An Ask Lemmy topic recently was “what are some video games that don’t exist.” I gave three answers, but held one back because it does technically exist.

SQIJ! for the ZX Spectrum was designed to be terrible by a programmer that, as I understand it, was contractually obligated to program a game, but had grown to hate the company. He wrote a game that turned the caps lock on so none of the movement keys worked, and if you edit the code with a memory poke to turn caps lock off, you’ll find there’s no game. It was written in BASIC, and the first line is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever read:

1 goto 2

I am gonna try this.

Cinnamon is the second of five attempts to defuckulate Gnome that I’m aware of, and my personal favorite.

A big barrier to Linux adoption is lack of software, and immutable distros locking you out of the traditional package managers like APT or DNF or Pacman and limiting you to what is provided on Flatpak, I think might trip some folks.

I learned how to Linux on a Raspberry Pi. That is, in fact, what they’re for. I’ve got one (a Pi 2) that sits on my LAN with a hard drive attached as one part of my backup solution.

Possibly for this reason, Mint is a great choice for “keep my PC going so I can get to the google and the email and the facebook without having to buy another $1000 machine.” Mint is my go-to to keep a Pre-TPM computer on the road.

If you’ve got actual work to do, don’t.

I’ve got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it’s pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn’t have everything I need to do actual work.

If you want to do anything of any scale with Python, you need to understand OOP because that’s how modules work, but you can use it without.

Modern day Quickbooks has gone the way of Office 365 hasn’t it? It’s just their website?

That’s something that has me hesitating starting a business, is Linux business software. I’ve heard of Odoo, and it’s allegedly open source but kinda not…?

AFAIK the syntax seems to be the same.

def sayHam():
    print("Ham")

sayHam()

works when typed into the Python console, no class needed. I program as a hobby, I’m no expert on the language, but does Python even differentiate between functions and class methods internally? Other than just scope? There’s a possibility I’ll learn something today.

Python: def :

derpface.jpg

My experience with LibreOffice is it works fine if you’re doing straightforward things by yourself. MLA formatted essay? “Twelve point double-spaced Times New Roman or you get a zero” and they never noticed my papers were Liberation Sans? Sure that works. “Pick a partner and make a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation” is a nightmare because sharing files back and forth between Powerpoint and Impress doesn’t work very well.

The more usable solution to that is Google Docs. I had a group project with four other guys, and we were all sat around a table typing in the same document at the same time on three different operating systems. Played perfectly well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Us Linux nerds who hate “the cloud” because “someone else’s computer” and Google because “Don’t Be Evil” kind of lurch at that one, but it functions.

I’m especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it’ll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says “Format Drive.” There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it’ll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.

KDE’s USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it’ll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it’s got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.

Cinnamon’s USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a “full wipe”, and that’s about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon’s design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it’s from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu’s fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can’t memorize “for the formatter, type “USB” and hit enter, for the writer, type “USB” press down and enter.” They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.

Is there any part of Gnome that isn’t “minimal and not distracting?” In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says “Do Nothing” in the top bar.

I don’t know, I played with it years ago, didn’t need it and haven’t really touched it until now.

I use Syncthing for several things, especially syncing photos between my phone and desktop.

dammit I like Syncthing. does kdeconnect do a decent job at syncing files?

To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just “Fork it, then we’ll have our own Linux.”

I don’t think there are any negative connotations to the original Steam Machine. They weren’t successful, but in a way that was okay. They weren’t widely sold, and what most of the gaming public got out of the Steam Machine project was the Steam Controller, Big Picture Mode, and the Proton compatibility layer. Most Windows gamers didn’t notice, it was a major boon to Linux gamers, and then they came out with the Steam Deck which has been a genuine success.

closest we got is Peertube.

Mind you that’s only Bazzite, Zorin has been making large gains as well.