Out of curiosity - what laptop maker is installing Sway by default?

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

I think it really strongly depends on what you’re programming - I know in some instances Julia’s performance can be nearly identical to languages like Rust. I suspect in my case it related to Julia being a garbage collected language, as my algorithm involved creating very large dynamic structures in memory before serializing them, clearing the memory, and building another one. Since Rust has no garbage collector it knew exactly when and what to drop from memory. In my case I had roughly a 10x(!!) speed-up. Funny enough an even earlier version of that algorithm was programmed in Java, and Julia was roughly 10x faster that it, so Julia isn’t the worst of the pack.

So at my previous employer I developed using Julia a custom ML model which ran, but the performance just wasn’t good enough for what I needed despite trying to aggressively optimize. I ended up rewriting in Rust (and calling through R) which ended up being like 10x faster. At my current job I program a mixture of Rust and Python.

If Julia were more peformant then it could potentially be an alternative to Python/R users having to learn Rust - but if you’re looking for top performance, some of your codebase is already written in R/Python, and you’re already willing to learn another language, then learning something like Rust naturally seems the better choice over Julia.

The one thing I did like about Julia - it took barely anytime at all to build a working prototype.

Nobody else here has mentioned this but they stripped out all the web plugin support and tooling with no way to install it, even for paying customers. So if you’re working on some kind of web application (perhaps compiling Rust to webassembly, like me) RustRover won’t support your use case.

They also believe we (Arch users) are unaffected because this backdoor targeted Debian and Redhat type packaging specifically and also relied on a certain SSH configuration Arch doesn’t use. To be honest while it’s nice to know we’re unaffected, it’s not at all comforting that had the exploiter targeted Arch they would have succeeded. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about how much I love rolling release distros and now I’m feeling insecure about it.

More details here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/xz/-/issues/2

I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

Related question - how usable (in practical terms) are these cards for running AI models like Llama or Stable Diffusion? I know it’s technically possible but I don’t want to install a billion AUR packages and a custom kernel, etc.

Yes there will always be demand for coders, but will there be enough demand for the current (increasing) supply? Right now the global number of software developers is growing by about a million per year (total is only 28.7 million) - this means that (very roughly) to keep salaries stable we also need demand for new software to be growing by about 3.5% per year. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but a decade from now you’ll need 1.4 jobs for every job now to keep up with the supply.

In the past we had new dynamics to get end-users to spend more and more time using computers and hence software (desktop PCs, video games, internet, mobile phones, social media, etc.). At this point there’s so little time left in a consumer’s day that tech can grow into that I worry that any further advancements will have to cannibalize from another area; I.e. we’ve reached peak demand for software.

Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have ‘000123’ turn into ‘123’, now it keeps it as text.

I’m not sure what version got this, but there’s a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it’s amazing.

https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates

FYI I’ve had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.

I don’t think their Linux support is bad, but it’s not Linux first. If Windows users had to run a command to fix a display bug it would have been held back until it was fixed. With something like System76 you get a laptop with Linux preinstalled that just works, no commands necessary.

Keep in mind I called them Linux-conscious / Linux-second. They still focus on making it a fantastic machine for Linux users, but I think it’s a little less than some other shops provide for Linux.

Just want to add that Framework isn’t quite Linux first, more like Linux second / Linux conscious. With some tweaking it works great but there are sometimes little issues that crop up, especially if you’re using the newest machines.

For example, when I got my Intel 12th gen Framework last year, X was super laggy (opening a terminal and typing a few characters might take several seconds). You’d have to end up disabling some kernel power management setting. That was fixed in later kernel releases and was because it was new hardware, but their focus pre-release was making sure Windows worked well on it, not Linux. Technically even now there’s some kind of conflict between the ambient light sensor and the screen brightness keys and the fix has always been to disable the light sensor, so I’ve never actually used that feature on my laptop (unsure why Windows is unaffected).

It’s still a great laptop and I absolutely love them, but I think other shops like System76 should get credit for their top-tier Linux support.

They said they tested using the version of Windows preinstalled by HP, as (presumably) HP would have fine-tuned it for the machine.

It uses a newer HTML feature called popover which Firefox doesn’t support by default yet.

Both i3 and sway are very lightweight so you do get good performance, but it’s the easy tiling / no-nonsense looks that appeal to me.

I’d hold off then as I would expect you to need to iron out wrinkles with regards to collaborating with others in the MS universe.

I think you should take baby-steps and focus first on just getting something running for you to use. Maybe first experiment with configuring an application you’d like in a virtual machine before you spend money on hardware too.

Sorry, unfortunately I don’t use heroic.