My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.

This is an exceptional write up, thanks!

I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?

I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.

Feature flags baby. This is how we do it.

Make it live but disabled, have an env prior to prod with them on, for any regressions.

Launching your already comprehensively tested and actually live feature? An easy deployment.

Can someone please tell me how to do this for the BE. Ta.

You can?!

I’m trying this. Thanks.

Bastard Operator From Hell

I refer to our sysadmin as a BOFH and he doesn’t seem to mind. The younger devs don’t know the term without googling it.

The sysadmin column feels so right.

He currently really likes locally copying people’s games from Scratch and modifying them in funny ways which he calls ‘hacking’ lol. He’s having fun so I’m happy for him to do what he likes so long as it’s age appropriate.

Your Mac has “recovery mode” in the firmware, it will often boot into recovery automatically if there’s something wrong with your boot disk

Oh really? Agh I just assumed incorrectly then. Thanks.

Thanks for the ‘more realistic’ intro to dev. I will be showing him CLI. And I think these are good steps. First though I want to give him the opportunity to learn the ‘thinking/design/problem-solving’ element of programming.

Great suggestions. I’m tempted to get a Chat GPT sub myself.

Hah yes we try and ‘balance’ it all. He’s a voracious reader, loves his rugby and we try and get out of the house as much as possible when it’s not continuously raining, thanks Britain.

Amazing thanks so much. Yes, structured ‘play’ might be just what he’s after. He can then tinker in an IDE - I did wonder if anyone had built one for kids specifically.

I can teach him a bit of CLI / Shell and I’m ok if he bricks the computer, hence the choice of OS. Super easy for me to nuke and start again.

I’ll be checking these out.

Mint Cinnamon was very straightforward for (a not very technical) me on a 2016 MacBook Air v7! Dual boot was a tiny bit trickier, but it’s given an old machine a new lease of life. Highly recommend.

Think about it. If you’d given so much of yourself over to crafting and honing an app like Apollo over the years and all that happened, happened… would you not be a tad deflated and exasperated?

I don’t blame him. Let him cool off for about 5 years. He’ll see it as a tribute one day.

Ditto. No issues with Lemmy here. I mean, there were a couple of annoying communities (to me anyway) but it was easy to block them.

Generally I’ve not noticed any toxic behaviour otherwise. At all.

In fact I was somewhat taken aback at the quality of responses to my last post. It’s going to take me days to research all the options and advice I was given. And from what I could see, most if not all the comments were informative and interesting.

The signal to noise ratio here is excellent, even if the numbers of comments etc are lower.

So did I. Pub near the Cenotaph in London by any chance?

I got a reply!

Hey people of the internet. So if I’m going to not lurk, and if I have a really weird sense of humour and am downright unfunny to most of my friends, where is my community here?