Why is she wearing the Sydney Opera House?

Kubuntu

The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.

It’s because it’s an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn’t really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.

People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.

I’ve installed Gentoo from a stage1 install. I’ve kept the same KDE Neon install running for over a decade, including moving the 3 SSDs that made up the install to another desktop.

But I’ve never managed to successfully bootstrap an arch system.

Cuddled my cat FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

Yes.

Sorry, but I have no tolerance for intolerance /s

Given that Valve has been one of the driving forces for certain gaming-related Wayland changes, I’m guessing we’ll continue seeing this for a while.

(Funnily enough, some of these changes were things that NVIDIA first proposed that got rejected, but coming from an organisation with a better reputation people were more open to hearing it. Although I’d guess Valve were also more open about why the changes were needed rather than Nvidia’s “trust us bro” answers.)

Yeah the XFCE dunking of KDE doesn’t even make sense these days - a fresh XFCE system has similar memory use to a fresh Plasma desktop with similar features.

(To be clear: the only one of those dunks I actually feel was deserved was the dunk on gnome.)

McCoy is a doctor, not an engineer

Honestly I’m pretty happy with the software stack in my Volvo. But then again it’s basically stock Android.

With 20+ years of using various Unix OS’s as my primary OS, I can say for sure that my answer to “vi or emacs?” is “neither.”

I keep flip-flopping between Kate and pycharm community. I prefer Kate’s LSP access, but pycharm’s management of multiple projects is great.

I wish I could easily set up Kate so it would open random text documents in a separate session from my session that’s running a certain project. And I wish it were aware of whether a session is running on the same activity. (In fact what I’d really like is per-activity Kate sessions).

Trouble is, I’m not good enough at C++ to make a merge request for those features.

One of the most important things to recognise before I start: Don’t try to make something permanent right now. None of this needs to be written in stone. Choose what’s going to be best for you right now and know that in a few weeks or months you might want to change it. With that in mind:

What do you want out of Linux right now? A development system? Are you looking to see what it would be like to move away from Windows? Something else?

Let’s start with the development system. Let’s say you’re comfortable on Windows and just want to do a few things that are easier or more convenient on Linux. In that case, you probably want Windows Subsystem for Linux. This will get you a bunch of things, including the ability to quickly and easily try out a bunch of distributions. Of course, this is going to be primarily a command line experience. You’re not going to get the “full experience” with a desktop environment, etc. But if you just “need Linux for a couple of things,” this is a great intro.

Next, let’s say you want to try Linux out, see what the desktop is like, etc. This is a great opportunity to try a virtual machine. You’ll have limitations (less hardware access, maybe not as smooth a desktop as if it were on the hardware directly), but it’s a great way to play with distributions, especially if you want to explore multiple distros. (I’ll get to distros below)

Got a distro you want and want to try it as your “main environment” for a while? Other folks have mentioned how to dual boot. Here, the most critical part in my opinion is to put your important data onto a third partition that’s easily accessible to both. On Linux, I’d suggest bind mounting directories from that partition in your home directory. If you want to wipe an OS later it’ll be a bit rough, but you can do it. You’ll just need to boot from a live USB to do it, and of course be very careful about what partitions you delete.

Now, for distros:

Everyone is going to recommend their pet distro, and to that end I recommend [REDACTED]. But! Here’s my actual guide for selecting a distro:

1. Got a friend who’s willing to spend a decent amount of time helping you? Go with whatever they suggest, at least for now. It’s okay if it’s not where you’ll be eventually. What they’re familiar with right now will speed up their ability to help you, which will speed up your learning. What they use may well not be where you end up and that’s okay. I do however have two exceptions to this: first, if they suggest Gentoo or NixOS as your intro distro, find someone else. Gentoo and NixOS are both fantastic, but they are very much not beginner distros. In 6 months or a year though, they might be something you want to play with if you’re interested in doing a deep dive into Linux. Second, have them with you while you’re doing the install. You want to be doing the install, but they should be there to guide you and answer questions.
2. Doing this on your own? Go with a beginner friendly distro. The main recommendations I have here are Ubuntu spins or Fedora spins. There may well be people who reply to my comment spewing hate about one or both of those recommendations, and while there’s controversy about both of these, at the end of the day they’re both great. (Conflict of interest declaration: I work for the company that makes one of those distros, and the other one is some of our biggest competition. I applied for this job in part because I thought that one of the things the community loves to hate about one of these was Great, Actually™, but I wanted to improve some of the things that I think are actually valid criticisms.)

If internet randoms tell you “X is garbage, don’t use it,” feel free to disregard them. Most Linux distros are great. They all have smart, dedicated people working on them, and they each have their own vision of how they want it done. These ideas conflict sometimes, but that’s okay.

And one final thing… Don’t fight against your distro’s way of doing something. At least not now. Most people telling you to do something that works against the distro are doing so for ideological, not practical, reasons. You don’t need to get involved in ideological wars - enjoy Linux for its positives.!

And for most people, Ubuntu Pro is free in practice (since most folks are unlikely to have more than 5 machines that need the features Pro provides).

LXD also has some cool features like launching VMs in a way that’s nearly indistinguishable from containers, which can be useful if you need to do something like run a distro that uses cgroups v1 (e.g. CentOS 7) on a more modern distro.

If people are frequently crossing between crosswalks, there probably aren’t enough crosswalks. If they’re pressing the buttons but crossing before the light changes, even if the buttons do cause the lights to change eventually they’re probably set up incorrectly and make wait times too long.

It took me 18 months of back and forth with my city to get them to fix a particular light. The beg buttons technically worked, but the light is where a major street intersects with a residential street, and all the beg buttons would do initially was make the pedestrian lights turn green the next time the lights changed. Problem was, if it didn’t detect a car there it would never trigger a change. What finally got it fixed was me sending the city council an 8 minute video of me waiting for the light to change before a car came along.

Yeah that was when it overtook HML as the premier Linux distro IMO.

But after it gets down on Friday how am I supposed to recover?