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danielquinn

@danielquinn@lemmy.ca

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

danielquinn,
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Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.

danielquinn,
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I quite like Thunderbird for this.

danielquinn,
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Isn’t most of what’s in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

danielquinn,
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It’s an interesting idea, but the differences between copyright and contract law present quite a hurdle.

Either you release something publicly, licensing it under certain conditions (you can use it this way, but not that), or you cut a contract with a 3rd party for them to use it a certain way – something that only makes sense in a context where the wider public doesn’t already have those rights, otherwise a contract would be unnecessary.

You see it in some Free software projects: they’re licensed under something aggressive like the AGPL, but for a few you can buy a proprietary license. This of course limits community participation though, as to contribute, you must agree to these terms. I think React does something like this, forcing you to sign a contract to submit a patch.

He points out a number of problems that I’d like to see solved, so I’d love to hear his ideas, so long as they’re similar in spirit to the goals of the FSF.

danielquinn,
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What exactly is the appeal of Docker Desktop on Linux? I can run docker just fine without it, so what’s it doing for me?

danielquinn,
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Oops, sorry I didn’t notice that part. I’ve never seen anything like that to be honest. It kinda violates the whole “do only one thing and do it well” UNIX ethos. As a decent work-around, you can just open the resulting images in Gimp?

danielquinn, (edited )
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GNOME has one built in. Just hit the “print screen” button and it should appear.

danielquinn,
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Wait, when is Windows 10 hitting end of life? If Windows 11 doesn’t support devices without aTPM, that’s a huge swath of insecure machines.

danielquinn,
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The easiest way to confirm this would be:

  1. Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
  2. List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don’t-want PDF.
  3. “Print” the new PDF from the old one
  4. List the metadata from the new PDF.
danielquinn,
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DNS is hierarchical majesty.

danielquinn,
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I always wondered about this. I have the same TV series as local MP4 files: one with English audio, and another with Greek. I thought I could just extract the audio tracks and use them to build an MKV file with multiple audio, but it always ended up with an audio sync error. One track would always be in sync at the beginning, but 20min in could be out of sync by as much as 5seconds.

How do people build multi-audio files if the audio tracks aren’t part of the original source?

danielquinn,
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Yeah that’s what I figured, but I have no idea how to adjust the frame rate when extracting the audio stream :-(

danielquinn,
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I’ll give that a try, thanks!

danielquinn, (edited )
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I’ve never heard of sub volumes. What do they do for me? Why not just partition the disk or store everything on the one partition?

danielquinn,
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It’s a powerful video player in Linuxland.

danielquinn,
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Great, do whatever you want. Just shut the fuck up about it, nobody cares.

You should really take your own advice on this one. That “article” was juvenile.

danielquinn, (edited )
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JetBrains ran aground of this years ago when they introduced a subscription model for their (excellent) software. People (rightly) lost their fricking minds when they heard that if they cancelled their subscription, they’d lose the ability to continue using the software they’d already paid for.

So JetBrains went back and reworked their system so that a cancelled subscription would continue to have the rights to install all the software that existed up to the day of cancellation. Effectively meaning that if v3 came out the day before you cancelled, you can still install and use v3 10 years later.

danielquinn,
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Yeah that was basically the sentiment of the developer community when JetBrains announced the change. Thankfully they heeded the screaming and fixed their model. I’ve been using JetBrains tools for around 10 years now and they continue to impress. I can’t recommend them enough.

danielquinn,
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Oh! Good to know. I guess that’s there to prevent people from reaping 2 years worth of development for a 1 year fee. That still seems reasonable to me.

danielquinn,
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Just fixing the link.

danielquinn,
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I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.

danielquinn,
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I never understand the whole thing around “fast” terminals. How can a terminal be “slow”? Surely the terminal you’re using has no effect on the programs you’re calling, so what’s being measured here?

danielquinn,
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It’s fine if all you need/want is a Linuxy shell to work with, but if you actually want a proper Linux computer, with a DE that doesn’t suck, mapable keyboard shortcuts, no spyware, working workspaces, tools that do what you want rather than what Microsoft wants for you, etc., you’re going to be miserable.

danielquinn,
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I still have every email I’ve ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn’t terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.

I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don’t need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn’t on the Open web or anything and doesn’t support SMTP. It’s just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.

I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.

Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I’ll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the /2023 folder on the archive.

Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.

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