I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.
They also devour my dreams.
I’m unsure how to feel about this. From some screenshots online it seems the project is really polished, and it’s apparently fairly popular, this makes me hope someone picks it up. But on the other hand there are already rather similar distros, like Mint MATE*, so this might be slightly pointless.
*I used it for a few years, it’s great. In fact I’m still technically using it, I just installed Cinnamon over it.
The name of his studio, “Kintsugiyama”, is too long. Can I clip the “sugiy”? It sounds better! :^) …okay, disregard the shitty joke.
Serious now: Kaplan and Ford’s takes are fairly reasonable. Forums online (including Reddit… and Lemmy/Piefed, by the way) seem to trigger on people a natural instinct to fit in, as part of a group. This leads to the adoption of similar values and judgements, and in turn to direct praise and criticism towards the same things — even when you’re in no position to do it, because you didn’t experience it nor plan to. In practice this means yes, it’s harder to speak “I like it” when everyone else dislikes it.
And people can get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally loud with this shite.
Also, I like the way they voiced this. It’s really hard to misconstrue it as “don’t criticise things”. Criticism is often healthy, sometimes even really harsh criticism; it’s just that sometimes it needs some experience to be even constructive, and that’s the case here.
All symbols are wrong, but in ways that oddly make sense:
I don’t know if what I’m going to say is correct, but this smells like LLM shitting emojis.
It is soul-crushing tedious. That’s probably why Lucy is calling it min-maxxing, in any other game this stuff would be seen as a player ruining their own fun, but in Isaac it somehow gets a pass. And it gets worse depending on the speed stat that she mentioned, if it goes down the process becomes even slower.
That is not to say the game is bad, though. It’s surprisingly good for something initially made in Flash.
I don’t know what D6 is
A cubic/“normal” die with six sides. In Isaac it’s an item that, when activated, replaces the random items in a room with other random items. If the new items are good you pick them up, if they’re bad you reroll the D6, but to recharge it you need to complete other rooms. So you keep revisiting the same room, over and over.
Cops aren’t just bastards, they’re often dumb as bricks. No surprise they don’t know the difference between “content criticising Nazism” and “content praising Nazism”.
I never played DCSS. Does it have anything to cause monster infighting, like Nethack does with the ring of conflict? If yes, that would be probably your best bet: let them fight, and kill the survivor.
Either way this looks extremely nasty.
It’s corporate parasite for corporate parasites.
I like how you phrased it. And it explains well why Canonical is so detached from the userbase, or doesn’t care about fragmentation — it’s simply that its host target audience is other parasites also corporate.
Mir came about because the people behind Wayland were fucking around for years without making progress.
This implies the motivation was either one or another. It’s both: Canonical saw there was room to push for Mir, because the Wayland project was stagnant.
Now that Wayland has actually matured, Mir is a Wayland compositor.
They saw they lost the fight, and gave up.
Snaps predate (and do a whole lot more than) flatpak.
This does not contradict what I said: even if snaps are older Canonical is still pushing them as much as it can, because it can’t control the alternative other distros would rather use (flatpaks). Or the distribution of software using that package system.
1 out of 3 isn’t great. (implied: “two of your examples are invalid”)
Nah, 3 out of 3. False dichotomy and red herring aren’t enough to discard either example.
But for the sake of argument let us pretend this was a 0 out of 3 instead. The point would still stand, given those are solely examples highlighting Canonical’s modus operandi.
Speaking about the third example (Unity) you didn’t mention: the situation was rather similar to Wayland: Canonical was displeased with GNOME 2.X, likely predicted 3.0 was going to be a trainwreck (it was), and then did its own thing instead of contributing with another project it wouldn’t be able to control.
I think the general Linux userbase is so used to non-profit projects that it forgets Canonical is a corporation, and corporations always seek control.
“software-properties is an old gtk application essentially focused on deb/apt world. Many of its features are dangerous or too complex for normal users (removing main, enabling proposed, source without specifying what, …)”
First it was Mir, the alternative to X and Wayland. Then it was Unity (notice the name!), yet another desktop environment. Now it’s snaps, as an alternative to flatpak.
Are you noticing the pattern? It’s always Canonical trying to force some distro-agnostic tool into the Linux community, so other distros start depending on Canonical. Always doing this through unnecessary fragmentation.
To be clear, fragmentation is not always bad. Sometimes it enables people to appease different target demographics; specially in the context of Unity. However the way Canonical does this stinks “we want control!” from a distance.
With that in mind, look at the part I’ve emphasised. It shows the actual reason why Canonical is ditching software-properties from the defaults: because it wants to press further for snaps, in detriment of .deb packages.
What follows is basically an excuse. I don’t think it’s actually removing it because “it’s too dangerous” or whatnot. However, if anything “this is an excuse, not the real reason” only adds injury, because it shows 1) that Canonical sees no problem misleading the users on why it does something; and 2) the people working there are so detached, but so detached from the userbase that they don’t get why this would rub users the wrong way. (It’s basically a “you’re trash too stupid to not cause itself harm” dammit.)
Ah, by the way: Canonical was always some sort of Apple wannabe.
February 04, 2025
I wonder if they gave up, after seeing how poorly Copilot was received.
I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.
Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be
why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?
Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.
You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.
Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma
I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.
Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.
So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.
That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.
Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS
Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.
Given the current political landscape, I find way more likely that some random American province declares independence than a Canadian one.
This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.
*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.
Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.
Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.
Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)
In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.
So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.
I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)
She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.
“This is an LLM — Linux Libre Machine!”
Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it’s simply changing a default. That’s completely fine.
I just tested it in Wayland and couldn’t get it to work there.
But in X it works fine for almost every application. Exceptions are usually the same ones who throw hissy fits against dead keys, like games. For those, I typically type the text in a notepad, copy it, and paste it there.
Just in case you guys want to fight each other like kernel devs, and need some raccoon GIFs for that.
GIF is pronounced /ɣi:f/ by the way.