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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I like that I don’t even care about it. The main user of it is my wife, who is non-technical. It’s the only computer she uses, for everything (browsing, shopping, banking, word processing, printing) for 20+ years, and if you ask her which distro it is, well, she doesn’t know what “distro” means.

    She doesn’t “use Linux” because she wanted to “learn Linux” nor to “try this distro”. She uses youtube, instagram, the bank site, amazon, libreoffice, etc. The closest she gets to the OS is accepting the package manager prompt to update.

    I wish one day most people can answer your question with “I don’t know, whatever came with my computer”, because it’ll mean all of them are as easy to use, as unobtrusive and as unimportant to the user as possible.

    But to finally answer it, kubuntu, some ancient, still updatable LTS version (can’t even recall when I last upgraded), because it was easier for my wife to adapt, coming from windows 95 when she started using it.



  • I agree; I mentioned headless server because that would be a more “pure” and general Linux administration - learning how to administer a SUSE Linux using the graphical yast tool won’t translate as well to general Linux admin as if you learn and understand how to fo it in the command line and config files.

    And absolutely; one can use Firefox, LibreOffice and any other tool on Linux, but I don’t consider that as “learning” or “knowing” Linux. My wife uses exclusively Linux for 20+ years (because when she left her job where they still had Windows 95, that’s what the desktop at home ran; kubuntu). She does text editing, internet banking, shopping, browsing, printing, everything there (even updates sw through the gui package manager), but she doesn’t “know Linux”.

    You can setup a Linux system for a computer illiterate, and they may happily learn how to use it for their social media and streaming consuming, and whatever endusers do in their computers, without ever knowing that’s “Linux”.

    Strictly speaking, that already happens. How many Android users know they are running on a Linux kernel?

    That’s why when OP said “learn Linux”, I prioritized the admin on command line; as you don’t need to really “learn Linux” to interact with it through automated/graphical admin tools (no shame on doing it, they’re sometimes quicker and more practical than command line).

    What I mean is that learning how to use cPanel or Yast is useful, but you’re learning how to administer as system through a tool, which in theory could even be adapted to administer a non-Linux system.




  • jsveiga@vlemmy.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlJust finished cs50 need some guidance.
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    1 year ago

    Apart from actual system administration or kernel developing, there’s no real “learn Linux” .

    Video/Photo/Vector editing on Linux is not “learning Linux”, it’s learning to use a tool which runs on Linux. You can learn to use Blender, Gimp or Inkscape on Windows. You don’t edit videos/photos/vectors with the Linux kernel. You can even “learn the linux terminal” installing bash on Windows.

    You can also install Visual Code or IDLE on Windows and on Linux. Learning to code on Visual Code or IDLE is not really “learning Linux”.

    Also going on distro hopping looking for the “perfect distro” many times means the hopper simply doesn’t stick to one long enough to learn how to customize the environment to their liking (which usually means the window manager).

    Most of the things you can do on the GUI, even the administration ones are just layers and layers of tools to make things “easier” - and they’ll be different on each distro and release. Command line administration will change much less, or at least less frequently.

    Things I consider “learning Linux” are for example:

    • installing Linux (specially a headless server)

    • understanding how to use the package managers - again, on the command line

    • understand how systemd works

    • (hard core) dive into the kernel workings

    • understand how grub works

    • learn the general filesystem structure

    • learn how to analyze logs

    • learn user administration and how the permissions (and extended permissions) work

    • learn how to integrate Linux to a Windows environment (join a workgroup or domain, share storage, authenticate users)

    • learn how to check resources usage and how to troubleshoot it

    • understand the nuances and of partitioning and when they are needed, as well as the different filesystems

    • etc (and /etc)

    And yes, many of those are not strictly “Linux”, but are specific to a Linux system, unlike photo editing.


  • There are two very distinct categories of content aggregation/social media: The ones where you primarily “follow” people/content creators (facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, whatsapp) and the ones where you primarily “follow” subjects (reddit, lemmy, slashdot, etc).

    The ones that focus on people are much more prone to create opinion bubbles, polarizing groups, and the obnoxious “influencers”.

    Of course in some cases algorithms (as in youtube) may take in account the subject of your subscribed content creators, and feed you other creators covering similar subjects, but when the focus is on people, chances are they’ll feed you similar opinions, not only similar subjects.

    It’s easy to see the difference if you compare subscribing to a “r/news” channel in reddit/lemmy with subscribing to a “foxnews” channel in youtube/facebook. One of those will get you a wider range of point of views (despite possible mod biases).

