Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
I will never understand the Fee software developers that go to bat for GitHub.
Microsoft hates you and everything you spend countless hours building for free. They steal your work and sell shittier versions of it for exorbitant profit that they do not share with the community. They contract with ICE. They sell AI tools to Israel to help them commit genocide, and their CI offering is a total fucking mess.
Ooh, I’ll steal that!
deleted by creator
has shifted from an MIT open source license
This is what happens when you contribute to MIT-licenced projects. They steal your work out from under you.
There’s a GNOME extension called “Just Perfection” that may be exactly what you’re looking for. It let’s you hide/disable pretty much any visual thing you can think of.
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta
print(datetime.now() + relativedelta(years=10)) # 2035-08-24 12:02:49.795177
It does get better, but… it’s kinda like river rafting.
Coming from Windows, Linux can and does often feel like you’ve spent your whole life trapped in a box. Suddenly “that thing that’s always annoyed you” is something you can turn off, replace, or improve with very little effort. I remember for example that when I switched back in 2000 I was blown away by a checkbox in the KDE PDF viewer. You could, in the basic settings, with no special hackery required, simply uncheck the box labelled Respect Adobe DRM. Suddenly, my computer was actually mine.
Using Linux these days is still just as amazing. You go from an OS that spies on you, pushes ads into your eyeballs, and has some of the worst design patterns ever, to a literal bazaar of Free options. It’s different for everyone, and that’s sort of the point: Linux is “Free” in all senses of the word, as you can make your machine do whatever you want.
It takes some time to get there though, and a lot of it is hardware unfortunately. A lot of the machines out there are built exclusively for Windows and the companies that make these things hide a lot of their inadequacies in their (proprietary) Windows drivers. So, when you try to use not-Windows, you end up using drivers written by people who had to reverse engineer or just do some guesswork to get that hardware working. This arrangement works very well for both Microsoft and these budget hardware vendors because it provides lock-in for the former, and a steady market for the latter.
The reality is that if you want to make the switch to Linux, you’re more likely to have a hard time if your hardware choices fall in this camp. For example, some times it’s just easier to buy a €12 USB WiFi or Bluetooth adapter that you know works with Linux than it is to rely on the chip that came with your laptop. It’s better now than it once was, but Nvidia cards, the occasional webcam, and a few WiFi devices have presented as problems for me in the last few years.
My advice is to embrace that “patience and stubbornness” and temper it with an honest pricing of your time vs. the cost of replacing the problematic hardware. When buying new stuff, look up its Linux support online before buying anything. You’ll save yourself a lot of pain.
In cases when you really want to dig in and understand/fix your problem (because it’s Linux, you’re allowed to understand and fix things on your computer!) then I recommend looking at the Arch Wiki and even using Arch Linux since (a) that’s the basis for most of the information there, and (b) Arch tends to favour “bleeding edge” stuff, so you’re more able to install the latest version of things that may well support your hardware.
I know it’s probably not the answer you were hoping for, but if you stick it out, I promise it’s worth it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now and I’m never going back. Windows makes me so inexplicably angry with it’s constant nagging, spying, and inadequacies, I just can’t do it.
Most of the comments here seem to be from the consumer perspective, but if you want broader adoption, you need to consider the corporate market too. Most corporate software these days is web-based, so the problem is less with the software and more with the people responsible for it.
The biggest hurdle is friction with the internal IT team. They like Windows because that’s all they ever learnt and they’re not interested in maintaining a diverse set of company laptops. They won’t entertain Linux in a corporate environment unless it’s mandated by management, and even if the bosses approve it, IT will want a way to lock you out of your laptop, force updates, do a remote wipe, etc.
There are (proprietary) tools to do some of this, but they generally suck and often clash with your package manager. Microsoft is just way ahead of Linux in the “bloatware that tours your hands” department.
That sounds like a nice feature we could use for the Aur actually. We already have the votes value, but some sort of verification body could help rescue the Aur’s reputation.
This all appears to be based on the user agent, so wouldn’t that mean that bad-faith scrapers could just declare themselves to be typical search engine user agent?
I’ve been thinking about setting up Anubis to protect my blog from AI scrapers, but I’m not clear on whether this would also block search engines. It would, wouldn’t it?
I had a job interview a few weeks ago where the lead developer straight-up said that he doesn’t have any tests in the codebase because “it’s just writing your code twice”. I thought he was joking. Unfortunately he was not.
I didn’t end up getting the job, perhaps because I made it clear that I thought he was very wrong. I think I dodged a bullet.
I don’t think there’s an official “way”, but here’s mine (which I love):
On start-up I open all the apps I usually use, one per designated workspace:
Workspaces 6-9 are left empty, ready for whatever app I need in the moment, but only ever one app per workspace.
With this setup, I’ve mapped Ctrl+Fx to each workspace, so Ctrl+F4 takes me to PyCharm where I write the code, and Ctrl+F5 followed by another F5 takes me to Firefox and reloads the page. Ctrl+F3 is always the terminal, etc., so you quickly start building these shortcuts to mean Fwhatever is $APP_NAME.
I almost never use the mouse, unless what I’m doing is necessarily mouse-driven: browsing or drawing charts etc. Everything else is keyboard-driven.
I have a few interesting ones.
Download a video:
alias yt="yt-dlp -o '%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' "
Execute the previous command as root:
alias please='sudo $(fc -n -l -1)'
Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:
alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"
This is a handy one for detecting a hard link
function is-hardlink {
count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
echo "Yes. There are ${count} links to this file."
else
echo "Nope. This file is unique."
fi
}
I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I’m using, it Updates All The Things:
function up {
if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
yay -Syu --noconfirm
yay -Yc --noconfirm
elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
fi
flatpak update --assumeyes
flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}
I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.
I have much the same:
The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.
Yeah this was a deal-breaker for me too.
TIL about using lsblk instead of just reading through the output of journalctl to find the disk and partitions. Thanks!
That’s not been my experience. It may be using a web view under the hood, but the functionality is quite different. Additional features, breaking the video call out of the primary pane, etc. To suggest that they’re essentially the same is not accurate.
Serious question: could we not just fork the project under the GPL and use that?