I tried the bing chat (part of the work license), asked it some random questions, asked for more accurate information and pointed out the flawed answers it gave. It told me that I was being rude and ended the session. (smh)

This also implies that the average population has an astronomically higher capacity to read code than actually exists. The average Excel user can’t read most simple Excel methods.

I’ve been pondering something similar since I realized that Pop24 would be delayed. :) I want to see if a couple of minor items are fixed with 24.04, and can’t decide if waiting or reinstalling is more work.

So far no joy. The Linux channel and posts haven’t been able to crack this nut. New version of Pop OS coming soon based on Ubuntu 24.04, will try again after the update. :)

Some of my saltiness comes from the fact that I tried to answer questions a few times, but told I wasn't worthy enough to participate in the conversation, and so I was confused by the system. Also, I saw people answering with lots of points, but their answers were trash and I couldn't impact that response/point gathering, and just made me think it was just another gamified system, and engineers love to game a system. :)

This was my experience as well. They seemed to angle the system away from the casual user, which I didn’t have time to sit around and answer questions to get enough fake internet points to interact more.

Sorry, when I said "life critical", i mean things like email, banking, self-hosted NextCloud for files, etc. For me, everything else is flexible as I don't have business things that have to run on Windows (that is my work provided laptop), so I don't have to have the Adobe suite for photo editing, i can use one of several open source alternatives, and all of my hobbies have open source alternatives like Blender.

The only game I cannot get to run is Space Engineers. Numerous other newer and older games work great. To be fair, I'm not an online/multiplayer gamer, so the challenges people run in to due to anti-cheating requirements don't affect the games I play.

What was really interesting to me, is that I tried Windows 11 Pro and 6 or 7 different Linux distros over several months before landing on Pop!_OS. I mention this because it was all the exact same hardware and so I was able to compare performance in an Apples to Apples situation. There is an obvious application loading improvement. Even comparing against something like Garuda that is supposedly all about performance tweaks.

I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year and couldn’t be happier. All apps run way faster than they did with Windows on the same hardware. All but one of my Steam games run great (one day I’ll get that last game to work). My “life critical” things are web based, everything else is adjustable.

That is 100% up to every team to decide. Version numbering is completely arbitrary.

(Hyperbole) I’m shocked! I have been informed for decades, usually at high levels of snootiness, that Macs don’t have viruses unlike those pathetic other operating systems…

(hahaha)

Recently I was thinking about how I missed webrings for websites instead of reliance on search engines, many of which aren’t even directing you to the sites anymore just showing AI summaries.

No MFA, and stale passwords up to 4 years old. And they say “anyone can do IT”…

After the recent Google AI stuff, I’d expect an AI children’s book tool to teach children how to make mustard gas with cute cartoon characters. :P

Was anyone else expecting an article talking about the subject? I was reading and then, "Oh they've set up an interesting topic to discuss... wait, other articles to read, where is this article?"

Also, the internet access mechanism (starlink) is incidental to the subject matter, why mention it in the title?

Also, what @paultimate14 said, "youth not respecting tradition"...

I have been ping ponging for almost two decades on the desktop. Currently on Pop!_OS (Ubuntu derivative) with a “safety blanket” dual boot with Windows. I went through a lot of these stages many times. So far, ~3 months on this has been the least frustrating Linux desktop experience. I’m still missing some of the power management controls and cloud file integration is kind of a joke, but an interesting time. For the many things that work well, the performance is so much better than Windows and all the other Linux distros I’ve tried on this same hardware.

2D/3D Simulation/Game creation Godot :)

I switched to Pop!_OS about 3 months ago and have been loving it! First Linux distribution that just worked for me, and every app works better than any other Linux or Windows 11 on the same hardware.

How many times? Every single time…

Hadn't realized that change was in there. What a mess.

The only thing worse is New Outlook. They took away all of the power features and a good deal of the customization, and so you are left with something that feels like it was designed for a mobile app while you try to manage thousands of emails.

We had a large layoff a few months ago, including people with over a decade of time at the company, and a meeting afterwards where an exec said, "Yes you were working hard before, and now with many hundreds of people let go, we are asking you to work even harder." Not all rainbows and butterflies where I am, just that one piece about remote work. :)

Got a weird speech recently that we all need to work hard for the company to succeed, but raises and bonuses were dependent on the "economy and stock market" doing well, if "the economy" was going to continue to do poorly, then there was nothing management can do about skipping another year of raises, and we should just be glad we haven't had another RIF.

My current company stated that if you have a local office and want to go there fine, but otherwise do your job where it makes sense. Of course my boss is on one coast, the rest of my team is spread out in multiple states on the other coast, and I’m kind of in the middle of the country.

“You must go in to the office, so that you can get on calls with your team or other teams, which are in the other global offices.” (rolling eyes)

Good read, thanks for sharing.

I tried Garuda as well, and was not happy with the hoops I had to go through. I switched to Pop OS, and have had very smooth sailing so far.

some people might like that it helps them get targeted ads - after all, the tech has crunched all the data, and can advertise things to you that you might actually want.

Hahahahaha Next best thing to ad blocking, is generic ads that you don’t care about and can ignore more easily, and you know that the company is getting paid less for those ads showing.

I’ve been trying to switch back to Linux desktop for a couple of years. I’ve been very successful lately with “Pop! OS (nvidia)”, I think this one might finally stick.

Thanks, I'll look in to this and maybe dual boot and try it out. I tried with Arch/Garuda and liked the window manager experience, but ultimately ran in to problems.

but even as a relatively technical person, it was a massive pain sometimes.

