slembcke

I use Lua for this sort of thing. Not my favorite language, but it works well for it. Easy to build for any system in the last 20-30 years, and probably the next 20 too. The executable is small so you can just redistribute it or stick it in version control.

Doesn't Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I've always avoided it as I've had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn't feasible for everyone.

Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It's brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)

Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn't work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work... Then not even close O_o)

I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\

Speaking personally. I had the same reaction. I realized I could sign in using my GitHub account for MCC, which was... weird. Since it was just their normal web/auth page you could click around and do it in that tiny little webview. -_- Ridiculous, but I wasn't going to make a new account to play a single player game. I did nearly refund it out of spite, but didn't.

I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a "real time" kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn't trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn't and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez... I don't want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That's not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

Eh, guessing from a distance or playing favorites won't be better though. Like I might get grumpy about a C-level guy or investor getting more than their "fair share", but marketing for example is still an important job done by people that aren't paid gobs of money. Without the ability to let the people that would buy it know about your product, it effectively doesn't exist. We all love the story about a game that came out of nowhere, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I've used with Fedora, but it's an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple's locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish... I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.

Looking forward to giving VRR a shot again. Last time I tried a couple years ago was pretty underwhelming on a couple different machines. Some games worked well with it, but a lot of software felt subtly broken. A lot of weird micro-stuttering and stuff just not feeling smooth even when the average framerate was high compared to boring synced 144 hz.

I guess by real world usage I mean what proportion of code is being made with them. You should be skeptical of their accuracy, but there are measures for that. Like there is this one: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, but it describes it's methodology as being about popularity based on articles, news, and other such things. Github publishes a very different chart as does RedMonk. Rust barely shows up on these charts, but Rust fans are very enthusiastic in threads like this. I like Rust well enough, but I also find the over-enthusiasm amusing.

By practical/pragmatic I mean the ability to target a lot of hardware with C. Sometimes the tooling is crap, but it's very universal. Being built on LLVM Rust can go onto plenty of hardware too, but it's probably not the tooling given to you by a platform vendor. It's also been around for a long time, so using Rust would mean a rewrite. Sometimes C is simply the choice. As for ideologically: Rust solves some pretty nasty programming issues, but sometimes I think it's fans over-estimate the percentage of real world problems it actually solves while ignoring that Rust can be more expensive to write. (shrug) Sometimes there's no such thing as a silver bullet.

I enjoy the selection bias in the comments for these sorts of posts. >_< There's a few people saying "I kinda like C", a few saying "use Python instead", and a whole lot saying "Rust is my lord and savior". Completely disjoint from the real world usage of the languages for whatever practical, pragmatic, or ideological measures they are used for.

Well... they don't like the design of a "system tray". To be fair, it's a very Windows centric idea, and the notion that they must provide one because Windows has one seems... similarly questionable to me too. Speaking personally I hate the idea, and always have. It's a real dumpster fire because:

• Lots of drivers (on Windows) assume you don't know how to launch programs, and force a permanent launch shortcut on you.
• Programs assume you don't understand how to minimize or hide a window, and put themselves in the tray instead. (launchers, chat programs, etc)
• Some programs seem to use them just to put their logo on the screen. You can't really do anything with the tray icon.
• Few icons match stylistically, and even on Windows, they don't match the system style. (White icons on a white taskbar? FFS)
• Programs often don't provide an option to disable their tray icons, and it's rare that I want them.

I guess I found the lack of them to be a breath of fresh air when I first tried Gnome 3 a few years ago. The current iteration doesn't quite work though... 99% of the time I just want an option to kill the damn things, but I've have had some programs that only provide functions through the system tray. It's dumb, and I hate it, but it is what it is.