palordrolap

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

Linux Musk sounds like the evil counterpart to Mint. A fork of Red Star OS, etc.

This has bell curve meme vibes. I’m just not sure what the middle guy would be saying.

Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.

You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

They’ve sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn’t provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

Logitech still haven’t written their own Linux driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don’t.

Pretty sure Cinnamon panels are designed to fit to the width (or height if they’re attached to the side) of the screen and can’t be altered. (The depth/breadth/“thickness” of the panel can be changed, but that’s not particularly relevant here.)

The same may also be true of panel-like features in XFCE and MATE too, but I can’t easily confirm.

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I’ve been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer’s been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I’ve thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I’ve had an Xorg update. That’s more of a “your graphics card is so old Mint doesn’t really support it any more” problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren’t quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it’s not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn’t get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn’t know what you were doing.

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell’s manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won’t cause an infinite loop.

* And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user’s ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

Is it still the norm to go to the dev’s office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we’re doing, tell them we’re shipping their machine to the client because it’s the only one that the code runs on?

And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

I’m assuming that this response from 4o isn’t real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.

My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.

Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn’t have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I’ve tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn’t intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn’t need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

One of Perl’s design principles was the Robustness principle, though it probably wasn’t known by that name at the time. (The name came about around the same time Perl was becoming a thing, something something zeitgeist something.)

Perl can be locked down and made to complain (with at least a couple of levels of pedantry) when things are wrong, but unlike most other languages, it doesn’t do so by default.

find’s expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.

That said, there’s nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.

The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I’m guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)

I think I might be the third option: f’ss-tab.

Couldn’t tell you where that’s from. When I first ran Linux, the year didn’t start with a 2.

They need to update that. They jumped to version 24 for 2024. 24.2.3 is the current version.

If they have any sense they’ll not try to find out what’s on it and send it straight to whatever electronics recycling is available.

Sticking a USB device of unknown provenance into your computer is just asking for trouble. (When you think about it, we even take a risk every time we buy one.)

Sure, you know it’s harmless, but they don’t know that, even if you tell them. Who are you? You’re just someone who used to live in their house. As far as they know, you might be a freak who gets a kick out of leaving dodgy devices around for people to find.