I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

And they’re all going to raise their hands in dispair when they get hacked, scammed, exploited, or sued.

I remember when Mandrake was a young distro – a redhat derivative – and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!

As far as I know, there are still rad hardened 486 chips being made for satellite applications. But my info may be a few years out of date.

The 486DX was the last cpu I truly understood (i did things like disassemble code for it). After the pentium instructions were added, I kind of stopped tracking changes to instruction sets. Now I’d be lucky to follow someone else’s assembly with the help of tools. It was a good time for me, back in the day.

tl;dw?

Probably someone’s pet project

I was about to date myself and say “there’s probably a dcop interface exposed”… But there’s probably a dbus interface exposed. You could write a script and plug it into a cron job or similar to tell it to adjust the background every hour or so. There are some nice dbus exploration tools available so you can discover the correct call to make.

If that doesn’t work, the hue is probably stored in a human readable file somewhere in your .config folder. You could probably have a script adjust the value in the file directly. Might take plasma a little while to notice, but it likely will.

Much sinusoid, very wave

I’m sorry you had a bad experience. I’ve used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I’ve found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.

The only actual pain point I’ve seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer … required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to “home”, you’re pretty golden.

Most of them have the app name in the config file. And the config files are largely human readable. Sort of self documenting.

Why not just back up the whole folder though?

MATLAB is basically a UI wrapper around Fortran’s BLAS and LAPACK – change my mind. ;)

print(eval(input(“Expression:”)))

Unsafe coding is best coding ;)

Insist they index from 1. Like God and Fortran intended it. ;)

Chicken and egg problem strikes again

I agree. And those decades of development come with huge advantages. Libraries. Patterns. Textbooks! Billions of lines of code you can cross reference and learn from!

It’s fun to bleed a little when you are tinkering. It’s not fun to have to reinvent the wheel because you choose a language that doesn’t have an existing ecosystem. That becomes and chicken-and-egg problem. The tinkerers fulfill this role (building out the ecosystem) and also tend to advocate for their tinkering language of choice. But there needs to be a real critical mass.

It takes decades to shift an entrenched ecosystem. Check in ten years if the following exist in languages other than C/C++: an enterprise grade database, a python(/etc.) interpreter that isn’t marked experimental, an OS kernel that is used somewhere real, an embedded manufacturer that ships the language as its first class citizen, a AAA game using it under the engine…

Like, in the last 15 years, I’m only aware of a single AAA game that used a memory safe language – Neverwinter Nights 2 used C# for part of the Electron Engine…

Rust is the most likely candidate here, although you see things like Erlang being used to make some databases (CouchDB). People see Rust being used on some real infrastructure projects that gain actual traction (polars comes to mind). Polars is an interesting use case though – it’s simply better than the other projects in its particular space and so people are switching to it not because it is written in rust at all… And honestly, that’s probably the only way this happens.

Certainly, if I had said that.

It’s like the Brits trying to convince everyone else to switch to their electrical socket. Sure, the design is better for higher voltage and current, has all these extra safety features, etc. But you cannot dramatically shift an entrenched ecosystem for free.

No.

C is going to be around and useful long after COBOL is collecting dust. Too many core things are built with C. The Linux kernel, the CPython interpreter, etc. Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.

Even Fortran has a huge installed base (compared to COBOL) and is still actively used for development. Sometimes the right tool for a job is an old tool, because it is so well refined for a specific task.

Forth anyone?

The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.

kate

I use Kate – part of the KDE project ecosystem (for anyone else wondering) – on all platforms, including Windows. So worth it.