Ubuntu is good, actually. It has basically the widest out of the box hardware and software support of any distribution, a decent default UI and an easy installer. Its downsides are that it has a reputation as baby’s first Linux so you don’t get any hipster cred and some people don’t like that it uses snap as a package format for some things, including Firefox.

I’m pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t trust the lifespan of spinning rust.

Can confirm. Source: am currently on vacation after yoloing a release on Friday.

Having been there and heard the real story about why it is the way it is, the Winchester house makes a lot of sense.

Same here. I can’t figure out why anyone uses based on what I read.

It only affects people who are cross compiling for 32-bit Windows from Linux. Considering that the last 32 bit only x86 CPU came out over 20 years ago, I bet you can count the number of people who will be affected by this on one hand.

Thanks, I hate it.

Only sorta related, but now I have an excuse to tell my anecdote…

One job ago I had a manager who decided that he would convert some of our helper scripts from bash to Python for reasons. I was new there and so didn’t realize what he was doing, or that he had started the process just as I was going through orientation. However, I ended up being the reviewer for the PR.

This was the worst Python I had ever seen but in such odd ways and it mostly worked. It almost felt like it was written by someone who knew bash really well but had never learned any other languages, or thought that bash was just so damn good that he wanted to turn every other language into it. For example, instead of using argparse he was manually looping through argv and parsing them one at a time. And instead of using a standard for each in foo loop, there were index variables and while loops. And certainly there were no comprehensions or any understanding of the basic built in data structures other than using lists as arrays.

So I did a review, assuming that this person was just really new to python and tried to gently coach him towards basic Pythonisms. His response was: “Oh yeah, I just ran them through ChatGPT and assumed it was all ok.”

I quit about two months later.

Array operations in FORTRAN are much easier for the compiler heavily optimize than it is in c/c++ due to its array model and type system. You can achieve much of the same thing with modern compiler extensions, but it’s difficult and not as portable.

I’ve had small Debian servers such as a RaspPi or a NUC that I’ve never updated after the initial setup and they were still working perfectly when I finally turned them off to move. If you don’t want to update a Linux system, don’t. Maybe setup auto security updates if it’s going to be exposed to the raw internet and running some open servers.

This is exactly it. The various *HDLs are explicitly written to create systems of logic gates.

I understood several of those words.

As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.

A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out https://mariushosting.com/

Thanks! I’ll see if I can find a windows machine and give it a try. I can’t pass it through to the windows VM I keep around, since it doesn’t show up as a USB device at all.

The bluetooth connection definitly works:

$ bluetoothctl info F4:6A:D7:9A:42:3A
Device F4:6A:D7:9A:42:3A (public)
	Name: Xbox Wireless Controller
	Alias: Xbox Wireless Controller
	Appearance: 0x03c4 (964)
	Icon: input-gaming
	Paired: yes
	Bonded: yes
	Trusted: yes
	Blocked: no
	Connected: yes
	LegacyPairing: no
	UUID: Vendor specific           (00000001-5f60-4c4f-9c83-a7953298d40d)
	UUID: Generic Access Profile    (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Device Information        (0000180a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Battery Service           (0000180f-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Human Interface Device    (00001812-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	Modalias: usb:v045Ep0B13d0501
	Battery Percentage: 0x64 (100)

I don’t have another device to plug the USB port into, but it can at least get power from it.

Ooh! Time to give it another look.

It’s alway weird to me that even though Ubuntu has the largest Linux desktop market share, no one admits to using it.

Anyway, I use Ubuntu because I was doing a lot of ROS development when I last built a machine, and getting ROS running properly on other distros can be a pain.

Looking back… that was right, hmm, 7 out of 8 times. The miss was a very chill place that gave out Dells, but I lost my job because the funding round didn’t come in.

I remember having a few of these for WordPerfect, MS Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.