[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

I've been using Mint for about 6 months now and it works with Nvidia just fine BUT the new user experience isn't great. You have to use the nomodeset kernel option and install Nvidia drivers, otherwise you'll boot to a black screen.

Helpful guide: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=421550

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I do quite like the stability of Cinnamon/Debian, and I think this problem is solvable (even if I have to solve it myself). I generally do not want to spend a lot of time futzing around with my desktop environment, but this is one thing I need to have.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Updated to be specific, I'm using Cinnamon. Muffin is the builtin tiling window manager for Cinnamon and it does exactly what you're describing. The problem is that it moves tiles, it doesn't absolutely position them. You have to keep moving tiles around to get them where you want them, Rectangle just has hotkeys to immediately place and resize to fit the active window for each quadrant that it supports:

  • ctrl+cmd+left: top left quadrant
  • ctrl+cmd+right: top left quadrant
  • shift+ctrl+cmd+left: bottom left quadrant
  • shift+ctrl+cmd+right: bottom left quadrant
  • alt+cmd+left: left half
  • alt+cmd+right: right half
  • alt+cmd+up: top half
  • alt+cmd+left: bottom half
  • alt+cmd+f: full screen

It's hard to express how natural that feels after using it for a bit, and I'm still using a Macbook for work so the muscle memory is not going away.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by thundermoose@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

To preface this, I've used Linux from the CLI for the better part of 15 years. I'm a software engineer and my personal projects are almost always something that runs in a Linux VM or a Docker container somewhere, but I've always used a Mac to work on personal and professional projects. I have a Windows desktop that I use exclusively for gaming and my personal Macbook is finally giving out after about 10 years, so I'm trying out Linux Mint with Cinnamon on my desktop.

So far, it works shockingly well and I absolutely love being able to reach for a real Linux shell anytime I want, with no weird quirks from MacOS or WSL. The fact that Steam works at all on a Linux environment is still a little magical to me.

There are a couple things I really miss from MacOS and Rectangle is one of them. I've spent a couple hours searching and trying out various solutions, but none of them do the specific thing Rectangle did for me. You input something like ctrl+cmd+right and Rectangle fits your current window to the top right quadrant of your screen.

Before I dive into the weeds and make my own Cinnamon Spice, I figured I should just ask: is there an app/extension that functions like Rectangle for Linux? Here's the things I can say do not work:

  • Muffin hotkeys: Muffin only supports moving tiles, not absolutely positioning them. You can kind of mimic Rectangle behavior, but only with multiple keystrokes to move the windows around on the grid.
  • gTile: This is a Cinnamon Spice that I'm pretty sure has the bones of what I want in it, but the UI is the opposite of what I want.
  • gSnap: Very similar to gTile, but for Gnome. The UI for it is actually quite a bit worse, IMO; you are expected to use a mouse to drag windows.
  • zentile: On top of this only working for XFCE, it doesn't actually let me position windows with a keystroke

To be super clear: Rectangle is explicitly not a tiling window manager. It lets you set hotkeys to move/resize windows, it does not reflow your entire screen to a grid. There are a dozen tiling tools/window manager out there I've found and I've begun to think the Linux community has a weird preoccupation with them. Like, they're cool and all, but all I want is to move the current window to specific areas of my screen with a single keystroke. I don't need every window squished into frame at once or some weird artsy layout.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago

Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I think AGI is a long way off. LLMs are a dead-end, IMO. They are easy to improve with the tech we have today and they can be very useful, so there's a ton of hype around them. They're also easy to build tools around, so everyone in tech is trying to get their piece of AI now.

However, LLMs are chat interfaces to searching a large dataset, and that's about it. Even the image generators are doing this, the dataset just happens to be visual. All of the results you get from a prompt are just queries into that data, even when you get a result that makes it seem intelligent. The model is finding a best-fit response based on billions of parameters, like a hyperdimensional regression analysis. In other words, it's pattern-matching.

A lot of people will say that's intelligence, but it's different; the LLM isn't capable of understanding anything new, it can only generate a response from something in its training set. More parameters, better training, and larger context windows just refine the search results, they don't make the LLM smarter.

AGI needs something new, we aren't going to get there with any of the approaches used today. RemindMe! 5 years to see if this aged like wine or milk.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Hyperfixating on producing performant code by using Rust (when you code in a very particular way) makes applications worse. Good API and system design are a lot easier when you aren't constantly having to think about memory allocations and reference counting. Rust puts that dead-center of the developer experience with pointers/ownership/Arcs/Mutexes/etc and for most webapps it just doesn't matter how memory is allocated. It's cognitive load for no reason.

The actual code running for the majority of webapps (including Lemmy) is not that complicated, you're just applying some business logic and doing CRUD operations with datastores. It's a lot more important to consider how your app interacts with your dependencies than how to get your business logic to be hyper-efficient. Your code is going to be waiting on network I/O and DB operations most of the time anyway.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I'm not faulting anyone for not thinking through a personal project, but I don't think Rust did Lemmy any favors. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how performant your code is if you make bad design and dependency choices. Rust makes it harder to see these bad choices because you have to spend so much time in the weeds.

To be clear, I'm not shitting on Rust. I've used it for a few projects and great for apps where processing performance is important. It's just not a good choice for most webapps, you'd be far better off in a higher-level language.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

I wouldn't shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn't to say that Rust's approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust's insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.

To be frank, this isn't necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it's second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you're working on an API-driven webapp, you really don't need Rust's efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.

I doubt it'll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

i ain't won jack alot from the squattery

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I think operating at 5V input might be a technical constraint for them. Compatibility revisions for existing hardware are a lot more difficult if the input voltage is 9x higher. Addressing that isn't as easy as slapping a buck converter on the board.

Not saying requiring 5A was the right call, just that I can see reasons for not using USB-PD.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 26 points 5 months ago

Why do you think ventilators made people worse? They only put people on ventilators when their O2 stats dropped so low they were going to die of oxygen deprivation.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago

I can hear René Auberjonois in that line

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

In reading this thread, I get the sense that some people don't (or can't) separate gameplay and story. Saying, "this is a great game" to me has nothing to do with the story; the way a game plays can exist entirely outside a story. The two can work together well and create a fantastic experience, but "game" seems like it ought to refer to the thing you do since, you know, you're playing it.

My personal favorite example of this is Outer Wilds. The thing you played was a platformer puzzle game and it was executed very well. The story drove the gameplay perfectly and was a fantastic mystery you solved as you played. As an experience, it was about perfect to me; the gameplay was fun and the story made everything you did meaningful.

I loved the story of TLoU and was thrilled when HBO adapted it. Honestly, it's hard to imagine anyone enjoying the thing TLoU had you do separately from the story it was telling. It was basically "walk here, press X" most of the time with some brief interludes of clunky shooting and quicktime events.

I get the gameplay making the story more immersive, but there's no reason the gameplay shouldn't be judged on its own merit separately from the story.

[-] thundermoose@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

This is an honest question, not a troll: what makes The Last of Us groundbreaking from a technical perspective? I played it and loved the story, but the gameplay was utterly boring to me. I got through the game entirely because I wanted to see the conclusion of the story and when the HBO show came out I was thrilled because it meant I wouldn't have to play a game I hated to see the story of TLoU 2.

It's been years, but my recollection is the game was entirely on rails, mostly walking and talking with infrequent bursts of quicktime events and clunky shooting. What was groundbreaking about it?

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thundermoose

joined 1 year ago