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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

    With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

    And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

    This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

    (I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)












  • Unity centered around what?

    Participation. Making things a tiny bit better when possible, and if not that, then minimizing damage.

    Making things better nationally is hard. But locally, change can be efffected — my city (San Francisco) has ranked choice voting for local offices. It’s awesome, and I vote for who I want first. It’s small, but it’s a start.


  • Depends on the person — when the pandemic hit I was a grad student, we didn’t have kids, and our living situation was nice (tiny studio but it had a wonderful, if small, outdoor space). Scary times for sure, but life — at least the day to day — was…pretty good!

    Now we have kids, and my god, I can’t imagine.



  • On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

    That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

    Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.