Both of my grandmothers are dead, but I did teach my aunt to use Linux. She had a laptop that “ran” Windows 10. It would take 30 seconds to open the Start menu. One SSD, one RAM upgrade and one install of Mint later it’s a whole new machine. She can Firefox and Mahjongg just fine.

Because KIA takes way too much room on the page.

“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”

Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.

For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.

I find KDE’s settings app isn’t always easy to find settings in, especially when you have no idea what to call a feature.

That one ran on a laserdisc, right? Like a CAV disc so it could very quickly move the laser to one of a couple of places for basically a win/lose decision, overlaying some graphics over top for the game UI?

It does work like that a little bit, like with sprites they’ve often hard-coded the frames of animation, so when you push a button it loads the correct image, like Mario’s jumping frame with his hand in the air. But there are such things as tilesets, and sprite positions, and all that good stuff.

Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

I do, I have this little Lenovo piece of manufactured ewaste that was capable of running Windows 10…in a perfectly flat frictionless vacuum. It briefly ran Fedora KDE, then I tried Fedora Gnome, which seemed more tablet friendly because the UI is big dumb iPad style, doesn’t make me hate Gnome any less. I may attempt KDE again.

I’m not convinced dating apps work for anyone in any way.

Engineers aren’t miracle workers, granted. Which is why it is their responsibility to thoroughly test the devices they design and document their limitations. It’s then on the medical industry to train doctors and nurses on those limitations.

I’m sure pulse oximeters now are more accurate than they were 20 years ago.

As I said, this continues to be a problem into the present day. COVID-19 patients with dark skin would suffer from hypoxia that pulse oximeters would fail to detect, leading the medical staff to fail to administer supplemental oxygen. That’s probably happening somewhere on earth as I type this.

Do the little lights in the device need to be brighter, or have a brighter mode? Does their need to be a switch on the side? Can our cultures handle a medical device with a “white people | black people” switch on the side?

The one I like is “Document it yourself.”

Hey, this application exposes a Python API to the user, where’s the API reference? How do I learn how to use it?

We didn’t write it.

Well…could you?

If you want it to exist, you write it.

How am I supposed to do that?

Examine the app’s source code.

I’m sure there are none, straight white guys are just a favorite villain around here.

I can think of a tech that doesn’t work as well on black people though: Pulse oximeters. A pulse oximeter works by shining two wavelengths of light through your finger to measure the amount of oxygen in your blood. It also sees your blood come and go with your pulse, so it can detect your heart rate. Well get this: melanin blocks light. A black man’s finger is more opaque than a white man’s finger, so optical pulse oximeters have been known to fail to detect hypoxia in dark skinned people. This problem has been known since the 70’s, and continues to be a problem to the present day. Because you know what happened recently? A global pandemic of a respiratory disease. Pulse oximeters failed to detect hypoxia in more black patients than white patients, who then weren’t given supplemental oxygen. So why in the last 50 years hasn’t that been addressed?

A game of Bingo requires several players to have different cards. That would be on another card. Other possible entries:

• Uses recently popular buzzword tech for no reason.
• Uses an always-on internet connection and multiple server farms to perform a function that ran locally on a Palm V PDA in 1997
• Isn’t legal in the EU

Do fleshlights not work on black people?

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

I may have phrased that in a strange double negative way.

Modern mobile platforms like Android and iOS are sinister in a way that PalmOS wasn’t. PalmOS, becasue the devices weren’t connected to the internet much if at all, didn’t have the big brother always watching and trying to come up with new ways to exploit the user as is standard today.

There was a lack of sinisterness to the PalmOS ecosystem that we’ve lost.

Probably PalmOS.

Compared to whatever the Switch 2 runs…yeah 100%.

We put the fear of death in the music industry with Pentium 2 computers running Windows 98 and 56k dial up modems. They try to pull too much shit and we WILL do without them.