ForbiddenRoot

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It’s still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it’s certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

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This is especially funny for me because here, in India, “getting a banana” means you got nothing / got fscked over :)

because if A is the string “-1” and B is the integer -1, JS evaluates A==B as true because reasons

Interesting. If it were the other way around, I think I would have been fine with it (i.e. == used for comparison with type like any other language and === without type). But as it stands now I would hate it if I had to write in JS (but I don’t so it’s fine).

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people”

Perhaps its an overgeneralization, but I like the concept behind it and at least it keeps me from gossiping / talking about people behind their backs. I am mostly an average mind though, by this definition.

I personally know a few former colleagues of mine from our Sri Lanka subsidiary who have left the country over the last year or so. Some to Australia and few to the UK. They all were having a harrowing time before they left, especially one who nearly ran out of some life-saving medication for his kid. We managed to get a few months of supply over to him from India. But that near-miss really shook him up and he left Sri Lanka as quickly as he could.

There are still some senior folks there who are in denial over the situation. Most of these have generational wealth and are largely insulated from on the ground realities that the middle and lower income people have been facing. They kept reporting back incorrect information on the situation at the peak of the crisis and kept saying that the media is over-hyping the situation, because they were concerned that we might shut down our office there (which we had no plans to and in fact we gave increased allowances to our staff to help them with the crazy inflation).

I wear them only if I have a cold or a cough myself now, or if I am traveling on a plane. I still carry a mask with me at all times though.

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it’s very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the “Year of Linux Desktop” is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.

I don’t want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.

This isn’t actually the case in my experience, because non-Apple products work just fine with the iPhone unless it’s some Android-specific accessory. No one wants to ignore the iPhone market so they make sure that their product is well-supported on iPhones. For instance, I use a bunch of headphones from various manufacturers, apart from AirPods, and they all work great too.

The actual issue is that if you want to move from iPhone to Android later you may have issues getting some Apple devices you have to work with Android, e.g. I don’t think the Apple Watch works at all with Android.

why do you use iPhone?

In my case, because I had a bad experience with Android phones in their early years. Each model I used had one or the other issues, either battery life, camera issues, screen issues or something else. Around the Samsung S3 days I finally moved to iPhone and “everything just worked”.

I am sure things are better now in the Android world hardware-wise (and software-wise Android has always been able to do more), but over the years I have become firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch, Airpods, Macbooks, Apple TV etc so it doesn’t make sense for me to switch again because there isn’t a compelling reason for me to do so.

No worries, we’re good. Cheers :)

So you’re not only being petty, you’re also plainly wrong

Relax, you are reading too deeply into things. This is a light and good-humored thread, please don’t spoil it by making personal attacks. There’s Reddit for that kind of behavior, it will fit right in.

Sometimes, in jest of course, if someone asks me for some permission using “Can I […]?” I reply “I am sure you CAN but you MAY not” :)

My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using “Telix for DOS”. For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called “irc” and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.

Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).

It’s not just the design. It is indeed an eyesore, but just due to its height compared to everything else in the city it sticks out like a sore thumb within an otherwise exceptionally historic and beautiful city.

I can totally see why Parisians hate it. Even as a tourist, it’s made me wince whenever I’ve seen it.

Over the years I have visited the usual suspects as a tourist and sometimes for work: Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid, Zurich, Berlin etc and some other cities in the same countries.

Mulling over it, I think Paris remains a place I always love to revisit. It’s not exactly warm and inviting from a people perspective, but the architecture, food, and general feeling of being there makes up for it. I am a history buff so Rome comes in second for me. People-wise I found Barcelona to be most friendly, though I have not been there in a decade now.

What I love most about European cities is that they are all so walk-able, which is in stark contrast to US cities (which I therefore rarely visit as a tourist, only go for work).

True. Somehow the term popped into my head as I was reminiscing about the good ol’ days and then I realized I haven’t actually heard it in a long time. I liked the connotation it brought of a borderless global community distinct from the real world.

What is your experience with lemmy?

Personally I am glad that decentralization is slowly picking up again with things like Lemmy and Mastodon. To me using it does not feel all that different from Reddit actually (UI-wise).

I grew up in the days of the old internet where newgroups and mailing lists were the way to interact with other “netizens” (a term I have not heard being used in years btw). Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it. Lemmy has that advantage too currently of smaller, ideologically-inclined, and willing-to-jump-a-few-hoops people.

TL;DR: I’ve no issues with using Lemmy and I like it so far, including smaller size of the community.

Personally, I came here for the ads