Just a basic programmer living in California
I agree; and I wanted to mention that you don’t need NixOS which is a full distro. Nix the package manager can be installed on any Linux distro, on Macos, or on Windows with WSL. You can set up your reproducible environment by including a devenv config in your repo, or a Nix flake.
There is documentation available for flakes here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/flakes/
They can flash by pressing the button. On some flashlights partially pressing and releasing the button flashes the light off and on. That’s a notable difference from, say, lanterns where you need a cover or shield for signalling.
The problem with “torch” is that there’s already a thing called “torch”, and now I don’t know which thing you mean. The word “flashlight” has avoided critical ambiguity in many of our Indiana Jones movies.
A pidgin language is a simplified language that appears when people need to communicate with each other, but they don’t have a common language. But if the situation lasts long enough for children to grow up learning the mixture of languages as their native language then it quickly evolves into a creole. The difference is that a creole is not a simplified language, and it has regular grammar. While growing up children always “reanalyze” their language to regularize grammar and fill in gaps in expressiveness. This is a main driver in shifts in all languages. The effect is especially profound when starting from an irregular, simplified language.
Because of reanalysis pidgins tend to either be temporary, or to give way to creoles. I don’t know of a pidgin that exists in the US right now. There are creoles - there are some details here
No, but I remember overhearing one of my teachers saying it’s actually helpful. That was in the early 90s in California.
I think of sourcehut has already-federated git hosting because to send the equivalent of a pull request instead of making an account you send patches via email using git’s built-in email workflow. Email is federated, therefore that is federated git collaboration.
Yes; first pull the black plastic piece out of the end of the refill. I read that there needs to be a little airflow into the refill for ink to flow, and when the back of the refill is jammed into the pen that can cut off airflow so you might cut a little notch in the end of the refill where the black plastic piece was. I also sometimes trim about 4mm off the end of the refill, or put a tiny bit of wadded paper in the pen for spacing. But I do this a little differently every time I put a new refill in.
Pilot Hi-Tec-C is a gel pen with refills that happen to fit in the Space Pen. It puts down a crisp, fine line.
The problem with the stock Space Pen is that it’s a messy ballpoint. I might be getting worse-than-typical results due to being left handed, but in general I find ballpoints don’t write crisp lines, and the ink smudges on my hand much more than gel pens do. But with the gel swap I do lose the feature of being able to write upside-down.
I carry a Fisher Space Pen everywhere, but I switched its cartridge for Pilot Hi-Tec-C refills. It takes a little fiddling to get the refill in there, but once it’s in it works great!
My thinking is similar. I’ve seen this news story more than once:
laptop stolen containing customer data… hard drive was not encrypted
I don’t generally have customer data, but it can happen every once in a while.
Or enabling nix-ld can often get such binaries working.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t completely clear. Yes you can run games on ARM on any OS with an emulator. When I said “won’t run any better” I meant you’ll get the same emulation slowdown on Linux as on Windows.
The point of the article is that stuff runs faster on Linux because you don’t need an emulator, and it implies that that includes games. That’s disingenuous because any games that require emulation on Windows will also require emulation on Linux. If there’s no ARM build, there’s no ARM build.
It would be great if there were a way to translate x86 binaries for ARM without emulation. Has Valve found some way to do that? From a bit of searching I see they’ve been testing games on ARM, and that testing involves a version of Proton/Wine that runs on ARM. But it looks to me like they’re testing with ARM binaries for those games?
I’m as enthusiastic as anyone about more Linux usage, and I agree that Linux support for ARM is a good selling point. But the reason Linux works so well on ARM is that we use all this open-source software that anyone can compile for ARM. I don’t think it’s honest to point to closed-source software that we can’t recompile, and imply that it will work better on Linux because other software runs natively on ARM on Linux.
Yes, Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM (WoA). However, WoA is not a first-class citizen in the Windows world. Many Windows programs won’t run natively on WoA […]. In particular, Windows games run poorly on ARM.
Interesting news! Sadly I imagine Windows games on Linux on ARM won’t perform any better than on WoA. But maybe this will be more incentive for game developers to ship ARM builds.
You can do tag-based file management on Linux. Linux filesystems support “extended attributes” or “xattr”. There is some software out there that uses xattr for tagging. I don’t know what the best options are right now for tag-based file management, but I think it exists.
Looking at what’s out there I see there are also apps that each use their own out-of-band tagging schemes. There’s a CLI, tmsu, and a GUI, TagSpaces. I don’t think these interoperate with each other’s tags.
Of course those supplement instead of replacing hierarchical organization.
The talk of hypertext and “escaping paper” makes me think of Obsidian which embraces hyperlinking, tags, and mind mapping via its canvas feature.
And they’re still on Sourceforge!
I love Cartograph CF for the terminal and code editor. I like the handwriting-style italic variant, and it has programming ligatures. And of course I like the way the font looks.
There is an open-source font, Victor Mono, that also has a handwriting-style italic variant and programming ligatures. Otherwise its style is quite different.
I set my kid up with Silverblue recently. After seeing it in use for a bit, as a power user I think it’s got some obnoxious compromises, and NixOS is a much better way to get the same benefits, and encourages safe experimentation at every level of the system. But for a beginner-friendly system that is very stable I think ostree distros like Silverblue make sense. Mostly stuff works fine, but you want to break out rpm-ostree occasionally to get a native package.
I have another kid on Fedora as a control. So far things are fine. Previously I had both kids on Manjaro, but they weren’t able to keep up with upgrades long-term (over the course of a few years) without some intervention from me.
Like I said in Silverblue stuff mostly works nicely:
I think we may have installed steam natively using rpm-ostree. I think we ran into some sort of issue running Overwatch, and I quickly opted for the native steam package to get things working instead of trying to fix the issue using Flatseal. But I don’t remember what that issue was so I can’t say the Flatpack steam won’t just work for you. Maybe it was very slow Vulkan shader processing?
My kid likes Minecraft mods so he needed java in his path to run installer jars. AFAICT in immutable distros the options for setting up CLI programs are either to run a different distro with native packages in a container (distrobox), or drop to rpm-ostree. I opted for the latter.
On the hardware side I think one of the biggest factors in building a snappy system is choice of SSD. Like you said, spinning metal is out. But the idea that SSDs are all equal is a common misconception. The thing to do nowadays is to use an M.2 form factor which is where you get a little board that goes into a slot directly on the motherboard, sort of like a small, sideways RAM stick. That plugs directly into the PCIe bus which gives it tremendous bandwidth. Drives that support newer PCIe versions can be faster due to having access to more bandwidth, but the design of the drive itself is also a constraint.
Roblox on Linux has gone through some phases of working and not working. Currently it does work using Sober https://sober.vinegarhq.org/
I haven’t tried Fortnite, but from what I’ve read I think that is a no-go.
You can run Roblox on Linux with Sober. My son is a big fan! https://sober.vinegarhq.org/
Oh yeah, and Nix has the advantage that you don’t need containers. If you want to run a graphical app in a container it might be tricky to access the window manager on the host system. Maybe that’s why you were setting up i3? Yeah, containers are great and flexible, but they also have a variety of downsides so Nix is better ;)