The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.

I understand, and it’s a great thing that we all can decide our experience. About the maker community, I guess the other option is to just create it and see what happens. If beehaw is defederated with many other instances, it would limit potential spread (again, this might be a desired outcome), but maybe it would fit in here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/communities or a similar instance?
I would be interested in a maker community, right now I’m subscribed to various niche ones like lasercutting, microcontroller, etc.

Oh, bummer.

There’s [email protected] with 400 subscribers, and not much action. But if you start adding more posts, maybe others will too.

plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)

Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.

If you don’t want to touch anything, you could boot from a live USB image and try it?

I wonder how much work would be needed to make a “FreeDesktop Linux” complete OS, with the runtime + whatever it needs beyond that. Then when you install a flatpak, it’s just like installing, uh, I didn’t think this through tbh.

Ubuntu (2007) >> Arch (2009) >> Debian (2014) >> Fedora (2024)
Plus now and then installing OpenBSD for fun for a couple of months at a time.

You are more than welcome to remove the need for any passwords at all on the linux systems you admin. Good thing about free software is that you decide how you want it, hack up or put up.

Ah, I see. It seems like you’re not the only one wanting this behavior, there is a workaround that might work: https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2085#issuecomment-487007720

Are you using Caja file manager? If there’s no setting, it could be that the authors of that file manager just wanted it that way. You can try other file managers like thunar and see if they are different?

I bet some of those people use neovim instead of the more unix philosophy ed.

New users found it hard to download the right installer if they needed non-free firmware. Experienced users know they can add firmware=never in the installer to disable firmware lookup if they want. If they want to decide on a firmware by firmware basis, that’s an option too. If the hardware doesn’t need non-free firmware it’s not installed.

I wanted to try inserting and removing kernel modules, so I looked around and thought “well, I don’t have a USB stick in right now so I can safely try removing the usb kernel module.” So I did that, and after pressing enter I realized my keyboard is connected with USB.

I started with LaTeX back in the day, but it was too hacky and complex, so I went to ConTeXt, which felt more consistent and planned out. Then I did OpTeX for a while and eventually I picked up the TeXbook by Knuth and it all just started to make sense to me. So now I use plain TeX with my own macro file to fill the gaps in functionality, I implemented colour support and picture support and small macros that I needed. I am very much into grid typesetting, so I need to know where all the vertical material comes from. There are areas that still scare me, like modifying the output routine or several \expandafter in a row, but usually that’s not needed. With plain TeX I can know every detail of the code down to the primitives. Of course this is possible in LaTeX too, but, there’s just a lot of code, layer upon layer, and I’m not smart enough to keep all that in my head.

Oh yes, same for me if I’m positioning an image or making a table, I compile to double check every little edit to the code :) I just mostly have plain old text so no surprises.

I don’t know about flicker, since I only recompile once in a while.

I use the Gnome document viewer, and every time I recompile it automatically refreshes and keeps position etc. I compile with $ luatex <myfile.tex>, not sure if that matters.

Those are good points, thank you for explaining further.