Because KIA takes way too much room on the page.

“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”

Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.

For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.

I find KDE’s settings app isn’t always easy to find settings in, especially when you have no idea what to call a feature.

Concussion at an ice skating rink.

Yeah actual error messages with helpful information are a thing on Linux.

The last time I tried to install Windows on something, there was some problem with the BIOS config, and Windows would get part of the way through installing and then a “FAILED TO INSTALL ERROR 0xA9BF4DAFDEB99B7AD46” or something. Installing Linux on the same machine said “Unable to install due to BIOS config. See here for details.” “here” was a hyperlink to the Ubuntu wiki, which you could open in Firefox because this is a live session with the whole desktop there, not some useless installer environment, nevertheless it gave a QR code to the same wiki page so you could visit it on a mobile device if you wanted to.

It’s like it’s meant to be used by humans, not the Borg. And not even like Borg Queen Seven of Nine Borg, like TNG era Borg.

A KDE update broke its lock screen. Locking the computer would bring up a message reading “The lock screen is broken and doesn’t work anymore, to unlock the computer, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1, login and enter this command.”

I’ll admit to liking the look of some gaming PCs, with a custom loop with clear tubing, colored coolant, coordinated lights; it hits the same way a well done build in Satisfactory does.

I’m not really interested in gaming peripherals like a big chunky mouse with a bunch of angled plates on it trying to look like Gigatron’s jock strap. Some RGB can be kind of cool, I kinda wish I could do more useful stuff with it, like I always throught it would be cool to have RGB lighting that varied from blue to red with component temperature or something. I’m not the biggest fan of just unicorn vomit for the sake of unicorn vomit.

In the 1940s or 50s. My family has owned it since the 60s.

xXx-=The_Mouse_Sl@yer_69=-xXx

Meowssolini

Actually I like that one.

You know that cute thing vets do when they come out to the waiting room and call the cat’s name?

They won’t do that if you name your cat “Shithead”.

The “scam” seemed to be “Look, a woman. Give us money.” Like, it was so obviously a scam that I started wondering what was really going on.

I wanted to be a pilot since I was a child. I got an introductory ride in a Cessna on my 14th birthday. Started taking flying lessons in earnest around 16, earned a private pilot’s license my freshman year of college. Decided I wanted to go into it as a job, started working on my instrument rating, and for my junior year of college I transferred to ERAU in Daytona Beach. Lasted just over a semester there. Ended up earning a light sport flight instructor certificate and I taught classes at a small school, eventually earning an LSRM certificate and working as the company mechanic as well. I’m a walking flight school, just add airplane.

Wasn’t earning enough money to pay all my own bills, and though I was logging 20-30 hours a week of flight time little of it was applicable to further ratings, and then the owners of the school started doing some sketchy shit and I decided to dip out. In the summer of 2012 I landed after a lesson with a student, and I haven’t flown an airplane since.

I kinda built myself a job as the project manager of a little job shop/prototyping firm, then that business didn’t survive COVID. I’m a woodworker now.

Condescend further to me. Explain it to me like I’m a woman.

Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

Long about 2015.

Autokey is software written by someone.

Drivers are software written by someone.

Have you vetted every line of code running on your computer?

There’s software on the computer that does that anyway, otherwise the keyboard won’t work. Feels like an arbitrary line to draw.

Honestly if pressing some buttons to get the computer to do something you programmed it to do is a “security nightmare” I think we should probably just give up, tear down the electric grid and go back to dying of smallpox at 17 like nature intended.