An AM4 computer is still pretty capable.

They do that with dum-dums, I know. I…couldn’t tell you if they’re actually different flavors, honestly, they all taste “fake fruit” to me, but they’re definitely different colors, and instead of cleaning the machine between batches of flavors they just start making the next batch and some of the candy comes out mixed. Perfectly edible just kinda weird so they put a “mystery” flavor wrapper on it. Honestly I respect the frugality of it all.

Or babies crying.

Hey, that’s a personal question.

Okay but why is it inherently funny though?

So we’re just doing food items with no other context as memes? What’s it gonna be next month? Pasta?

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

My problem is people keep infecting the world with software designed with Gnome’s “Mac with Meningitis” style sheet.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.

What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

Three. Wordpad also existed.

Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.

Let me Wikipedia that for you…It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it’s basically just a link to Wordpad.

According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.

PDF is one of those weird “not for editing” formats, like STL. Hence why it’s often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.

It used to be even hackier. You’d have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you’d start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you’d select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan’s Own Favorite Contraptions.

The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you’ll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.

At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.

• Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
• Works, their “for home and small business” product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
• Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.