Tom’s Root Boot.

One floppy disk, one Linux machine!

It’s never claimed to be a democracy. It’s not a monolith, either. Some projects have forms of input and/or voting, most don’t because it’s just a few people writing software that they want to write.

Get over yourself if you think that people working for free should be required to listen to you. Just as in anything else, pay them if you want a guaranteed response.

Otherwise, recognize that the key element of Open Source is that you have the source code. If a project isn’t doing what you want then fork it and build it yourself. That’s the whole point of this community and philosophy.

Discord does provide a .deb, but I’ve never found a repo that carries updated versions. I’ve found plenty of hacks that download the latest one and install it every night, but for whatever reason, it’s not kept in the various Debian repos out there.

The kids mostly use Mint with one Ubuntu machine (driver issues that worked on Ubuntu, but not Mint).

I’ve only barely used steam myself (no time for games: see having many kids), but I know the kids often do have to do various tweaks for games at times. I let them have full sudo on their own machines with a scorched earth policy if something goes wrong. Mostly, it seems to work and they don’t bug me much.

Thank you. I’m very proud of all of my kids (even the Windows user).

I haven’t put anyone on the Arch path yet. So far, apt, video drivers, and Steam have been giving the crew enough trouble.

If nothing else, just keeping Discord patched is getting them lots of experience with sudo and dpkg tools. Why doesn’t Discord have a repo?

The crazy moment was when one kid was about 10 years old and he busted open the terminal without promoting to get something done. He already knew it was faster and more powerful so he just started learning the tools.

I danced a little jig in my head once I realized what had just happened.

That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.

I’m a die hard Linux user. I don’t spend much time telling people about it outside of actual tech conversations that should include the topic. I did raise my kids with a lot of Linux desktop use on their machines. They uniformly find the Windows 10/11 experience to be horrible, so I guess I’ve managed success on that front.

Mint is my go to Linux desktop distribution. There’s plenty of solid choices, but it’s served me well ever since Crunchbag Linux closed up shop.

It’s wonderful how included and valued nerdiness is these days. Being interested in anything non mainstream in the conformist 80’s was hell outside of a tight friend group.

I used WSL for a job and it worked fine. It’s kind of a weird VM that doesn’t really integrate with the host OS fully, but it works for many use cases.

Git BASH has more direct system integration and hardware access than WSL, though it’s been a couple of years since I had to look at WSL at all. Hopefully they’ve improved the integration over time.

What?!?

I looked it up and you can. I’ll have that fired up with their docker image in no time. Thank you for the pointer.

If I’m stuck on a windows machine, one of the first packages I try to install is git-scm.org’s BASH.

It’s not actually Linux, but it’s got a command line and enough programs to really help get work done.

It’s strange how that happens when a government starts to consider other options.

Mint is my go to desktop option. It usually does the job.

I don’t usually worry about older packages. Most things run fine. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to make my UI pretty. For me, the GUI is a place for terminals, web browsers, my IDE, and general tools, not some kind of whiz bang thing to tweak all the time.

Debian: good enough and stable. No worries > new features.

Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There’s plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.

Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.

I dunno. Maybe an orange dog? Give it big brown ears.

One of the interesting aspects of humanity is how much people like given text editing methods. There’s a handful of approaches and after learning one or two, people really figure out what works for them.

I am more than happy to say I like vim, but in the end you should use what you like best. Just done be surprised when I can write and edit a ton of text really fast while your nano session is comfortable, but slow.

If an IDE doesn’t have vi key bindings it isn’t going to be used by me. That’s what finally get me to change from terminal only dev to vscode. Until I found the vi editing extension the IDE wasn’t of interest.

Yes, vi is just that good.

I hear emacs bindings are also great, but I just know how to save and exit from emacs.

Such great Exploits of a Mom: https://xkcd.com/327/

Based on the various other descriptions of the DBUS features, I kept thinking “this sounds like a message passing model with a bit of CORBA hiding in there”. It’s got a bit of SLP and AMQP/MQTT to it, just on a local machine instead of a distributed network. It’s solving a lot of problems with service discovery, message passing structure, and separating transmission layer details from service API design. Raw sockets/pipes can always be used to pass data (it’s how DBUS does it!), but there’s additional problems of where to send the data and how to ensure data formatting that sockets/pipes do not have the capability of solving by design since they’re simple and foundational to how interprocess communication works in the kernel.