I have told this story several times.

In late 2013 or so, I bought a Raspberry Pi 1B as part of my amateur radio hobby. I did all my actual work on a Windows laptop, the Pi was pretty much just a toy, and I learned a little about Linux with it.

Mid-2014, the display in my aging laptop died. I was going back to school that fall, I needed a laptop. So I ordered a high end Inspiron from Dell. And Dell sold me a lemon. That laptop would just…shut off and never turn back on again. And then I’d call Dell’s tech support. They’d send a tech out within a week or two. He’d throw a part in it, and then it would last somewhere between days and seconds. After waiting over a week to get a tech to come out and fix it, it didn’t finish booting before it died again. I finally got them to replace the laptop outright, with a system that lacked many of the features I had explicitly ordered.

I am no longer a Dell customer.

That whole time, I needed a computer, and the only thing I had was that Raspberry Pi in addition to my Galaxy S4. It was real fun typing up homework in LibreOffice on a single core 700Mhz ARMv6 and 512MB of RAM.

I finally got a running Dell, after an entire semester, loaded with Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 was a total pube fire. Linux felt more familiar at that point, so I tried a few different systems, discovered Linux Mint, and 11 years later I don’t have any computers that run Windows.

many don’t deliver enough power for a Pi 4.

Well, I’ll put it to you this way: If I hire a graphic artist to design a logo for my company, and they turn in a .png they drew in Photoshop, GIMP or Krita, they’re fired. Because I’m going to have my logo on my website, printed on business cards, on key fobs, on the side of work trucks, and painted on the side of buildings. I need a four color variant, a black and white variant and an outline variant, and they all need to work when printed at any scale. Raster art can’t do that. “Hey, can you plasma cut my company logo out of stainless?” “Send over the file.” “…what the fuck is this?”

Hell just having it in .svg format rather than .ai format is gonna be a problem, because Adobe Illustrator is a proprietary industry standard. But I mean, the rest of society is dying, why shouldn’t graphic arts also have the disease?

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.

It is my understanding that Kriita is a raster art program, while Illustrator is a vector art program. Inkscape is a vector art program.

As far as I know those days have never arrived.

In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..

In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!

It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?

It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.

It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

Now, when that containership a few years ago wrecked and containers full of BMW motorcycles washed ashore…

One actual reason I can think of is they haven’t passed customs inspections. There’s a reason they ask you if you have any fruit or vegetables when crossing national borders, or even some state borders in the US: To prevent the spread of invasive pests. All there need to be is some Brazilian Screaming Mites on those bananas and no plants will ever grow on the island of Britain again.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

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.