Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.

Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.

Holy shit I think I have the same problem, mesh network and all. I assumed it was a driver issue; thanks for the pointer!

Bad code, yes, calling it ‘shit’, no.

Stuff like this is a big part of why software circles are seen as so hostile and unwelcoming to outsiders.

You can be completely clear and frank without resorting to insult, mild though it may be. Just because you and people most like you understand that calling their work ‘shit’ doesn’t reflect on them personally, doesn’t mean it’s not significantly exclusionary.

Now, obviously you can get to know your reports well enough to understand whom would take ‘shit’ well, but that doesn’t mean it’s not generally important to temper criticism with kindness. Kindness never has to mean holding back criticism, just avoiding stooping to insult.

“You’re dumb” is disrespectful, but “your code is shit” isn’t? How does the latter not reasonably imply the former?

Being respectful is taking the time to moderate “your code is shit” to something like “your code is not acceptable”. You might even go a modicum further into kindness with “there are aspects of your code I need you to improve”.

All express the same idea, some will leave the listener more open to internalizing the criticism.

I suppose I don’t see what is conceptually challenging about chords; they’re just physically annoying and require memorization. Most people are used to control key chords at least, so emacs benefits from that. Whereas vim requires a deeper shift in thinking.

Memorizing chords is conceptually simpler than taking on a modal mindset. I sure got pissed at insert mode plenty of times while I was learning vim.

Thankfully this was during my college masochistically-acquiring-skills-that-make-me-feel-cool phase where I was also learning LaTeX, so I just focused on the future gainz. I’m so glad I did on both counts.

Well of course, but some of us want to be well-informed on the tradeoffs we’re making.

What do you mean? Payment isn’t anti-FOSS at all, it’s just a lot harder to make money when the source is libre.

‘Need’ as in why do they need to stretch their development resources to cover a video player when they’re already stretched thin and perfectly serviceable alternatives exist.

I have no actual idea, but that’s what was meant. My guess is they want everything written in Qt6 so it can all be portable to windows etc.

What got you onto Linux so early? Wasn’t it much less practically useful than BSDs at that point?

That’s what I get for not using autocorrect 😆

There’s a bit more subtlety to it than that. The PC architecture that dominates today is a direct descendant of the 1981 IBM Personal Computer, which was made to run DOS and later Wondows. The cultural association makes sense in that context.

Perhaps your parents recognized the valuable skills you were developing!

I see it more as pride in the community and administrators. Plenty of distros are complete passion projects and aren’t undeserving of pride.

Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.

There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.

Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.

Kubuntu

I don’t think they’d be so popular if they weren’t useful.

Why should the user be required to reinstall their whole OS? I don’t think they are: it seems relatively straightforward to change DEs on Ubuntu at least.

On the other hand, if someone knows they want Ubuntu with KDE, why should they have to go through a regular Ubuntu install just to do the post configuration themselves? Plus, maintainers of these offshoot distros can potentially more deeply remove dependency on the default DE.

I think focusing on differences in system software is less illustrative than looking at the out-of-the-box user experience and capabilities. A changed DE is a pretty huge practical difference.

This line of thought does really underscore how nebulous the definition of an operating system really is. Pour one out for GNU being totally subsumed culturally by a Kernel that everyone sees as an OS.