I'm glad to hear this... I've been writing code and using Linux on servers since Red Hat (pre-fedora) had "Redneck" as a language option... But so often I get told, "Oh, you must be a technical newbie, because real techies can handle recompiling the kernel in order to get everything to work..." ( rolling eyes ) There is a world of difference between a headless server, and wanting to use an OS for your primary direct interaction. :)

• When I decided to get a new laptop, I failed to look for reviews of Linux driver compatibility while making my selection. That one is on me. I've run Linux on servers for so long, where I need network only and no graphics, sound, or even input usually (just remote in), that I forgot about the driver limitations.
• I'm also a developer. :)

Sound never worked right, occasional app worked, but not most things. CPU control was touchy, and this new laptop on full performance drowns out the TV on high volume, so I need fine control to manage the noise in order to stay where the family is and still use my system. :)

Blender was a problem until I learned you have to use "prime-run" (or something like that) to force the dedicated GPU, then that started working. Was trying to determine a system to make 3D environments (like Unity, Unreal, etc.), but didn't find anything great, and then found out that that a secondary interest of VR/VR development is poorly (or not at all) supported on Linux (something about the window manager not managing display access correctly). File syncing with services like Dropbox and Google Drive were problematic.

Then of course is gaming. I have a small handful of games I enjoy, and after a couple weeks I finally found a Steam setting using an older Proton version that worked well enough (but a lower overall performance compared to native Windows), with only occasional crashes for no reason.

For Steam/games, i was trying to run "windows" stuff, as the games were not native. For other things, like sound (never worked right), Blender (took me a few days to learn i had to run Blender through an app that forces GPU), or the file sync, they were supposed to be native. But I was doing a lot of fighting. I wasn't reading distro recommendation sites, I was trying to troubleshoot issues. "Here is how you fix this issue on Ubuntu, no instructions for any other flavor)." (but I installed a derivative of Arch because I was interested in the rolling release instead of fixed releases, and turns out there was significantly less troubleshooting material)

I might go back again, maybe with a dual boot scenario, and try again without

(my personal experience)

A couple of months ago, I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 11. I turned off the safe boot stuff, plugged in a Linux USB drive, wiped out Windows, and went to it.

The next 6 weeks or so, i spent about 75% of my time reading articles that included things like, "In order to get this non-Microsoft program/service/etc. to mostly work ('will still randomly crash, we don't know why'), you have to get Linux to pretend to be Windows, here is a lengthy process, different than how you made Linux pretend to be Windows for that other program." The other 25% of the time, I was reading articles about why I chose the "wrong" Linux flavor, and that was the cause of the rest of my problems. "We know you have this wide choice of Linux options, but if you don't pick this one variety of Linux (that has a fair amount of controversy), no one wants to support you, sorry." (this just sounds like Windows, with extra steps)

Some of these things to me were basic, like, running Windows I have a good amount of control over the CPU speed, which indirectly helps me manage how much noise the fan makes. The Linux options were "Do you want the worst CPU speed or best? That is all we can do." Or, i wanted to connect to a hosted file sync service, which it could only do through it's own graphical file manager, that not all installed applications supported, and that WAS NOT SUPPORTED ON THE COMMAND LINE. An app, built natively for Linux, didn't support the command line. (meaning, i couldn't open the command line and see the mounted remote source in the folder structure and correct file names, it was mounted there, but all the file names were IDs in one giant folder) My brain broke a little that day as someone that has dabbled with Linux for Server for 3 decades.

I feel like anyone that has tight enough app expectations where Linux/Windows doesn't really matter, is probably someone who would be well served by a Tablet and could stay entirely out of the whole conversation. I really wanted Linux as my primary OS, and I worked hard at it, but I have a family and 1-2 jobs, and just couldn't spend any more time fighting the OS to run basic apps/have basic control. Went back to Windows, installed WSL and a Linux on VM, and spend less time fighting to get non-MS things to work.

edit: For the people down voting, I would love to hear how my personal experience was wrong. I had what I considered basic needs that were not being met, and so I altered what I was doing until I could gain enough information to try again, rather than staring at an expensive doorstop. :)

I’m sure average Joe doesn’t even know what EOL means, or knows when it happens. :)

I never paid particular attention to national park sizes until seeing your comment. "Everything is large and far away" is just part of the mindset in the US. :) Looked them up, and Nigeria would only rank as #23 for total land area compared to the US national parks... Crazy.

I’m teetering on this edge currently. “Oh, I haven’t made GitHub contributions to my two open source projects in awhile, and I need to brush up my coding skills in case I cannot find another Director level job, and …” then I’m exhausted and dreading the next day’s meeting schedule.

[Solution] I disabled BitLocker within Windows, then installed MiniTool Partition Wizard Free 12.8. Using MiniTool, (now that the partition was showing as NTFS and not BitLocker), it allowed me to set a new smaller size, with a prompt to reboot (cannot modify the C: partition while in use).

The system rebooted and before Windows loaded, the partition app did it's thing. Windows then started normally with the smaller partition and no errors.

I’m disabled BitLocker, and then the free version of Minitool Partition was able to resize the partition as a reboot action. On to dual boot install!

Asking questions about the company, tools, processes, and other aspects is the right direction to find out if you want to work at a company.

If your only question is “when do/can I start?”, you have utterly failed the purpose of an interview. Also, before you have finished asking that “question “, it is likely the interviewer has already mentally thrown your resume in the trash.

I'm always curious about this particular feature/argument. From the aspect of "i can unit test easier because the interface is abstracted, so I can test with no database." Great. (though there would be a debate on time saved with tests versus live production efficiency lost on badly formed automatic SQL code)

For anything else, I have to wonder how often applications have actual back-end technologies change to that degree. "How many times in your career did you actually replace MSSQL with Oracle?" Because in 30 years of professional coding for me, it has been never. If you have that big of a change, you are probably changing the core language/version and OS being hosted on, so everything changes.