I think that Linus becoming less of an abusive asshole over the years has been a positive development, but I wouldn’t mind the return of the old for this event

Oh, I love this one, it’s very silly. I find it oddly grounding when I discover that the cause of a problem was me being silly, because I’m already aware that I am prone to foolish errors (as all humans are); when I discover that an unfathomable computer error is actually my fault, it feels like everything is right with the world

I hadn’t considered this, so thanks for the info

When you get a moment, you could try switching over to the tty again, login to the shell, and then try typing in the command btop (which I think is the Bazzite specific version of the default “top” command, and should be installed by default). Top is basically a task manager, and you can see what programs are running (and taking up resources) right there in the terminal. If your system freezes up, you can often unfreeze it by killing the unresponsive programs. It’s probably useful to familiarise yourself with that interface before you need it.

I didn’t get the joke until I read your explanation, but now I do get it, I think that it’s a very funny joke.

I’ve never had things break after doing updates in Arch. Am I doing something different to most people in the “pacman -Syu” memes, or is the likelihood of breaking stuff overdone as a joke

https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun, tournament style quiz that compares different monospace fonts. It’s far from comprehensive, but I found it useful to gauge what font features I find stylish and readable

(For the record, my go-to font is Jetbrains Mono)

Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice

I revived a friend’s old laptop by installing Linux on it, and I told her that using Linux entitled her to a small amount of “nerd creds”. Years later, she told me that it did end up eliciting mild approval from a woman who ended up being her partner for multiple years. The system works!

Adding the solution to your post is a classy move, and I approve

I dual boot Fedora and Arch. Fedora was just a fluke because it seemed like one of the most mainstream distros, and I was a Linux noob.

I liked Arch though because the Arch wiki is so useful for a beginner to learn from, even if you’re not on Arch. At first, Arch seemed too complex and difficult for me, as a beginner, but when I kept finding myself at the Arch wiki when troubleshooting, I realised how powerful good documentation is. I installed Arch with a “fixer-upper” type mindset, with the goal of using the greater power and customisability that Arch offers to build a config/setup that worked for me (learning all the while). It was a good challenge for someone who is mad, but not quite so mad as to dive into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch

Damn, thanks for that link; earlier today I was telling a non techy friend about Unicode quirks earlier and I could vaguely remember that post, but not well enough to remember how to find it. I didn’t try very hard because it wasn’t a big deal, so the serendipity of finding it via your comment was neat.

This is going to be such a ridiculous disaster that it’d be entertaining to watch it go to shit — if it weren’t such a critical system they’re fucking with.

That’s probably who I’m remembering; I recently discovered his work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters

I can’t remember the particular phrase that was used, but I heard an argument recently that we need to be more like politicians going on an interview and ensure that we’re more on message. For example, it’s fairly obvious by now that economically, the problem is wealth inequality, but I see fairly surprisingly few people discussing that.

Recently, I recommended to a friend that basic vim/vi is worth learning because it’s a baseline that you can always trust will be there across different Linux systems.

They asked me what I used most on my home system, and the answer was emacs, but I was very clear that I was not recommending it. It’s a particular kind of person who finds themselves at home in emacs, and for everyone besides those people, selling them on emacs would feel like persuading them to do hard drugs.

The thing is that this kind of thing works for people who don’t know better. I have spoken to dudes who like the abstract notion of Musk being a gamer, probably because it wasn’t apparent to them that his Path of Exile account was so obviously boosted. Similarly, a script-kiddie can seem like a skilled programmer to people who have little knowledge of programming

I’ve watched/played/read things I wouldn’t have discovered if there hadn’t been masses of people crying “woke” about them; there was a period where it was a really useful recommendation engine, because they’d be especially pissy if high quality stuff was woke. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work as well anymore, because “woke” is increasingly meaningless

Containerized software is huge in the sciences for reproducible research. Or at least it will/should be (speaking as someone adjacent to bioinformatics and genomics)