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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It should be offered as an option really.

    One caveat is that you need to think ahead about how much space you want to assign to each partition. You could end up with your /home/ partition being full while the system partition still has plenty. Or vice versa. You can manually readjust the boundaries but it requires some understanding and can’t be done on the fly by a non-technical user. By contrast if everything’s stored on the same partition you never have to worry about this.

    You can, by the way, manually recreate this set up even after the initial set up although it will require lots of free space to shuffle around files (or some external storage to temporarily hold them). Basically what you do is create a new empty partition, copy all your /home/stuff there and then configure your system to always mount that partition as the /home/ directory when it boots. Files are just files after all and the operating system doesn’t really care where they come from as long as the content is correct. Once you got it working you can delete the originals and free up the space to be used otherwise.


  • Typically your personal files and app settings are stored somewhere in your user home folder, eg under /home/bob/. Ideally you’ve set up your system in a way so that the entire /home/ folder is stored on its own disk or partition at least. That let’s you boot up a different distro while using the same home directory. But even if you haven’t set it up separately from the rest of the system, you can still manually copy all those files.

    Not every single application setting is transferable between distros as they sometimes use different versions but generally it works well. Many apps also let you manually export profiles or settings and reimport them elsewhere later. Or they have online synchronization baked in.






  • ¿Does Gimp on Windows finally use the same interface as the Linux version? But either way while I have learned to use Gimp over time and appreciate it the interface certainly has rough edges. For me that’s particularly noticeable when it comes to handling different layers and controlling which part of the interface has focus.

    Some functionality is also quite hidden and exploring the interface isn’t so useful for finding it, often I found myself prompting a search engine instead. But I can also see that Gimp is a complex program with a ton of functionality and it’s very hard to make the interface intuitive for every type of user at once.



  • One reason to keep in mind is backwards compatibility and the expectancy that every Linux system has the same basic tools that work the same.

    Imagine you have a script running on your server that uses a command with or without specific arguments. If the command (say tar) changes its default parameters this could lead to a lot of nasty side effects from crashes to lost or mangled data. Besides the headache of debugging that, even if you knew about the change beforehand it’s still a lot effort to track down every piece of code that makes use of that command and rewrite it.

    That’s why programs and interfaces usually add new options over time but are mostly hesitant to remove old ones. And if they do they’ll usually warn the others beforehand that a feature will deprecate while allowing for a transitional period.

    One way to solve this conundrum is to simply introduce new commands that offer new features and a more streamlined approach that can replace the older ones in time. Yet a distribution can still ship the older ones alongside the newer ones just in case they are needed.

    Looking at pagers (programs that break up long streams of text into multiple pages that you can read one at a time) as a simple example you’ll find that more is an older pager program while the newer less offers an even better experience (“less is more”, ¿get the joke?). Both come pre-installed as core tools on many distributions. Finally an even more modern alternative is most, another pager with even better functionality, but you’ll need to install that one yourself.






  • Good point.

    I guess just having a staggered temporal restriction is fine, don’t need to wait until you retire necessarily. You would still receive a portion of your salary package in the form of classic currency and plenty for a good life too. An example could look like this and I’m obviously making up the percentages and durations here, they would need to be fine tuned:

    • 40% of salary as cash
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 6 months
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 12 months
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 18 months
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 24 months
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 30 months
    • 10% of salary as stocks that can’t be sold within 36 months



  • It’s so dumb that JSON doesn’t officially have comments.

    So much this.

    Used to work at a company where I sometimes had to manually edit the configuration of devices which were written and read in JSON. Super inconvenient if you have to document all changes externally. As a “hack” I would sometimes add extra objects to store strings (the comments). But that’s super dicey as you don’t know if it somehow breaks the parsing. You’re also not guaranteed the order of objects so if the configuration gets read, edited and rewritten your comment might no longer be above/below the change you made.

    Always found it baffling that such a basic feature is missing from a spec that is supposed to cover a broad range of use cases.


  • Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:

    „Amazing“

    But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:

    “Amazing” or ‘Amazing’

    The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.