Yeah, for me, the big thing was that I only found out you could test-run Linux without installing after I had made the decision to install it. Of course, having no real clue what I’d get into massively delayed the decision…

suddenly found myself in the Realm of Zot.

Yeah, when I got there the first and only time, I was also surprised how little separates you from Zot once you’ve made it through the Dungeon and the rune branches. Far too many of my characters have died on the final stretch…

For anyone wondering, the Rettungsgasse (“rescue aisle”) is something we do on longer stretches of road whenever congestion happens, to allow ambulances to pass through as quickly as possible. Everyone on the right side of the road keeps to the right and everyone on the left keeps to the left, forming a roughly ambulance-sized gap in the middle. On multi-lane roads, it’s formed to the right of the left-most lane.

There’s also laws for it. You can get fined, if you hold up the ambulance, because you failed to form the Rettungsgasse, or if you have the audacity to drive down the Rettungsgasse to try to skip a traffic jam.

It’s not really a thing in cities like shown in the video, as we’d typically try to drive into side roads or onto parking spaces or the sidewalk to make room for the ambulance. The laws don’t apply there either.

Yeah, leaving moral reservations aside, it’s especially annoying to me, because it’s being pushed with complete disregard whether it actually helps me.

I’ve been working in a programming language for the past two years, in which I’m well-trained. Better than the statistical average that LLMs blurt out, at the very least. So, I’ll often end up correcting whatever it generates, rather than just typing out the same directly. In particular, I also find it much easier to think while typing, rather than while reviewing code, so I need pauses to think anyways. And I also just find it disrupts my concentration when the autocompletion-style LLMs keep flickering their suggestions at me.

Similarly, flavor images. So much of management is fucking excited about generative AI, because they can type shit like “wombat hanging off of a line of code” and then it slops out an image, which they can slap into their presentation and pretend it has meaning.
I don’t like those images. The AI-generated ones look terrible to me, but I did not either like them before they were AI-generated. It’s just pointless imagery, why are you showing me this?
Obviously, management can disagree with my stance, many people do, but if they want me to present shit, they need to respect that my presentation style just does not include flavor images, no matter what flavor image generator we pay for.

Here in the Europes, I find curbside parking similarly depressing. Like, man, it should be a human right for kids to be able to go outside for playing ball. But you can’t do that anywhere around here, because wherever there’s kids, you can be sure that someone’s parking their precious car nearby.

This is why I recommend FOSS apps for base functionality like that. There’s plenty folks out there, who’ve implemented a grocery list app as a hobby project, who don’t need to try to make money off it. As such, their app can exist without ads, tracking or needy notifications.

Yeah, while writing the comment above, I realized a quip like that could work. Maybe also “We just ran out of strong men, but I’ll see what I can do”. Didn’t have that sleight of mind in those situations so far…

For anyone else wondering WTF SAE is:

Tools and fasteners with sizes measured in inches are sometimes called “SAE bolts” or “SAE wrenches” to differentiate them from their metric counterparts. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) originally developed fasteners standards using U.S. units for the U.S. auto industry; the organization now uses metric units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units#Other_names_for_U.S._customary_units

When you skip head day…

I mean, if it’s still shit and it’s getting even worse, I don’t know why we wouldn’t continue to mourn that, or at least call it out.

Well, as the other person said, it was not a failing of LiMux. It was political. Munich had been ruled by one coalition throughout the lifetime of LiMux and after it went to a different coalition, they announced the switch back.
The manager of Munich’s IT department also publicly stated that they were surprised by the decision, because there are no larger technical problems and compatibility is resolved by providing virtualized MS Office, where necessary.
Coincidentally, Microsoft also moved its German headquarters from just outside of Munich’s tax region into Munich around the same time.

Well, traditionally, console prices were subsidized by the more expensive game prices. They’d sell the console at a loss to then make that back per game. Them raising both the console price as well as game prices is what makes it awful.

Yeah, always weirds me out. Like, if you ask for help normally, I’ll be the first to jump up. But if you ask specifically for strong men, you ask me to be a cunt to everyone else in the room, saying I’m stronger than them, which I don’t even know.

And even if I were to think that I’m the strongest, there’s still no way to know that I’m actually able to lift whatever heavy object it is. If I cannot lift it, I’ll look like a massive poser, when I then come crawling back, asking for help from others.

I mean, maybe this works better in different cultural contexts, but whenever I’ve seen it tried, it always resulted in those going along, who did not have to worry to about being confused for strong men. Which is just stupid, too. Let my older colleague throw their back out, even though I would’ve gladly helped as well.

Good way to extort get Microsoft to offer competitive prices. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But yeah, it was the city of Munich that had a few goes at this. Now it’s the state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.

And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.

As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: https://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job.

Yeah, and them being trigger-happy with the ban hammer is why Lemmy exists at all today. All Reddit alternatives back then were Nazi hotpots, because pretty much only folks who got banned from Reddit joined the alternatives (and back then, Reddit moderation primarily concerned itself with Nazis).

They would show up on dev.lemmy.ml, too, and “just ask questions”, like if an immigrant did a certain crime, would you want them deported?
These questions served no point other than to drive the conversation tone to the right.
And yeah, I was glad that the admins were always vigilant about that and immediately banned anyone asking such ‘questions’, even if it may have thrown legitimately curious folks under the bus, because it allowed proper conversations to exist.

Of course, I have survivorship bias. I don’t concern myself with China or Russia nearly enough to have specific opinions about them.
But when someone is not being intentionally intolerant, I am of the opinion that talking to them is worth it and the only way to help center opinions which one might perceive as extreme.
But well, I also don’t concern myself with my admins nearly enough to have specific opinions about their opinions either. I don’t have to agree with everything they think, just because I’m on their instance, so I don’t care nearly as much as some other folks here.

Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.

If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:

• Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
• Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
• Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
  It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.

As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…

Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.

With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.

• My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it’s got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It’s kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
• The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It’s more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it’s also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
• Well, and I guess, I’ll throw in Xfce, too, since that’s likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
  Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.

Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.

I mean, yes, but I was rather wondering, if that extra space was maybe why it couldn’t find it. Maybe you had to manually enter the SSID and accidentally put in that extra space? Then again, I don’t even know, if you took that photo…

Personally, I grew up in a family of meat eaters, so I’m pretty numb to the sight of it. For me, it’s rather inverted, so I avoid the topic, because meat eaters will feel attacked and become aggressive. But yeah, it’s a lot easier to avoid in that sense, because I can simply shut up rather than having to leave a situation entirely…