First: Find easier comprehensible input material. The whole point is to learn new words by guessing their meaning based on context. It aint gonna work if you don’t know enough words to even understand the context. So, content meant for natives will be quite far along your journey. Start first with comprehensible input content meant for learners. And if even that is too difficult, go back to studying the words and grammatical structures that your textbook tells you to.
Second: At least in my experience, there’s no easy way around doing a shitton of flashcard/sentence mining. Set aside time in your weekly (preferably daily) routine to just spam the fuck out of Anki / q*izlet / whatever other app you use and commit to it religiously. Practice makes perfect. Don’t slack off and tell yourself that you’re “not motivated”. Force yourself to study even if you don’t want to. Motivation is a finite resource, Discipline is renewable. Soon enough, you will find that it gets easier and easier to stay motivated. That is the essence of discipline. And, as a bonus, discipline is a universal skill: if you get better at motivating yourself in the context of learning a new language, you will also notice improvements in other areas of your life. Many people start learning a foreign language specifically to train their discipline.
Third: Only do n+1 sentence mining. That means, only make flash cards out of sentences that have only one word or construct that you don’t already know. And if most of the sentences you encounter have more than that, it’s a sign that you have to take a step back and learn the basic vocab sets that your textbook gives you before moving on to comprehensible input and sentence mining.
Fourth: As Stephen Covey said, take time to sharpen the saw. That means put some effort into researching different learning techniques that work for you. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time on ineffective strategies. The previous advice I gave may not apply to you specifically, so it’s best to do your own research.
LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there’s things like myst markdown.
Not trying to downplay your experience, but uni was actually so much better for me… being able to focus on things that actually coincide with my interests and abilities in Uni was so liberating after being forced to go through five classes a day five days a week, most of which were either insultingly idiotic or existentially difficult… Not to mention having an actually human-paced schedule with ample time to plan ahead instead of constantly being in damage reduction mode. I remember thinking to myself in the first year of uni: “Is this what normal life is supposed to feel like?” I’m still recovering from school emotionally, but the fact that I finally have the mental space to recover is definitely a good sign. I guess you and I just have way different schools, universities, and personal circumstances!
I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn’t figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I’m trying to get...
Hmmm I’m a bit hesitant about nixpkgs, since when I last tried using it (outside of nixos), many (modern) GUI apps were broken, at least on my distro, But I’ll give this a try if u/observanTrapezium’s suggestion doesn’t work. Thanks!
Wine tends to work better for Wndows programs that already have a Linux port, because they depend on fewer mcrosoft-specific libraries… which is not very helpful most of the time, but it is the subject matter of the meme.
The redpill is that there are none. You know how wndows search is absolute crap, but you can get actually decent search results with Powertoys Run? You know how instead of trolling through control pannel and Settings, you can just directly search for whatever configuration you need with god mode? You know how wndows has a package manager, but it is not even installed by default? Or how it supports hibernation (suspend-to-disk), but hides it from the power menu? Ask yourself, why add all of these useful features, and then hide them far away, while presenting the user with a painfully outdated interface bloated with crap like cpilot or crtana or whatever? The answer is that to remain relevant, Mcrosft needs to keep the computing experience painful for their users. If they make Wndows actually nice to use, people will swiftly realize that using your computer can actually be enjoyable. And that leads to trying out alternatives like BSD and Linux. And trying out alternatives leads to finding out that those alternatives are superior. Think about it. They’ve already lost in the server world. Once the remaining office workers and college students realize that mcrosft has been pissing in their mouths while telling them that it’s raining, the only userbase that will be left are “capital G” gming addicts. And that demographic is also slowly waning thanks to wine and the fact that modern vdeo gmes are slowly becoming utter trash.
False alarm! I’m on Void Linux too, gtk2 is alive and well! I was just being an idiot and searching for gtk2 while the real package is called gtk+2. I absolutely agree about gtk3 and gtk4. With gtk4 its like they didn’t even bother. Client-side window shadows?!? seriously???. I personally prefer CLI and TUI for my apps, but gtk2 would be my second pick if I ever need to develop a GUI app. Partly because if my app ever gets popular, it would piss off a lot of those updooter types. I would love to use something even more minimalist like nuklear but sadly that’s missing a lot of actually useful desktop integration like IME support (as far as I understand).
