Evidently I’m similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.

Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn’t eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.

Depends on what you’re beginning.

The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.

There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.

It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.

I did this for awhile…

https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next

If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.

Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.

That’s industry talking!

"Net Neutrality policies are a national standard by which we ensure that broadband internet service is treated as an essential service. It prohibits internet service providers from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content. "

So if they block or throttle you when you hit a cap…

Seriously this is probably lost to time, but we were setting up for this battle in the DSLAM era because every provider over sold their bandwidth. It lays pretty much untested because nobody was worried about pennies in a gold rush and that’s about the time fiber backbone started to make the problem irrelevant again.

Fair.

I think in asking myself why I’ve never really held Linus conduct against him; he’s this weird 1:1 situation.

He’s unfortunately tasked with stewarding a project that runs the planets tech and it’s his name on the tin. Which whether he likes it or not at this point, makes his identity wrapped up in the quality of the project. I absolutely don’t condone the behavior, but I can understand how people handing you shit sandwiches becomes a personal attack of it’s own over time.

It’s probably a lesson we’ll refuse to learn about not doing this single leader thing again. Time and insularity tend to make bigger assholes of us all.

With the caveat I’m technical not legal… Its largely kept data caps off domestic lines, but not entirely. Net neutrality has had a couple taking points and its a long fight at the FCC that’s gotten weirder by the decade.

Net neutral meant Microsoft couldn’t make the MSN dial up network prefer windows network traffic, over the years companies got smart and just opted to pay for peering instead of running the low profit access tunnel.

Google even drops boxes to cache stuff at tiny ISPs/WISPs, but doesn’t deprioritize traffic to other end points.

There have been intermittent swings at labeling this the pay to play it is, but since the investment isn’t spilling out of public works there’s a decent case this is the fastest you could give out access to everyone.

Source: am former network closet guy who racked google cache devices, installed WISP equipment, legal layman.

Even as a toy language if I can’t tell what it’s doing beyond interface with an llm prompt… What good is it?

Consistency and validity of output is essentially impossible to prove, because this has all the accuracy of both humans famously bad at explaining their problems to machines who understand 80% of it.

You’re just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us…

Hey cool, it’s that a person who caused this mess telling me what to do about it.

Here’s what liz should do.

• Invent a time machine.

• Actually endorse Bernie instead of help the establishment beat him back.

You don’t get to lead the resistance as a collaborator liz.

We have so short memories we forget Biden’ rode in preaching accountability and on the heels of George Floyd’s murder. And then for at least some of us failed to deliver.

If you were listening, she gave plenty of reasons to send a message back right out of her own mouth.

Condemning a genocide would have been an easy win for one, but it’s one of a dozen. She ran a campaign to hug the center, she got all the voters that will get you because 70/240 million possible Americans aren’t persuadable. But it’s all she tried. Gun control, health care, labor rights, dropping death penalty reform from the platform, a campaign run to save us from Republicans… With a bipartisan panel involving Republicans.

I’m not for an instant insinuating there isn’t a problem with both race and sex in America, but the problem is the people fighting it from the top are idiots who can’t do basic math. There were plenty of votes to win among the 80-110 million people who are eligible, but didn’t.

No I don’t think they’re going to be better off, but the blame is not giving them the thing they want to vote for. They outnumber you. They would have beaten Trump.

Its the same problem as standardized Unix systems in the 90s. There’s more ideas on how to implement hardware than there are hands to integrate driver software.

When it comes together it’ll be because we either make the manufacturers warp around something like POSIX, or provide a common target on phones like the steam deck.

Otherwise every hardware generation will get the undescribable misery of supporting the last one, from the one they’re on, while writing the next one. The problem tends to compound.

This is always a spectrum from how long it was since the last Debian stable release. So about 2 years max.

Modern release cadences make it crazy anywhere but Debian, but security patches are very timely. If you’re dealing with newer features, driver support or java/npm packages you’re probably also outside the typical defaults, but there’s generally some people working to keep the common ones up to date.

Still not my preferred way to handle updates and in some cases… kind of abusive to the maintainers who constantly haVE to deal with bug reports from “out of date” Debian users. The xscreensaver maintainer has some choice words. But it works, has for years with no sign of slowing.

K, teachable moment maybe.

How complicated do you think a web browser is? Out of the box there is support for 30 years of web and file systems, support for socket types that will never be commissioned again and a pipeline to every native media format.

It’s complicated, it’s essentially an OS. with perfect backward compatability. (Mostly)

I have an increasing amount of bile for the Mozilla Corp, but if you’re on Lemmy you probably noticed corporations don’t make the best decisions for you… My question is how many of the options do you see in about:config do you think chrome and safari don’t show you?

Mostly to their benefit I’d add, except if they set them maliciously you’ll never know.

I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.

Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.

Honestly unless you’re going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years… But I don’t want to set it up again. Not again.

It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the “core” (that stays the same everywhere and you don’t have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It’s big and complicated because you’re replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don’t like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.

It hooks into nearly every base utility I can’t live without (fzf, jq, helix, ripgrep). If you’re on windows im not sure you’re going to get a ton unless you live in WSL.

You can pick the editor it’ll open by default, which should be configurable with comparable syntax highlighting. Vi can pretty much look like whatever. I think it’ll default to vscode on windows.

Im not sure what you’d use it for but manage files, but I would have poked it and probably moved along while I was still on windows.

Edit: the other benefit you might not see has a lot to do with support of mime types.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

The xdg open protocol will open whatever app is assigned to handle type locally. Which is probably why it defaults to editor.

I binned my copies of ranger and nnn when I found this last year. Its stellar.

Diskonaut is the only other one that stuck, of the new CLI file managers. hunting lost files from a recovered hard drive was a lot easier with directory visualization for whatever reason.

I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.

That doesn’t mean the org always live up to it, but that’s partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.

The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I’m amazed they’re not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it’s a rock solid implementation.

Definitely worth running through vim tutor at least once.

It’s beyond typing speed, things like piping out strings to utilities is using one program to write another, you aren’t just getting faster because of access, it’s a paradigm shift.

Edit just for fun: im a non Dev dummy who happened to grow up in a Unix household. Even having dropped vim for helix and bounced around the MS admin/Apple IT space for 30+ years. When I switched to Linux I could still remember binds I’d set up and last used at 9.

Kinda like riding a bike.

Efficiency.

There’s 0 chance if you have to pick up your mouse that you can keep up with a Unix gray beard.

That’s just editing, if they’re from the emacs era there might be nothing you can do with text faster across their whole system.

I like vscode as a entry point, but if you care to get faster learning just vim motions and sys utils alone is going to cut time from the process.