VS code is a good app in spite of using electron, not because of it. There’s no reason a simple plaintext editor needs to allocate 300MB of ram even without extensions just to launch, and there is definitely no reason a plaintext editor should require compiling chromium to build from source.
Slack is fine, but only when you exclusively use slack. Throw in an actual browser, discord, VS Code, Whatsapp, teams (?), etc. each with their own chromium instance and now your 16GB of ram are being eaten up at idle.
VS code is an electron app, there are a few others that have a simple enough purpose that they shouldn’t be using a whole dedicated chrome engine to function.
Tell me you’re not a software developer without telling me you’re not a software developer.
If you’re working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn’t be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings
(italicized is edited in for clarity)
Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I’m pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)
I wouldn’t call necessarily call it “unproductive” though? He has been lobbying in cases and contributing to the right to repair movement for several years now. It’s not like he’s doing nothing, he’s doing everything that he has the power to do.
I choose to see this question as “If you could magically just make someone a billionaire, who deserves it,” or more specifically “who would actually do good things with the money if they had a billion dollars.”
As you said, the reason these people aren’t billionaires already is because they haven’t been exploiting others. That being said, there are likely a few people that would use the money to better support a lot of great causes, like the Free Software Foundation, medical research, or climate change action
Does distro breakdown matter that much though? It only really matters on windows because each version has significant compatibility changes. AFAIK as long as you update your system Linux compatibility with tools like wine/proton shouldn’t change much between distros.
Something I noticed was that in this case it was mostly binary AUR programs taking up the space.
I think maybe since yay/AUR use cloned git repos, and old versions of binaries get stored in the git diff and then add up because different versions of the binary are basically like keeping multiple copies of it instead of just the changes to the source code.
I use thunar (with ePapirus-Dark icons which is probably what makes it look like nautilus), I liked nautilus when I used it but thunar has a bit more functionality that I like
Something I noticed was that it was mostly the binary packages that were taking up so much space, it may be because of how yay stores the programs (does it use git?), the ones that were compiled from source code usually took up the least amount of space, while the binary programs were the ones taking up tens of gigabytes
IMO I’d say the same thing about windows’s “Temp” folder though.
I agree that a lot of Linux isn’t user friendly but I’m also on a distro that is specifically supposed to be customized from the ground up (arch-based) using a tiling window manager which also involves configuring most things from the ground up. This isn’t a problem that most Linux users will likely have, but it is a problem that people may have if they are power users trying to have full control over their system (people who will be on a community about Linux). From what others in this thread have been saying, non-arch distros (and even arch with other aur helpers than yay) tend to have much smaller caches that get up to around 10Gb at most, which is also similar in size to what Windows’s temp directory uses.
This is a Linux community on a FOSS platform. This community is inherently going to be filled with more “geeky” people. Isn’t this what we signed up for? You make it seem like Linux was ever attracting people who weren’t these type of people to begin with. Computer science is still a growing field, and most sane computer science curriculums involve using POSIX terminal commands and by extension linux at some point. I’m a zoomer and can confirm, we’re not all as hopeless as you think we are. Linux will be fine even ignoring all of its corporate and government backing. And for people who don’t even know what a file is, they probably won’t know what Linux is in the first place. Even if they somehow have a system preconfigured with linux, their Ubuntu or Linux Mint install will probably be clearing the cache for them.