Tie it to your internet bandwidth usage, so that the bulb starts dimming when utilization goes up and maybe flicker a bit, as if you’re drawing too much power off the grid when you’re downloading stuff.

I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.

I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.

Remote, because my commute would be 140 miles round-trip again. Otherwise I mostly enjoy working in an office with people and I don’t mind going in every few months or so.

Remote is also nice because it actually makes it easier to collaborate with other developers when we can both be at our own keyboards and share screens.

I work well alone, but I spend a lot in time in calls, either work meetings or collaborating on code. I do enjoy the social aspect of that as well.

I use AI pretty much every day, but mostly as a search engine/SO replacement. I rarely let it write my code for me, since I’ve had overall poor results with that. Besides, I have to verify the code anyway. I do use it for simple refactoring or code generation like “create a c# class mapped to this table with entity framework”.

This is one of the reasons I prefer using ctrl-insert/shift-insert when it’s available. Unfortunately the Insert key seems to have disappeared from a lot of keyboards. Scroll lock sometimes works instead of ctrl-s and ctrl-q. I would be ok remapping ctrl-c to ctrl-break, but I still use ctrl-z to background a job. Would be great if terminals had a quick easy way to select your preference of Microsoft, unix, or CUA shortcuts.

That’s awesome. My 1993 self is very envious of your rig.

I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.

Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.

I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.

Yaml editor? Business therapist? Email author? Paid meeting actor? Scrum participant? Office cynic? Idk.

This is a great answer. I will just add that KDE in general exposes more settings in the UI than stock Gnome (but Gnome Tweaks is a thing). If you are the kind if user that just sticks with the defaults, Gnome is probably less confusing to use and what I recommend, but I personally prefer KDE because I like to tweak things.

That’s a great tip! It turns out I must have already tried some of that. I found multiple settings in about:config. Anything with a file picker works (open, save as), but the “open folder” from the Downloads dialog must just not use xdg-open, since none of the settings had an effect on that. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have my Dolphin bookmarks and places.

Edit: Adding this here in case someone in the future finds this searching for the problem. It looks like I’m bitten by the bug described in comment 55 (near the bottom) of this Firefox bug report. TL;DR: it works if I have Dolphin open already, but if not, it starts Nautilus. While this isn’t great, at least I have a workaround.

Thank you for replying, very informative. I think I have most of the actions/types I wanted associated with my preferred ones now. The most noticeable one is Firefox when I open downloads from the menu. I’m not sure if Firefox uses xdg or not? I don’t mind GTK or Gnome at all, in fact I probably have spent more time on Gnome, but I do like when things are consistent.

Looking forward to this. I do have a question for the more seasoned people here: I installed Fedora 41 not too long after its release on a new PC, which has been my daily driver every since. Very happy with it, tweaked everything to my liking. However, by mistake I installed Workstation (with Gnome) and then switched to my preferred KDE Plasma as the DE. This has left some corners of my system with the Gnome look and feel, which is fine, but I prefer if it were more consistent.

My question:

1. Can I/do you recommend that I upgrade Fedora in place? I prefer this if it means I don’t have to reinstall everything.
2. Or do you recommend I do a fresh install anyway for a clean upgrade and at the same time clean up my DE? What is the least disruptive way to do this?

No offense taken at all. I just agree it’s a sad state of affairs.

I don’t mean to be a doomer and I do try to give my kids more than a black and white picture. I’m not a parent who tells them to just suck it up. I support them every step of the way.

But I do try to keep their expectations realistic. I think it’s fair to let them know that what they see in glossy college ads isn’t typical.

Finding a job you actually like can be hard. Working 40 hours a week can be hard. But eventually you will manage it. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the rent.

Usually you have to play the cards you were dealt while you look for better opportunities. Few people can afford to be out of work for a long time. I consider myself very lucky to be able to sit here right now and discuss work/life balance on Lemmy, rather than trolling the Internet for jobs.

Yes, it is. But it’s the reality of being a working stiff in America today.

I have a kid who’s just starting full time work out of college. I’ll tell you what I told them: you’ll get used to it. You will eventually settle into the habit and it becomes routine.

However, there will be tough times where you need to work hard to motivate yourself to go to work. Those happen.

What works for me during those times is the same that works for me exercising (which I hate): one step, one mile, one day at a time. Tell yourself it’s just one more day to the weekend or to vacation. Have something to look forward to.

Burnout also happens. What works for me there, is to draw an absolutely strict line between work and life. You need to fight for your work/life balance. Maintain friendships outside the office.

When you’re not working, try to do something not related at all to work. If that’s working on improving your health, that’s even better. A healthy body and healthy mind has more energy. Do literally anything except working or thinking about work. If you can’t turn it off, practice setting boundaries until you can.

Finally, and this surprised me as I realized that all the stupid corny stuff we do in the office: luncheons, raffles, TGIF, “just another day in paradise”, and that, are coping mechanisms. Play along, but don’t get sucked into a negativity spiral. Humor can be a great stress reliever, but watch out for HR watchdogs.

Are you telling me Beowulf clusters are back?

Jokes aside, it depends what you want to do. You can’t really build one powerful gaming PC out of multiple, but your can run parallel workloads in a number of different ways. What exactly, comes down to what you’re doing. A kubernetes cluster is different from a Blender render farm, for example.

As others mentioned you can just remote into the servers with ssh, vnc, rdp, etc. if you want physical displays on them, you can look for a cheap KVM which lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

This is not correct.

If you compile GPL licensed code and distribute the binaries, you are still obligated to make that source available under the same license, with your changes.

In the case of GPL, but not all open source licenses, this even applies if you link to (compile with) the GPL code from your own. The MIT license on the other hand, comes with almost no obligations.

What RedHat and others do is add support, services, and their own proprietary programs on top of the open source. The open source parts of that distro is and always will be free as in both beer and speech.

The non-free packages are often distributed via separate repositories to make the distinction clear.

That is just one way to fund open source software and is sometimes referred to as the RedHat model.

What OP is asking about is the donation model to fund software. You’re not required to donate, but if you enjoy the software and you can afford it, then there is your opportunity to give back.

As someone else pointed out, hosting and bandwidth isn’t free, so it’s important for these projects to find some revenue stream to pay for that.

HostGator. They raised their prices by quite a bit last time I renewed. So I contacted them and complained. After a while they came back with a “special” offer to renew at the old price but I had to accept it right then. I felt like I wasn’t gonna get a better deal and it wasn’t my money anyway, so I accepted.

Got the price they offered but they renewed it two months ahead of when it was due, so it ended up costing the same anyway, because now it will be up for renewal sooner. I will be moving away from them before the next renewal.

TL;DR: HostGator can fuck right off

I create a cron job with something like: docker system prune -af --filter="until=XXh" where XX is on the order of a few days.