I begrudgingly prefer AppImage to being told to make make install, at this point. You know those little projects that will never go into a standard repo or flatpak. For example, some ham radios used a converter box that hooked up to a Windows 95 PC via serial so you could program its internal memory. Well, none of that shit exists anymore. so some guy somewhere has written a thing to do it with a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO. 444 people in the world will ever download and use this software. I’d rather you AppImage that than tell me to git clone make make install.

I think they broke up.

I am in the final stages of building two PCs for relatives of mine, and I don’t think I did so an hour too soon. I watched RAM double in price the day after I bought it.

And they did this by theming and extending Gnome, so Gnome must break it on their behalf bi-weekly.

That’s normal. cats are a viscous liquid.

I believe the original concept was that humans were used for processing power, but explaining “brain is computer, computers together stronk” to the audience of a guns and karate movie in 1999 wasn’t as easy as holding up a duracell.

I was in late middle school, like 11 or 12 years old, walking down the street with my friend Chris, and there was a bolt of lighting right near us. I don’t know how close it was, I saw white and heard the loudest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It felt like it struck 10 feet up the road. I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever run.

surprised its not just Conky.

Kernel-level anti-cheat, it’s not just for gamers.

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.

it’s a little ARM box running Android, right?

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.

I still like Cinnamon better. To quote Jeremy Clarkson, “This is brilliant, but I like this.”

I mean, just now I was talking about dual booting Linux and Windows, and they fight over the RTC, Linux wants UTC, Windows wants local time. It’s a line of bash to set Linux to use local time, it’s changing a registry key in Windows.

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.

Have you run into the system clock issue yet?

You can learn how to use the terminal. You have demonstrated the ability to compose a coherent sentence, you can learn.

Every terminal command is a program. Typing a “command” into the terminal is just typing the name of a program. If you type firefox, Firefox launches. If it’s installed, we’ll come back to that. Anything else in the “command” like if you see letters or words after a dash, something like ls -a is an option, it’s like ticking a box in a dialog window, but on the front end. I recommend spinning up a virtual machine or getting a Raspberry Pi or something you don’t care about, and following some tutorials. Learn how to move around the file system, install software, run some utilities.

About that “if it’s installed” part. You mentioned you run Zorin. Zorin is what I call a Trendy Distro Of The Month. I’ve been using Linux for twelve years now, this hasn’t stopped yet. There’s the mainstays like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuSe, there’s the niche special purpose things like Kali and TAILS and Puppy and Tiny, and then there’s the hundreds of quadrillions of “We took Ubuntu, put Steam on it by default, swapped SystemD for whatever.rs, swapped Firefox for Chromium and did a half-assed job at theming and extending Gnome that’s going to break every time they push an update.”

PeppermintOS, ZorinOS, ElementaryOS, Pop!_OS, Garuda, Nobara, Endeavor, Manjaro, Bazzite, Cachy, hundreds of others, are basically the same software in some slightly mutated permutation that most veterans aren’t familiar with. Invariably the veterans first hear about them from noobs who went looking for a distro that is “good for gaming” or “easy for beginners” and because SEO they find the Trendy Distro Of The Month. Which always offers some little gimmick that ultimately doesn’t matter. The process of getting a Bazzite ISO is taking a little Cosmo quiz about what you’re going to do, but then the installer is really borked compared to Mint or even Fedora.

A lot of instructions are written with Ubuntu or sometimes Fedora in mind, and then you pick a distro that differs from those, and then bitch that instructions don’t work.

Also, you need to upgrade your backup hardware if it takes 20 hours to image a drive. That should take minutes.

Artie! The coziest cat… …IN THE WORLD

“They told me to type words into a black screen with green letters, and the mere suggestion burned down my house and killed my family.”