Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I took a drive today. Around my old stomping grounds, streets I haven’t driven down in years if not decades. Past the hospital where I was born, past the high school I graduated from. Down the highway where my driver’s ed teacher when I was 15 kept bitching at me to lift my head off the headrest. I made sure to drive that stretch of road with my head on the headrest.

    I drove past my great grandmother’s old house, where some of my earliest memories were formed. It’s been standing abandoned long enough that trees are growing through the porch now. Past the Yamaha dealership where I bought my first motorcycle, which is now a machine parts warehouse. Past the airport where I got my pilot’s license.

    I stopped at the lake by my old college and walked the trail around it, stopping at some of the little fishing piers, benches to look at the lake and the woods. I stopped at the foot bridge over the creek that feeds the lake and just looked upstream and listened to the water babble over the tree roots.

    The entire time I was out, my mind could only do two things: hum Auld Lang Syne and envision swimming straight out to sea.

    On a related note, the above text felt like an answer to this question.










  • English class is just a place to go to be wrong according to someone with no actual skills.

    English itself is the result of numerous rounds of multilingual people mashing together the most efficient bits of other languages. The rules are so inconsistent that there kind of aren’t any. Also, written English and spoken English are two different languages with different rules, which is why you sound pompous when reading aloud formal essays and why you have to invent emoticons and even start to do rich formatting and change fonts to translate casual conversation into writing.

    Take a persuasive writing class at an American college, typically numbered as ENG-112, they might touch on a few points about how to create effective arguments, they’re mostly going to grade on pedantic points of grammar, punctuation, spelling and MLA formatting. They’re not going to teach you a damn thing about teaching, partially because they’re obligated to generate test scores and testing a skill-based curriculum is more difficult than a pedantic rule following one, and mostly because they don’t have any actual teaching skills themselves.

    Which is why there is a nationwide industry of your high school teacher teaching you how to use semicolons and a college professor marking you wrong for doing it that way.



  • Difficult to concisely explain what Wayland is.

    Software in the Linux ecosystem tends to be built on earlier projects. You may be aware of the various Desktop Environments like Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, xfce, etc. Something they all have, or had, in common was they all used a truly ancient piece of software called X11. This is the Windowing server. Most of the look and feel of a desktop environment comes from a configuration file that sets up X11 to work a certain way.

    X11 has been a standard for longer than Linux has existed, it dates to the early 80’s. It is quite old and isn’t capable of keeping up with some newer technologies like multiple monitors at different framerates, HDR, there are problems with things like Freesync, etc.

    Wayland is a project for replacing X11 with a newer system designed with modern display technology in mind. It works a little differently, and it breaks compatibility with a lot of long-standing systems, but it’s now in use by several DEs by default. At the moment there are technical reasons to use Wayland and technical reasons to use X11.



  • There are basically 2 things that can tempt me away from Fedora KDE right now:

    1. I’ll return to Mint Cinnamon if Wayland support and the GPU features it enables are robustly added to Cinnamon.

    2. Equal or better support for my hardware with better and easier package management. The main gripe I have about Fedora compared to Mint is the repository is a lot emptier. The long if now gone era of Ubuntu being THE distro for desktops means a LOT of stuff is packaged as .debs or when you do have to go to Github there’s almost always “Debian/Ubuntu” instructions. Arch’s AUR has a reputation of having literally everything in it, but my understanding is being bleeding edge it’s liable to break, and it’s yet another source of software in addition to the standard repos and Flatpak. Yes I think I would install things from Flathub rather than the AUR if available in both because I see Flatpak and Flathub as either the de facto place for the publishers of software especially commercial software to officially release for Linux, and if it isn’t yet I’d like to encourage it to be. The AUR being Arch-specific is as much of a non-starter for me as Snap is.