Can’t vouch for any other distro, but aplay is alive and well on Mint. The package that contains it — alsa-utils — seems to be a core dependency for Cinnamon, even.

So basically, your example runs fine on my machine, screechy sounds and everything.

There’s another, more DNS-related, reason why it was usually preferred to have something before the domain part. It’s possible to alias a subdomain to another subdomain, but not so with the root of a domain, which must point directly at a single IP address.

If your IP addresses are more subject to change than your hostnames, or your site was hosted on a third party service, then it made sense to point www at a particular hostname rather than its address. e.g. you might point www.your-domain-here.biz at a-hostname.the-hosting-provider.tld. That’s not possible with a root domain. IP address or nothing.

Similarly, it’s possible to point a subdomain at multiple IP addresses (or multiple hostnames) at the same time, which was a cheap way to do load balancing. i.e. For a site a user hadn’t visited before, they’d be basically told one of the listed IP addresses at random, and then their local DNS cache would return that one IP address until it expired, generally giving enough time for the visitor to do what they wanted. Slap 8 different IPs in the www subdomain and you’d split your visitors across 8 different servers.

Root domain has no such capability.

Technically it would be possible to do all of that one level higher in DNS where your domain itself is the subdomain, but good luck getting a domain registry to do that for you.

I haven’t done DNS in over a decade at this point, so things may have changed in the intervening years, but this was all definitely a thing once upon a time.

You do realise that even though it’s not one of the official Mint variants, it’s still possible to install Gnome on Mint with minimal fuss?

There are people that still install and run KDE and that hasn’t been a Mint variant for some time now.

Or are you saying that Gnome should be the default variant because it’s “modern”?

The monkey’s paw curled a finger when they took off in that direction. Most old Linux/X applications will run fine under any window manager / desktop environment and, by and large, inherit the look and feel of that environment. Modern Gnome apps say “no” to that and look like Gnome apps wherever they are.

Since the Mint team are forking Gnome apps precisely to avoid that behaviour, I’d say Mint isn’t going to adopt Gnome proper any time soon, but as I said, you can install it if you really want.

Bad news for you: Spez loves Elon and his business ethos.

You remember how at one point Elon was beloved among nerds? A lot of that was fomented on Reddit, and a few haven’t grown out of it yet.

“A 'ISO” where that apostrophe represents hard attack on the vowel sound.

As for what that is, consider the phrase “Paula asked a question.”

If enunciated clearly there’ll be a hard attack between “Paula” and “asked”.

(In this example, some — chiefly British — people will put an R sound between them if they don’t enunciate clearly. The R wouldn’t show up in “A ISO”, but this is to demonstrate hard attack, not get into those weeds.)

¯\(x_x)/¯

Pedant mode rising. “A ISO” is only valid in a few English dialects and this doesn’t read like any of those everywhere else. Also, there’s the missing apostrophe in “lets”.

The ambiguity of that abbreviation means you could well be arguing for Mangione and his methods, not against him.

And if you meant Universal rather than United, most of the folks in countries with it don’t want to lose it. Better to worship that than profits, don’t you think?

But worshipping profits made from denying people life-saving care is fine.

Imagine you’re a horrible misogynist who has the drive to have sex with a woman, but you don’t like the idea of actually having to touch one. If only there was something feminine but not a woman. Something that could understand a man in the way only a man can, but at the same time is not quite as strong and powerful as a man…

The Chinese AI paradox: Either it will be allowed to criticise the CCP and be ultimately shut down by the CCP because such criticism is not allowed, or it will not, hence being untrusted by anyone who is not a fan of the CCP.

You might be thinking of lzip rather than lz4. Both compress, but the former is meant for high compression whereas the latter is meant for speed. Neither are particularly good at dealing with highly redundant data though, if my testing is anything to go by.

Either way, none of those are installed as standard in my distro. xz (which is lzma based) is installed as standard but, like lzip, is slow, and zstd is still pretty new to some distros, so the recipient could conceivably not have that installed either.

bzip2 is ancient and almost always available at this point, which is why I figured it would be the best option to stand in for gzip.

As it turns out, the question was one of data streams not files, and as at least one other person pointed out, brotli is often available for streams where bzip2 isn’t. That’s also not installed by default as a command line tool, but it may well be that the recipient, while attempting to emulate a browser, might have actually installed it.

They didn’t put it by one. They allege that they thought that since there were no studies in the same vein, it therefore ought to be acceptable, conveniently ignoring the fact that a lot of things that hadn’t been experimented on for the first time were later widely decried as things that never should have happened.

I’d call them weasels, but that would be unfair to actual weasels.

FWIW, most Debians (which includes Ubuntu and Mint) have Ctrl+Alt+T set to open the default terminal program without needing to install anything else. This is usually reconfigurable in the system settings too if that’s an awkward stretch.

But I get that people like the drop-down terminals too, for which see also Yakuake and Guake.

The article writer kind of complains that they’re having to serve a 10MB file, which is the result of the gzip compression. If that’s a problem, they could switch to bzip2. It’s available pretty much everywhere that gzip is available and it packs the 10GB down to 7506 bytes.

That’s not a typo. bzip2 is way better with highly redundant data.

Even the old monolithic sites started out with a lot of tech folks as the initial population. It’s tech. Such is the way of things.

Here maybe the effect is stronger because of the similar ethos between the Fediverse and free software like Linux.

Give it time.

And if you dare take the risk of lobbing a SIGCHLD at the parent process, most of the time, that doesn’t even do anything, and now you’ve been through the stress of signalling a perfectly healthy parent process.

I like to analogise and anthropomorphise signals, but there’s no non-depressing way to do this one. SIGCHLD is basically “clean up after your kids, even if that means tidying their corpses away”.

Often the parent can’t do that or doesn’t know how. It’s hugging them close and they’ll only leave once the parent also leaves.

These things aren’t even sentient and that stings a bit.

But unfortunately, apt moo | cowsay does something horrible to the cow in the speech bubble.

Yeah, I was about to go to bed when I was writing that. “Several” or “a few” would have been better.

It’s 1375 and I’m asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.

But let’s assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I’m spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I’m lucky, they’ll think I was sent by God. If not I’m gonna have a real bad time. There’s a good chance I’ll break a bone in the fall, and that’s not going to go well at all.

But let’s assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That’s actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.

Now I’m on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don’t speak any language they’ll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won’t evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we’re talking Chaucer and that’s pretty much opaque.

I’m literate, but not in Latin, and that’s the language of the Church. I’m numerate, but they haven’t got beyond Roman numerals yet.

I’m not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building’s no more than 200 years old. Maybe it’s on the same site. I’d head there for shelter at least.

I know the Lord’s Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.

Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.

And then I’d be burned as a witch.

You want a website and software that does Lemmy and Mastodon at the same time? That’d be kbin / mbin.

In part because of the kbin creator’s real world struggles, it hasn’t really taken off quite as well as Lemmy has, but its successor mbin is in use in a few places. I’m currently on fedia.io which is an mbin instance, for example.