”

Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can’t deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can’t remember how to do that, sorry, because it’s been a while and also I’m mildly drunk, sorry.

Back in 1997 I was like “Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe.”

(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)

Now? “Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can’t login. I’ll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!”

Shit, we’ve gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that’s not a good sign I don’t know what is.

Not “auto trust”, of course, but rather make adding keys is a bit smoother. As in “OK, there’s this key on the web site with this weird short hex cookie. Enter this simple command to add the key. Make sure signature it spits out is the same on the web page. If it matches, hit Yes.”

And maybe this could be baked somehow to the whole APT source adding process. “To add the source to APT, use apt-source-addinate https://deb.example.com/thingamabob.apt. Make sure the key displayed is 0x123456789ABC by Thingamabob Team with received key signature 0xCBA9876654321.”