Lvxferre [he/him]

I never played DCSS. Does it have anything to cause monster infighting, like Nethack does with the ring of conflict? If yes, that would be probably your best bet: let them fight, and kill the survivor.

Either way this looks extremely nasty.

It’s more like

• [This case] “etymology shows this usage of the word is acceptable”
• [Typically] “language change shows the usage of that other word is also acceptable”

IMO they’re both poor grounds to defend the acceptability of a certain word usage. But they don’t really contradict each other; in fact they’re both the same fallacy (fallacy of origins aka genetic fallacy).

I believe a better way to defend the acceptability of a certain word usage is to highlight language is a communication system; the point is not to use this or that word, it’s to convey meaning. So if $vegetable milk conveys the meaning, it’s fine; if “skibidi” also conveys meaning, it’s also fine.

Just my two cents.

Mayor Poopington is likely talking about the fibre around mature coconuts (left).

Context: Discord.

It’s corporate parasite for corporate parasites.

I like how you phrased it. And it explains well why Canonical is so detached from the userbase, or doesn’t care about fragmentation — it’s simply that its host target audience is other parasites also corporate.

Mir came about because the people behind Wayland were fucking around for years without making progress.

This implies the motivation was either one or another. It’s both: Canonical saw there was room to push for Mir, because the Wayland project was stagnant.

Now that Wayland has actually matured, Mir is a Wayland compositor.

They saw they lost the fight, and gave up.

Snaps predate (and do a whole lot more than) flatpak.

This does not contradict what I said: even if snaps are older Canonical is still pushing them as much as it can, because it can’t control the alternative other distros would rather use (flatpaks). Or the distribution of software using that package system.

1 out of 3 isn’t great. (implied: “two of your examples are invalid”)

Nah, 3 out of 3. False dichotomy and red herring aren’t enough to discard either example.

But for the sake of argument let us pretend this was a 0 out of 3 instead. The point would still stand, given those are solely examples highlighting Canonical’s modus operandi.

Speaking about the third example (Unity) you didn’t mention: the situation was rather similar to Wayland: Canonical was displeased with GNOME 2.X, likely predicted 3.0 was going to be a trainwreck (it was), and then did its own thing instead of contributing with another project it wouldn’t be able to control.

I think the general Linux userbase is so used to non-profit projects that it forgets Canonical is a corporation, and corporations always seek control.

“software-properties is an old gtk application essentially focused on deb/apt world. Many of its features are dangerous or too complex for normal users (removing main, enabling proposed, source without specifying what, …)”

First it was Mir, the alternative to X and Wayland. Then it was Unity (notice the name!), yet another desktop environment. Now it’s snaps, as an alternative to flatpak.

Are you noticing the pattern? It’s always Canonical trying to force some distro-agnostic tool into the Linux community, so other distros start depending on Canonical. Always doing this through unnecessary fragmentation.

To be clear, fragmentation is not always bad. Sometimes it enables people to appease different target demographics; specially in the context of Unity. However the way Canonical does this stinks “we want control!” from a distance.

With that in mind, look at the part I’ve emphasised. It shows the actual reason why Canonical is ditching software-properties from the defaults: because it wants to press further for snaps, in detriment of .deb packages.

What follows is basically an excuse. I don’t think it’s actually removing it because “it’s too dangerous” or whatnot. However, if anything “this is an excuse, not the real reason” only adds injury, because it shows 1) that Canonical sees no problem misleading the users on why it does something; and 2) the people working there are so detached, but so detached from the userbase that they don’t get why this would rub users the wrong way. (It’s basically a “you’re trash too stupid to not cause itself harm” dammit.)

Ah, by the way: Canonical was always some sort of Apple wannabe.

Ah, this reminds me the game Celeste. The game kind of hints the main character (Madeline) is trans, with then word of the dev (who’s also trans) confirming it.

Anyway. That’s a good way to detect bigots before they cause you trouble.

In addition to all of that, since your comment is spot on:

When people claim some variety is more conservative than another variety, they tend to cherry pick a lot. It’s easy, for example, to look at rhoticity and claim “American English” is more conservative, or to look at the cot/caught merge and claim British English is more conservative. But neither claim is accurate or meaningful; and when you try to look at the big picture, you notice changes everywhere.

To complicate it further, neither “British English” nor “American English” refer to any actual variety. Those are only umbrella terms; they boil down to “English, arbitrarily restricted to people who live in the territory controlled by that specific government”. And the actual varieties that they speak might keep or change completely different features.

Backstory of the spelling of that word:

Latin colōrem (accusative of color) gets inherited by Old French as color /ko’lor/.

Somewhere down the line Old French shifted /o/ to /u/. I believe this shift affected at first stressed vowels, or that the distinction between unstressed /o/ and /u/ was already not a big deal; so there was more pressure to respell the last (stressed) vowel than the first (unstressed) one. So the word gets spelled color, colour, colur.

Anglo-Norman inherited this mess, spelling it mostly as colur. Then Middle English borrows the word, as /ku.'lu:r/~/'ku.lur/. It’s oxytone in AN, but English has a tendency to shift the stress to the first vowel, creating the second pronunciation. Spelling as usual for those times is a mess:

• colur - spelled like in Anglo-Norman.
• color - swap the ⟨u⟩ with cosmetic ⟨o⟩. Scribes hated spelling ⟨u⟩ in certain situations, where it would lead to too many vertical lines in a row; that’s why you also got come, love, people instead of cume, luve, peuple.
• colour - mirroring an Old French spelling that was more common up south, around Paris.
• coloure - that ⟨e⟩ was likely never pronounced, I think it was there to force reading the previous vowel as long
• coler - probably from some /'ku.lur/ pronunciation already reducing the vowel to */'ku.lər/
• kolour - ⟨c⟩~⟨k⟩ mixing was somewhat common then. And no, KDE did not exist back then, they did no lobby to spell the word with a K for the sake of a program that would only appear centuries later (Kolourpaint).

Eventually as English spelling gets standardised, the word settles down as colour.

Then around 1800, Noah Webster treats this word as if it was directly borrowed from Latin. Since in Latin it’s color, he clipped the -u. And his dictionary was popular in USA, recreating the mess, even after it was already fixed.

D. cinnabari aka dragonblood tree:

D. trifasciata aka snake plant:

…the resulting hybrid would look nothing like a snake tree :(

*Caution* the sexy girl in my avatar may have fire.

Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false?

The original statement implies the technique was widespread across Native American groups. It’s almost certainly false for the ones here in South America; there’s a lot on terrace farming and slash-and-burn, but AFAIK nothing that resembles the companion system of the three sisters. (I wonder if it’s due to the prominence of subterranean crops. Taters, yucca, sweet potatoes.)

The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and the Cherokee/Tsalagi being related hints me it was something they developed.

While “Iroquoian” is still used as a technical linguistic category

I’m guessing this won’t last for long, given some people already call the language family “Ogwehoweh” instead of “Iroquoian”. Example here.

Don’t speak please

How am I going to phrase requests then? sudo make me a sandwich style?

February 04, 2025

I wonder if they gave up, after seeing how poorly Copilot was received.

I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

1. You got some experience with that distro and you’re willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.
2. The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.
3. The distro is reliable, and won’t give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

Yes, there is. But it’s more like a bunch of tiny nature reserves in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, full of “BUY IT!” flashy signs. When the old web was more like an expansion of wilderness, you didn’t need to look for amateur stuff to find it.

(I agree Lemmy has that same vibe.)

still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.

I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it’s all… you know.

Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn’t exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.