Tumbleweed is a very good distro. I hope it survives the upcoming wave of BS. It probably will.

Yeah but how many normal-sized screens do you want it displayed on? Everyone has one these days. That soon adds up.

I agree they’re overkill. I’d use something like Joplin for note taking and to-do lists, which stores its data in SQLite anyway.

If you want something a bit more powerful than SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL both support CLI interactions and scripting too.

Google takeout is there so they are technically compliant with rules that say you must be able to download your personal data, but they make it so inconvenient to use that practically it’s almost impossible to download it. Google photos isn’t a backup service so much as a way for Google to hold your photos hostage until you start paying for higher amounts of storage. And by the time you need that storage, Google takeout download has become impractical.

Laptop 2 only supports USB2 according to this page.

Yep. By the time I get to actually writing the code, I feel relieved because by then I have a pretty clear idea of how I’m going to do it, and I can work quickly. It’s the hours of figuring that out that are difficult, and the boss demanding constant progress reports when I’m still figuring it out and have nothing to show but a bunch of notes and TODOs. I find that writing my thinking notes in the form of documentation for the product can help appease management.

To get a career in IT.

It’s a quote from the article, not a statement by SUSE.

Interesting question. I’d be comfortable up to level 2 in this list, after which I want to have my eyes on the changes. Even where code is functionally or semantically equivalent, style can make a lot of difference for comprehension and maintainability.

JesOS

That must be annoying just after OpenSUSE went through a branding redesign process. I guess they’ll have to give up the gecko logo since SUSE also uses it?

And there’s more at stake than a rebranding it seems. This could signal SUSE withdrawing development support from OpenSUSE:

Let’s face it: SUSE has been more than just a namesake for openSUSE; it has actively provided resources and support far beyond what it would ordinarily need for its business operations.

This generosity has fostered a thriving openSUSE project that has excelled under SUSE’s goodwill and informal support, including contributions made by SUSE employees on company time.

However, the recent request for a branding separation has overshadowed this partnership. If openSUSE does not handle this request with the sensitivity and cooperation it demands, the project risks not just a reduction in support from SUSE but a potential shift in priorities away from it.

The “Factory first” policy, a cornerstone of the engineering synergy between SUSE and openSUSE, could also be scrutinized, emphasizing the gravity of the current situation.

Everything runs as root.

Yikes.

Is btrfs RAID stable yet? This article is three years old, so maybe things have improved, but it contains some pretty strong warnings about the dangers of btrfs RAID:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/

To summarize, the article argues that btrfs is great for single-disk usage but its RAID implementations are idiosyncratic and unreliable.

(I use btrfs daily on several single-disk computers and it has been great, but I have never tried its RAID.)

My kids have been surprisingly interested when I show them Commodore 64 or BBC Micro BASIC. I was expecting them to groan but they wanted to write their own programs on them. They’re also more interested when it’s a physical machine than an emulator.

The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.

Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.

Am I likely to be annoyed about where the fiber comes into the house?

That one depends on the company installing it. When I got it installed they asked me exactly where I wanted the fiber to terminate and ran it through the house to an outlet under my desk. So let them know and they might put it where you need it.

As for the router, I recommend buying a mini PC with at least 2 Ethernet ports and 4GB of RAM and running OPNsense. It’s great and will give you all the control you need. Or you can repurpose any old PC you have lying around and just add some Ethernet ports on a PCIE card.

I’ve pulled Linux boot drives out of one machine to stick them in a very different machine (e.g. from a 6th gen Intel i7 with an AMD GPU to an AMD 5950X with an NVIDIA GPU) and they almost always just work or require only minor tweaks. Chances are it will be fine.

Linux: Libre Office

Windows: MS Office

Libre Office is also available on Windows.

“Free software” doesn’t mean you don’t pay for it, but that it respects and preserves the user’s freedom. The opposite is not “cost software” but unfree software.

What is free software?

Most of the other points in this list are also questionable or inaccurate. In fact, I think the only true one is the first one: open source vs closed source.