As someone that grades undergraduates, I’m happy that they not use the letter “x” to imply multiplication.

Powerpoint is what made me originally vow to try to never use word or powerpoint again, about 15 years ago. I was making a mathematically-dense presentation and became so frustrated with it that I wanted to throw my computer out the window. I still was somewhat new to latex at the time but figured there had to be some way to make presentations in latex. Found beamer and have never used pp for a real presentation again.

Made a Zandalari troll resto druid and immediately tried healing some dungeons. I was really bad at it. I’m guessing healers will have insta-queues when i get to 25 and can try raids for leveling.

Yup. I teach at a university. It used to be adequate for instructions to say something along the lines of

open the file C://Folder/anotherfolder/subfolder/document.ext

I encounter more and more students every year that have no idea how to do this.

Yeah there’s definitely a learning curve. A little coding experience makes the task easier. I typically give my students a template that they put their own text into that includes a peer-reviewed journal format and an example equation, table, and figure.

There’s still the “not so short introduction to latex” out there that helped me learn the basics back in the day.

Physics professor here. I tell my students that i will give them unlimited help and assistance if they want to learn latex. I find that most students prefer latex once they get the hang of it.

I’m incredibly biased though. There is rarely a situation that I would prefer to use word over latex.

Or just don’t use a figure or table environment. Those are what specify it as a float. If you really must have that image or table at some specific location, just do a center environment with a captionof from the caption package.

This latex “annoyance” is unwarranted as figure/table environments are specifically telling latex that this location doesn’t need to be precisely here and please place it somewhere that will look better. The problem is that when people google “how to make a figure in latex” they see a result done this way and don’t know that figure/table is not required.

User you are replying to wasn’t replying to OP?

Maybe my reading comprehension is bad, but it seemed obvious to me user was replying to a specific comment seeing how it was a reply to that nerd comment instead of OP and post used the phrase “this comment”.

You say this as if command line is bad? I love the command line for certain tasks. A very common task I do is convert an image from one filetype to another. How does this work on windows? Assuming I have a program that works with each image filetype, I open up the program, click on some menus and dropdown selections and click convert or “save as file type”. On linux, where every major distro has imagemagick installed by default I type

convert image.jpg image.pdf

and done. I mean, how much easier can that be?

Or another example is merging a bunch of pdfs. I imagine adobe acrobat can do this, but I’ve never bothered to learn how, as I quickly learned that I can do it using pdftk on linux by typing

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf

and done. If I do happen to forget the exact syntax for that command, google gives me the answer instantly.

If there’s a difficult command line thing to do with lots of options that can get confusing, there is a GUI interface that someone has written that has the dropdown boxes so you don’t HAVE to learn the specific options, but a little bit of learning the command line makes many tasks way more convenient than a typical windows GUI program.

Regarding wine, you’ve obviously have never used it (or likely even linux). I used my linux pc for 13 years before installing wine to play WoW. (side note to another of your strange assertions, I knew zero programming languages when I switched to linux.) Although, I wasn’t really gaming at all in that time period. I mainly do work on my pc, and the software I use is so much more convenient to us on linux than windows: mainly latex and vim. Some friend asked me to play WoW with them and I said “If I can get it to run on linux, I will.” Kind of thinking it would be a huge pain in the ass to get to run. But the whole process went super smooth, it was maybe 3 commands and now I use zero command line to launch WoW using wine.

Finally, I don’t like the windows UI. Floating desktop managers always annoyed me (including the linux ones such as gnome) whenever I needed multiple windows displayed at once. Way too much fiddliness adjusting window sizes and borders. I learned about tiling window managers, and that’s what I use now. Is tiling even possible on windows? I know you can win+arrow to kinda do this, but then rearranging can be a pain. I know this is all personal preference and most people like floating windows, but it’s a choice I can make on linux.

Is there a link? Am I missing something?

Well, Pop was released way after I bought the first laptop. I guess I haven’t had any reason to try it out, as I’m happy with my i3/sway setup. I don’t really hop distros at all. Maybe when system76 completes/releases their full cosmic desktop (not based on gnome) I’ll give it a spin.

System 76 customer here. I just replaced my 2011 system 76 lemur with a new lemur. I have Ubuntu installed on both and have never tried pop os. I was very happy with that laptop and the company in general. It actually still runs okay. I did replace the battery after about 5 or 6 years. I’m thinking of trying out nixos on it.

My guilty reason for upgrading was I wanted to play dwarf fortress at more than 5 fps…

Thanks for this write up.