• 19 posts
  • 58 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 17th, 2023

Biggest WTF news I’ve read today. I’m not a web dev so this doesn’t affect me, but this is bizarre.

We get a closer first look at what’s around the corner for AI coding tools, and make Bun better for it

This incredibly popular tool is now going to merge with an AI company and shift gears to be turned into some forced AI hype machine. Yipee! Exactly what all the devs were hoping for! /s

  • Why are people promoting this, all of a sudden?

    They just released a new version a few days ago that’s really solid and aims to be a drop-in replacement for Windows. It’s probably the most beginner friendly distro out there and has stuff like Onedrive/MS 365 integration for people using that stuff.

    The paid version is useless unless you need support.

  • and a bunch of “professional” apps.

    It is in fact a bunch of pre-installed free software. I like Zorin, but Zorin Pro just seems like a way to trick businesses into paying for the distro. I guess having access to a support team is nice, but otherwise it’s not worth it at all.

  • No idea what the other commenter is on about, I used Zorin ~2 years ago. It’s a great distro for people new to Linux, and IMO has the cleanest aesthetic of any distro I’ve used. It was also super stable and reliable.

    My issue with it (and ultimately the reason why I moved) is that it aims to be very stable which means its packages can get very outdated. I think the Nvidia drivers they used at the time I was on it were two years old. It’s not something most people would notice especially with how much Flatpak is used nowadays, but you’ll run into annoying cases where that thing you want to update isn’t available in that package manager.

    Even looking at the website, Zorin 18 is out but it seems people on Zorin 17 will have to wait a few weeks for a way to upgrade.

  • Very excited for Cosmic. I wanted to like Gnome but it’s a pain in the ass in so many ways, with weird design decisions that constantly ruin the experience. They tell you to use extensions to get basic features like a system tray, but then break extensions every update.

    KDE is in a fantastic spot but I’m ready for something new.

  • A standardized file format isn’t comparable to them changing software they own though. They can’t “take back” WEBP and it’s well-supported by basically everything these days. There’s zero risk of a rug pull, so why wouldn’t you use it when it’s objectively better at compression compared to something like jpeg and gif?

  • Okay, þ is not going to happen, just say th.

    Anyway, I did try V before Nim and found it way too unstable (which is corroborated by every other blog post talking about it). I also couldn’t get the language server to work no matter what I did, it just fails to start which isn’t a good first impression. This isn’t even mentioning all the drama behind the scenes for this language.

  • Go would probably be my 2nd choice. I haven’t used it much but my initial impression was that it felt kind of boring to write with, and a hello world would end up being a ~2mb binary which put me off a bit. I could give it another shot in the future, but I’m busy enjoying Nim so that probably won’t be any time soon.

I’ve been researching programming languages to find a good, high level language that compiles to a single binary that is preferably pretty small. After tons of research, I landed on Nim and used it to make a quick txt parser for a project I’m doing.

Nim seems absolutely fantastic. Despite being sold as a systems programming language, it feels like Python without any of its drawbacks (it’s fast, statically typed, etc.) - and the text parser I made is only a 50kb binary!

Has anyone here tried Nim? What’s your experience with it? Are there any hidden downsides aside from being kinda unpopular?


Bonus: I want to give a shoutout to how easy it is to open a text file and parse it line-by-line in this language. Look at how simple and elegant this syntax is:

import os

if paramCount() == 0:
  quit("No file given as argument", 1)

let filepath = paramStr(1)

if not fileExists(filepath):
  quit("File not found: " & filepath, 1)

for line in lines(filepath):
  echo line
  • Performance should be relatively the same across every distro, there are benchmarks online you can check. I didn’t like Bazzite with my short time using it though, being immutable means you have to jump through hoops to install something that isn’t available as a flatpak. Like I mentioned in another comment the battery life was also not great, and I found it to be a little slow in general.