Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I think I’ve done a reasonable job improving my dovetail jig.

    That 12 inch Porter Cable model; it has some problems with repeatability. The reference marks are quite wide and positioned in a way to give a lot of parallax error. There was no real way to quantify how far you’ve moved the template in and out, which meant it’s basically guaranteed to come out of alignment. So I took a knife to it. Scribed the alignment line around all the tines and put graduation marks on the brass thumb wheels. It’s a lot easier to be deliberate in adjusting this thing now.

    It still needs a few other things here and there, and I need to put those alignment marks on other templates. But it’s a start.




  • I forget why, but Picard and Riker are away, Data is in command with Worf as his first officer. Data wants to be analytical and consider all options, Worf wants to fire all phasers and die in glorious battle. Data comes to a decision and gives orders, and Worf says “Finally!”

    Data asks to see him in the ready room, and then dresses him down for talking back to him in front of the crew. They hash out what they expect the role of second in command is supposed to be, and with the military shit out of the way, Data then acknowledges that this dressing down may have damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that no, he was out of line so it was his fault, that he acknowledges that he was out of line and if we can overlook this incident he’d like to continue being friends.

    Stated problems, voiced objections, addrressed objections, no personal slights, no raised voices, actual accountability expected and accepted…manliest conversation ever filmed.



  • On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

    Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

    I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

    I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.







  • I have very little experience with Arch. I ran Mint for a decade before coming to Fedora KDE for Wayland’s wider support for variable refresh rates and such.

    A lot of my opinions on the matter have more to do with KDE vs Cinnamon. But as for Fedora vs Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, I have one major one: Software availability is nowhere near as good.

    On Mint, a shit ton of stuff can be found in the APT repos, plus Flatpak is there. If the package you want isn’t in either of those two places, there’s probably an Ubuntu-style PPA (remember those?) or, if you’re resorting to downloading and compiling from Git, they always include Ubuntu instructions and they work.

    On Fedora, the standard repos via DNF have half a moldy butt in them. They maintain their own Flatpak repository, and there’s Flathub. There have been a number of times where I’ve had to just give up having a piece of software I was used to because it’s not packaged for Fedora. Build instructions are rarely written for Red Hat/Fedora, and “Well I’ll just say DNF install instead of APT install” is usually “cannot find package.”

    I’ll probably be moving on at some point, but it’s working for now.




  • LibreOffice runs on Windows and I think MacOS, I would install it there to try it out especially before jumping OSes.

    LibreOffice, unto itself, is fine. There’s an alternate universe where we’re standardized around it instead of MS Office. The main issues you’re going to run into is working with people who use MS Office. LO’s compatibility with Microsoft’s formats is imperfect. If you’re collaborating on, say, a powerpoint presentation with classmates, expect LibreOffice Impress to mangle it.

    I’ve been out of school for awhile now, and as an adult running a household it’s all the productivity suite I’ll ever need.

    I’ll be honest here: Wanting to try out ElementaryOS “because it’s pretty” and having no experience with Linux…I foresee this ending badly and shortly. Something isn’t going to work exactly the way it does in Windows and a hissy fit will ensue. I recommend taking an image backup of her machine before installing Linux.





  • Actual answer:

    Rust is a relatively new programming language. Similar to C or C++ it compiles directly into executable binary code so it can be used for bare metal or low level operating system programming. It is thus relevant to Linux kernel development as things like drivers can and are being developed in Rust.

    Compare this to the likes of Java or C# which get compiled to bytecode or a kind of pseudo machine code that gets run in a virtual machine, which has advantages for application development, or something like Python which is interpreted (or just-in-time compiled) at run-time, useful as an end user scripting language.

    Rust is designed from the ground up to tackle some modern problems, a key one being memory safety. It’s a lot more paranoid about memory allocation and access and it’s structured around this. Older languages like C allow the programmer a lot more absolute control over the hardware, which effectively means the C programmer has a lot more footguns in his toolbox. Theoretically, Rust offers fewer opportunities for the developer to shoot himself in the foot.

    Rust also comes with some really cool tooling. Compiler errors usually point straight at the problem and say something like “Shouldn’t there be a colon here?” The build system, called Cargo, is really slick in a lot of ways, handling linking, compiling, even library package management in a very automatic fashion. It’s real slick to work with.

    As with anything, fans of the language can be a bit much; they stereotypically suggest rewriting everything under the sun in Rust whether it makes sense or not, and this includes the Linux kernel, which has caused some friction in the community; Linux contributors are often very accustomed to C and some don’t want to deal with anything else.