    So I really hope subscribing or following people never becomes relevant in lemmy, let alone having algorithms tailoring what is shown to me. I want to know other people’s opinions; not an echo of my opinions.






  • Because the tire is topographically a radially flattened torus, when you turn it half inside out, it becomes a 2D möbius strip. At this point it effectively has only one side. When you push such construct horizontally against a solid, because the z-axis perpendicular to the strip has no negative values (it only has one side), if that coincides with the orientation of the ∇Np of the solid, the z vector wraps around the solid. When the tire snaps to its rest state (inside in), it’s easy to see why it ends up around the pillar.

    This 3D animation demonstrates the concept:

    https://youtu.be/xvFZjo5PgG0


  • I’m a 55 year old senior developer. I’ve been coding since I was 12 (yeah, RPG II in punch cards and COBOL stored in 8" floppies), and I have a TERIBLE memory.

    Don’t bother memorizing and knowing every language feature and detail. Just get a general awareness of what it can do. Then when you need to accomplish something, it’s good enough that for the first times you do it you go “hey, I recall there’s a way of doing it” or at least (often happens to me) “hmm, this sounds useful enough that this language must have a built-in way of doing it”. Then you google or ask some AI, and you’ll get pointed to the general direction most of the times.

    Then if you use it often enough, you’ll remember it. (and in my case, if I don’t use it for 3 months, I completely forget about it, and even get surprised when I see how I did it in my own old code).

    In the old days, you could indeed know every feature and library (if any existed at all) of a language. Heck, I knew almost all hex op codes for the Z80 assembly by heart (still recall more of those than I recall my relatives names). Nowadays it is impossible to memorize everything.

    In JS realm, if you look at the amount of components you have available in most frameworks, for example in UI5, or existing node modules for your node.js project, even trying to “memorize” them all is a waste of time. In cases like this, you just need to assume there’s a component or module that does what you need, then be good at finding, choosing, and understanding how to use one.

    Not to mention the reduntant stuff they throw in “modern” languages, like javascript’s forEach. Some languages have 10 ways of doing the same thing, each one 0.1% more efficient for each particular case, but may catastrophically fail in some other specific case. Screw it. Learn the one that works well for every case and stick with it - you’re not coding ultra performance critical stuff in js anyway.

    Programming today is usually more an integration of functioning pieces than building from scratch (assuming that if you’re talking about JavaScript, we’re not talking about creating microcode for bare silicon).

    Worry about building an efficient and robust logic in your head. Then the programming language is just a tool, way less important than the logic you came up with.


  • …or to a diabetic person whose health plan does not cover all the insulin cost they need.

    I should have specified that I was referring to superfluous stuff.

    For basic needs like education and health, any cost is too expensive. That should be sponsored by the whole society and government, and be free.

    In some cases, they are. My bachelor’s degree (5 years Engineering) costed me zero (in monetary units). Even the printed material was free, from the uni printhouse.

    We also have the largest free universal health care system in the world, and it’s even pretty decent in some regions of the country (Brazil).


  • jsveiga@vlemmy.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you use adblock? Why? Why not?
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    1 year ago

    I’ve never used them.

    If I like an app or site, but the ads are annoying me, I do one of these:

    • If there’s an option to pay the creator/aggregator to eliminate the ads, and the cost/benefit is worth it, I’ll pay.

    • If there is no option to pay, but the app/content is worth the ads annoyance, I’ll keep using the app/site and watch/skip/ignore the ads.

    • If there is no option to pay, or there is, but the price is higher than what I perceive as the app/content value, I’ll stop using the app/site.

    For example, I paid for Baconreader Premium, but I watch YouTube ads, and I removed several sites from my google home page feed because they had more ads than content.

    I’m also stop using Reddit, as I don’t think it’s worth enduring their obnoxious native app.

    And no, I don’t use pirated software, nor watch or listen to pirated movies or music. If something is priced above what I consider it’s worth, I just don’t use it.

    Yes, Baconreader Premium could be consider as a “reddit ad blocker”, but it operated within Reddit’s approval. Now Reddit changed their rules, and it’s their rules.






  • jsveiga@vlemmy.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat is always worth it?
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    1 year ago

    You answered “trying” as something that “is ALWAYS worth it” - which was OP’s question.

    If you now say you need to “weigh the pros and cons” - which I agree - then trying it’s not ALWAYS worth it, no?

    Then as someone else commented, each person has their own risk tolerance, so once each person weigh the pros and cons, trying will be worth it for some and not for others.

    So answering “trying” to “what’s something that’s always worth it” is rather paradoxical, as what you probably meant then was “trying it, but only when it’s worth it”.