I’ve seen that kind of thing out of Linus Sebastian too, with the infamous 30 day Linux challenge, and I remember when they took a young woman on their staff who was there as I think a graphic designer and they had her spec out and build a PC with no coaching.

Chin first no reading no help no think only send. Color me not impressed.

Do things like that, but have someone experienced do some coaching.

I would go with the patent term of 20 years. That’s enough time to monetize your creation, and then it’s in the public domain. Copyright being over a hundred years is essentially an end-run around the contract.

I would like to see a commonly used “Not Free For Corporations” license. Something a bit like the GPL; this is my copyrighted code, I’m offering the source code for others to examine, use, modify, redistribute, if you redistribute it it must have these same license terms. I would add it is free of charge for personal, educational, and small business commercial use, it is available on a per instance subscription basis for corporations. My work may not be used for the profit of shareholders unless I get a hefty piece of that pie.

My solution: rm will remove an empty directory, while a full directory will throw either an “are you sure? y/N” or require you to use rm -r. Why have a command whose only job is to remove an empty directory?

There’s a certain divide I’ll have where, I might want my CAD software, reference material etc. all open, and that can easily spread my two monitors, and then if I’ve got communication stuff like email, slack etc. open it’s easier for me to mentally switch to a different place to do that. Much more than my big center monitor and two others and that’s more than my visual field and I don’t really want to use my computer looking all around the room with me, trying to find the damn mouse cursor.

I have a 34" 1440p monitor, which I almost always have tiled in half, and a 1080p monitor next to that. Some more involved workflows will have me branching out to other desktops but I can get a lot done with two monitors. A third would be nice but I’ll need a new desk for that.

I typically keep three virtual desktops, one “main” one with what I’m working on, a second one with communications, like email and slack and whatnot, and another as basically blank space to put stuff that I need open but doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Yeah it still has a certain “AAAAH! You didn’t say simon says” feel to it when you’re actually trying to get things done. Like imagine if you had to choose a different option from a context menu to delete a folder in a GUI. If there was an option for Remove File and another one placed a little elsewhere in the menu that says Remove Directory.

I’m still gonna call it an unsanded corner.

Arch Linux’s whole claim to fame is Some Assembly Required. Go with something like Mint or Fedora (the latter of which is available with the KDE desktop, source: am typing this on a gaming computer running Fedora KDE) and they’re much more complete out of the box.

UGH that shit.

rm deletes a file. It can’t delete a directory, you have to use

rmdir to delete a directory…as long as there’s nothing in that directory. If there’s anything in the directory, you have to know to use

rm -r to delete a directory and its contents, and no

rmdir -r isn’t right somehow!

now thats just ignorance.

Explain the permanent state of GIMP’s UI without deliberate sabotage.

Arch, a community-driven distro that hostorically required heavy use of the terminal to even install. It presents itself as very sleek and utilitarian (hence plain black girl). Arch users tend toward enthusiasts also commonly in the anime, furry etc. fandoms. Wearers of “Programming socks” almost certainly use arch (hence rainbow girl).

Ubuntu was historically marketed as the distro for everyone. Ready out of the box, polished GUI, media codecs, marketing materials made by someone who got paid to do them (hence rainbow girl). Ubuntu these days is an exceedingly corporate distro, Canonical really wants to be Microsoft. Ubuntu is very commonly used on servers for commercial and enterprise solutions and end-user desktops are vestigial at this point (hence plain black girl).

does the average Korean citizen have a PC of their own?

I’m reminded of a video I saw of a woman talking about her dating prospects using M&Ms. She poured a bunch on the table as a metaphor for her dating pool, and slid away M&Ms as she ruled the people they represent out. “8 million people in the city. But half are women slides half of the M&Ms away of the remaining 4 million men, 20% are under 25, slides more M&Ms away” until she got to a point where she had one candy left, and then she shattered it with a meat tenderizer and continued sliding pieces of it away.

You can do that for potential adoptees of Linux, because there are a bunch of filters in series you have to pass through before successfully adopting Linux.

8 billion people on the planet.

Subtract the Sentinelese and Amish and North Koreans and everyone else who just outright doesn’t have access to computers. Nothing we can really do about them and in some cases it would be unethical to try.

Now subtract out the people who only use a mobile device like a cell phone or tablet, which are locked to their OSes. Android or iOS is as much a part of the hardware as a microwave oven’s firmware is to them. Linux on mobile devices (excluding Android) is in a severely rough state, there’s basically no hardware and software combo that is ready for daily driving.

Now subtract out the people who do use a PC or other device, that won’t ever install an operating system on a computer themselves. You’ll get some of these folks by selling computers with Linux installed in stores and such, though I think you’ll have to address a few other points later. I think SteamOS is demonstrating this.

Now subtract the people who might install Linux themselves, say PC builders who would have to install an OS anyway, but bounce off the process of choosing a distro and then installing. The big distributors like Canonical and Fedora tend toward marketing wankshit instead of human language. You can’t tell their goddamn websites “I just want the normal end-user desktop version with KDE please.” Does “Core” mean our main, central product, or the IoT embedded system version? You kind of have to know Fedora calls their Gnome edition “Workstation” and if you want “normal Fedora but with KDE” that’s a “Spin.” Then you get the Trendy Fork Of The Month, things like Bazzite and Nobara that pretty much are Fedora or Ubuntu with a theme applied, maybe some actual features in the OS, but often just a redone onboarding process, like I think it’s Bazzite that offers a configurator on their website that lets you pick your desktop and such. Defuckulating the onboarding process of major distros might allow us to do away with the Trendy Fork Of The Month.

Now subtract the folks who get a Linux machine up and running and then bounce off of the unfamiliar UI. I’m pretty sure this is Gnome’s fault more often than not, Gnome is deliberately hostile to both distro maintainers and end users to the point there are now four DEs that are “We can’t do this anymore” forks of Gnome: MATE, Cinnamon, Unity and Cosmic. You’d probably see more people stick with Linux if it was less easy to stumble dick first into Gnome.

Now subtract the people who got this far and then said “My CAD/art/music/office/finance/whatever software doesn’t run on this.” and had to switch back. In a lot of cases, software like that exists in the FOSS ecosystem but it’s significantly inferior, like FreeCAD or GIMP. These are often kept in a deliberately shitty state because some opinionated programmer likes how the code they wrote in 2004 looks in their IDE, so open software continues to be unadoptable and people continue to pay subscriptions to the Captain Planet villains in charge of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe.

It CAN be configured, but you have to go hunting for the tools to do so.

I’ve got an old 5.1 surround sound speaker setup attached to my main rig, and in both Cinnamon and KDE (the only two I’ve tried), you can’t use the normal DE’s audio control panel to put the thing in 5.1 mode without first installing an old, probably unmaintained tool called ALSAJackRetask. Once you’ve retasked the jacks, several options for surround appear in the DE’s audio control panel. It knows but it can’t do.

I wonder if I’m going to live long enough to see Gladys and Eustice and Eugene and such like that come back. When I’m 70 meet some teenager named Plutis.

Torvalds, looking at Linux From Scratch like “Bish please.”

I hope my neighbor doesn’t think I address her as “my little quadropus.” Especially since mine is an indoor cat and I never talk to my cat outdoors.

Sarah Chalke can be a lot, can’t she?

Barbie?