Hello thanks for visiting my profile.

For any picture posts I make with the [OC] tag, I provide a license for you to use my photo under the terms of CC-BY-SA-4.0. You may DM me for questions.

  • 11 Posts
  • 456 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 14th, 2023

help-circle







  • I select the most proximate lever in each cluster, using any criteria that would produce a beginning of a discrete order (so no ties for first). If I get infinite “tries” then even if it is an infinitesimally small chance of selecting the functional lever, at some point I will expect to get it.


  • Right now I just play with things at a level that I don’t care if they pop out of existence tomorrow.

    If you want to be truly safe (at an individual level, not an institutional level where there’s someone with an interest in fucking your stuff up), you need to make sure things are recoverable unless 3 completely separate things go wrong at the same time (an outage at a remote data centre, your server fails and your local backup fails). Very unlikely for all 3 to happen simultaneously, but 1 is likely to fail and 2 is forseeable, so you can fix it before the 3rd also fails.



  • Ok. Just wanted to make sure the info is relevant to you.

    If you have any connections to the IT departments of colleges or your work, see when they do overhauls of laptops and if you can be sold any surplus. They will be not amazing but solid performers, tend to have decent compatibility and a good deal usually. Watch out for Chromebooks as they might be a little harder to configure than your standard.

    Use your local online classified (craigslist, kijiji, FB marketplace etc.). You will have to arrange pickup and payment 1 to 1, quality may vary but you will get a decent deal. Test for boot up to a login screen at minimum before you buy, and when you get it check that the speakers/headphones, other hardware actually works before installing something new and wondering if it was functional to begin with.

    Avoid Bestbuy, Newegg, Amazon as they are way overpriced for what you can get through these other methods. Warranty is the main advantage, but I’d suggest Microcenter or to support your local computer shop if you go this way.

    Stuff like ebay may work, quality could be decent but unless you can spot an amazing deal, prices are only a little bit better than buying from a retailer.


  • What country/geographic region are you in? I have Canada and US specific sites about what sites and stores are good, what are overpriced.

    You should be able to get Linux running on most laptops, whether every feature will work (camera, fingerprint sensor, audio, dedicated video card) can be a crapshoot but I’ve heard it’s gotten better on the software side in recent years, just use Ventoy and distrohop until you find one that works. Trying to use a Nvidia laptop graphics card is a huge pain in the ass, I’ll warn you in advance.

    Old ThinkPads are a solid choice if you can scrounge one wherever you are.



  • Even with a server, you’d still want the UI to have priority. God knows when you do have to remote in, it’s because you gotta fix something, and odds are the server is gonna be misbehavin’ already.

    That’s a fair point.

    I still contend that regularly using processes that hog every available cpu cycle it can get its hands on was not a common enough desktop use case that warranted changing the defaults. It should be up to the user to configure to their needs. That said, a toggle switch like the hidden windows setting you described would be nice.


  • Yeah I think the philosophy of Linux is to not assume what you are going to be use it for. Why should Linux know where your priorities are better than you?

    Some people want to run their rustc, ffmpeg or whatever intensive program and don’t mind getting a coffee while that happens, or it’s running on a non-user facing server anyway, to ensure that the process happens as soon as technically possible. Mind you that your case is not an “average usecase” either, not everyone is a developer that does compilation tasks.

    So you’ve got a point that the defaults could be improved for the desktop software developer user or somehow made more easily configurable. As suggested downthread, try the nice command, an optimized scheduler or kernel, or pick a distribution equipped with that kind of kernel by default. The beauty of Linux is that there are many ways to solve a problem, and with varying levels of effort you can get things to pretty much exactly where you want them, rather than some crowdpleasing default.



  • Maybe next year Xbox cloud gaming should team up with Outlook and Onedrive for the “Ultimate” cloud computing conversion feature:

    When you drag and drop a file into Outlook, Windows mail, or Exchange, the file bounces around like in the window like in the game Breakout. You can only attach a copy if you hit every word in your email message. If you let the file fall past the signature line, it makes a Onedrive link automatically.




  • During the pandemic after Win 7 went out of support Jan 2020, I changed the harddrive to an SSD, and installed KDE Neon on a laptop from around 2014. At the time it was an Ubuntu 18.04 based distro with a KDE frontend.

    All I had to do was put Chess, Go apps, shortcuts to use common sites, put two web browsers (Chromium and Firefox) to separate my parents’ browsing and it was ready to go.

    For the most part after I showed them how to use it they had no issues. I had to show them how to print, and scan things, transfer files from their phone (honestly doing it by email was less complicated). The computer had an icon in the tray that told them to update every once in a while (and the sudo password is 1234, they wouldn’t know how to even mess things up using the GUI only).

    The slightly annoying issued that cropped up now and then was keeping the browser up to date to ensure that video sites didn’t nag my parents for the computer being out of date. Chromium eventually stopped seeming to work at some point.

    Fast forward to today, only my mom uses it because my dad got a separate, faster laptop, cuz idk, they got tired of sharing. The laptop’s still humming along and quite responsive. Since Bionic Beaver has been end of support for a year now, I have to go back over and upgrade it to 1 or 2 LTS versions up. I hope this doesn’t introduce new lag or break my mom’s workflows which are 90% just web browsing.