Gnome is trying to do their whole “Macintosh with a concussion” thing, there’s a handful of tiling window managers that are difficult to describe, but…kinda yeah. Most of us also use QWERTY keyboards that date to the 19th century.

systemd would be a fantastic OS if only it had an init system.

Linux has a wide selection of GUIs. For those comfortable with Windows I would recommend either Mint’s Cinnamon or KDE.

Correct. Doctor should have his head put through the wall. Use a stud finder so you don’t miss.

I do find it funny how much people hate our society’s fundamental rights and want to limit them as much as possible. AIN’T NO FUCKIN FREE SPEECH HERE. WE HATE THAT SHIT.

I answered why it’s still debatable. Debating is free speech.

It’s why you can’t stop the debate. It’s not illegal to be wrong.

And then we graduated into the worst financial/employment crisis of the last 100 years.

Yeah, graduating high school in 2005 and thus finishing college in 2008 was…great. I’m not shotgun emoji about it at all.

Thing is, when we were in college, it looked like jobs and futures still existed, they waited until our last semester to destroy society. It never got better. Kids these days were born in the bullshit, we were merely adopted by it.

Also, you apparently don’t know the first fucking thing about the trades.

But they are allowed to debate.

Something something first amendment.

I’ve gotten into the habit at my grocery store of taking a cart from the corral into the store rather than walking in and then taking one from inside the building. It’s functionally no effort for me and its one less time a store employee has to walk that cart back into the building. The people who work at that grocery store are my neighbors and townsfolk, every cart I bring back in on my way is an opportunity for them to stand around on the company dime.

Raspberry Pis have CEC support. I’ve used it with OSMC (formerly either LibreElec or RaspBMC, one of those? It’s Debian Kodi). It was much better without. So, if you turned the TV off with the TV’s power button, the Pi would turn the TV back on.

The Pi has a 3.5mm audio jack. I have a set of desktop PC speakers that are hell and gone better than anything built into a television in the last 20 years. Not only is it not straightforward to get it to control the Pi’s audio output level with the TV’s remote via CEC, OSMC absolutely did not want to do this. Not only would that setting get revered to HDMI audio out, it would disable the analog out option, and you’d have to SSH in and change a config file to re-enable that option in the first place. That would happen either during updates or even just power cycles. I swear the phraseology of the line you’d have to put in that config file would change; the same line I’d put in there would still be in there and not working.

The thing with open source software is, it’s always going to have the UX of a sinus infection, especially since the manufacturers of hardware gimp their devices to not work well outside of the walled garden.

Well how prominent will plumber’s putty or silly putty have the word Download on a page?

My town has a bulletin board posted adjacent to the sidewalk near the post office. It’s labeled “The Town Cryer” and fliers for local events, businesses etc. get posted there.

That is what I see the Twitter/microblog format as useful for. It’s for stand up comics and musical acts to post “come see us LIVE at the Somewhere Dome in Citytown This Saturday a 8/7c.” Or for ISPs to post “Service interruption in the Carolinas, repairs underway, expect service to resume at 9 pm.”

Other than that and it’s just All Old Men Yell At Cloud.

The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.

I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.

The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.

Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.

Those engineers probably had a job market with serious salaries to work for, and a course load relevant to that market. Kids these days live in a dying society with no hope. Why the fuck should they try? “Get a degree” is the quest. The assignment isn’t to learn something, it’s to get that fancy page. One of the required items is take some token bullshit art class. So we’ll do the one where we sit through movies.

The “go to college to become successful” thing is mostly bullshit; see there’s that community of people who were already going to be successful because their parents are, and what they get out of college is unsupervised time together with their peers. It’s not about Calculus 2 homework and Sociology lectures, It’s about not saying anything to your roommate’s girlfriend about the girl your roommate was fucking last night, the resulting bro-hood that earned, and your roommate becoming the district attorney in 12 years time. That’s what the people who are in congress got out of college. The thing is, you have to be one of them when you get there already.

Hell, I think the entire reason this ritual is academic-scented is because scholarship and science were a big fad with the elite about 300 years ago.

Actually walking the walk, going to school to learn the material the professors are teaching and getting a job in research or the professions will land you a job that pays marginally better than McDonald’s and a lifetime’s worth of debt. Doctors don’t get rich anymore. “Scientist” is the occupation of applying for grants. There’s no money to be had in actual academia…unless you’re owner of the school and teenage drinking buddy with the man who is now the governor.

College itself has very little to offer those who are planning to go get a job that doesn’t have some regulatory “it is a felony to do this job without a degree” requirement like lawyer, engineer or physician, but it has become a de facto societal requirement. Which has turned college into less of an educational experience and more of a trial to endure. And these kids are enduring it.

Both are content silos with begrudging PDA features.

For the point I’m making, that’s close enough.

I will sometimes play with the weirdest little electronics, like a smart outlet or something, and the damn thing will have a little Linux distro running out of Flash and there’s no room to install anything but it’s got Vi on it, often as part of Busybox or Toybox. Nano might not be installed, emacs almost certainly isn’t, Vi or Vim almost certainly WILL be in there. For if you ever need to edit wpa_supplicant.conf on your coffee maker. Because we live in a world that contains that hell sentence.

The Republican party is a religion with two and only two commandments: Racism and fossil fuels.

Someone deliberately chose to break with POSIX compliance?