jdnewmil

There are thousands of programs for Linux... but you should be warned that relatively few programs run natively on both Windows and Linux. In some cases there are ways to run "Windows programs" on Linux, but in general such successes are special cases. If you absolutely must have Windows you can run it in a virtual machine... but you will most likely be happiest with Linux if you aren't chasing after such things.

I use Windows for work because our IT department only supports that... but I use cygwin and wsl to get a smidgen of my familiar Linux tools that I use on my personal computers.

Yes, this was an appropriate response. I hate people who wave guns around like they are toys.

NPR sez Florida law would disallow him voting, but he wasn't convicted in Florida, so they defer to the law in the state where he was convicted. New York allows felons to vote up until they are imprisoned, which doesn't seem likely to happen before election day since he is appealing. Skin of teeth again.

Way too late for that. Every language I know makes some kind of auto conversion for numeric comparisons... and sometimes for strings as well.

I stopped buying phones from carriers 15 years ago for this very reason.

Using sudo when it isn't necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su.. Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files... and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental "sudo rm -rf /" command.

Seriously... sudo is not a "habit" to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.

Noob question?

You do seem confused though... Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system... the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and "break" as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro... but if you don't like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater... the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.

It is amazing how much you can learn when the only way to get OpenOffice working is to troubleshoot outdated C syntax errors in the output generated while compiling with clang. Time solves even the most abstruse problems, whether you planned for it or not.

jk

Nope. When you use sqrt to solve y=x^2 , you are expected to recognize that sqrt is only the inverse of the right branch of the parabola. Likewise, arcsin is only the inverse of the sine limited to +/-pi/2, so you have to use it intelligently as a tool, not blindly as a black box.

Well, the Butlerian Jihad was a big influence obviously, and later in the series they end up fighting some leftover AIs from that era. But yeah, a very different take on robots between the two

While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.

There was one place where a man was referred to as having a male spouse, but I just took it as "pay attention to the words and don't be lazy!"

But if they are determined to paint it red, then red it will appear.