In the unix world, truly great programs tend to stay around for ever. less has been around since 1983. grep was there ten years earlier. Linux users love vim. What does the “v” stand for, you ask? “Visual”, of course, because it was one of the first text editors to offer support for computer monitors. And before that, when we had teletypes, people used ed, which still comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. Not to mention that the modern linux terminal is basically emulating (that’s why we called them terminal emulators) an electronic typewriter with some extra extensions for color and cursor support. They’re backwards compatible to this day. That’s why it says tty (teletype) when you press ctrl-alt-F2.
The caveat is that these examples are all low-level programs that have few dependencies. And they are extremely useful, therefore well-maintained. When it comes to more complex programs with a lot of dependencies, unless there is someone to keep it updated with the latest versions of those dependencies, it will eventually get broken.
The reason this happens less often in Wndows is because wndows historically hasn’t had a package manager, forcing devs to bundle all their dependencies into the executables. Another part of the reason is that mcrosft would lose a lot of business customers if they broke some obscure custom app with a new update, so they did their best to keep everything backwards compatible. Down to the point of forbidding you from creating a file named in order to keep support for programs written for qdos, an OS from before filesystems were invented.
isn’t there a way for Linux users to automatically install every missing dependency for a program?
Great question! There is. What you’re describing is a package manager. Overall, they are a great idea. It means devs can create smaller “dynamically linked” executables that rely on libraries installed by the package manager. The w*ndows equivalent of this is using DLL’s. Another advantage is that urgent security updates can be propagated much faster, since you don’t have to wait for each app that uses a vulnerable library to update it on their own. Also, dynamically linked executables can help save on ram usage. With statically linked executables, everyone brings their own versions of some library, all off them off by a few minor revisions (which all have to be loaded into ram separately), whereas a bunch of dynamically linked executables can all pointed to the same version (only needs to be loaded once), which is what package maintainers often do. Finally, package managers eradicate the need for apps to include their own auto-updaters, which benefits both developers and users.
This model goes wrong when software depends on an outdated library. Even if the package maintainers still provide support for that outdated version, often it’s difficult to install two wildly different versions of a library at the same time. And apart from libraries, there are other things that a program can depend on, such as executables and daemons (aka background processes aka services), old versions of which are often even more difficult to get running along with their modern counterparts.
So when you say that the “W*ndows way kind of looks superior here”, you are right about the specific edge case of running legacy apps. It just happens that the Linux crowd has historically decided that the other benefits of package managers outweigh this disadvantage.
There are tools for developers to bundle dependencies. Statically linked binaries, “portable” apps, AppImage, and so on… It’s just that package managers are so widespread (because of the aforementioned benefits), few developers bother with these. The general attitude is “if you want a statically linked executable, go compile it yourself”. And by the time it’s time to make an “archiveable” version of an app because it’s abandoned… nobody bothers, because it’s, well, abandoned.
However, as disk capacity and ram size steadily increase, people are starting to question whether the benefits of traditional package managers really outweigh the added maintenance cost. This, combined with the recent development of a linux kernel feature called “namespaces”, has spawned various new containerization tools. The ones I am familiar with are Docker (more suited for developer tools and web services), and Flatpak (more suitable for end-user desktop apps). I personally use both (flatpak as a user, and docker as both a user and a developer), and it makes my life a whole lot easier.
As for what makes it easier for users to get old apps working (which is what you’re asking), well… that’s sort of what we are discussing in this thread. Again, these tools aren’t very widespread, because there is rarely a practical reason for running legacy programs, other than archivism or nostalgia. More often than not, modern and maintained alternatives are available. And when their is a practical reason, it is often in the context of development tools, where the user is probably skilled enough to just Dockerize the legacy program themselves (I did this a couple times at a job I used to have).
Do you happen to know what (if any?) technical advantages appimage has over “portable” applications (i.e. when the app is distributed as a zipped directory containing the executable, libraries, and all other resources)"? As far as I understand, appimage creates an overlay filesystem that replaces/adds your system libraries with the libraries that the packaged app needs? But why would that be necessary if you can just put them in a folder along with the executable and override LD_LIBRARY_PATH?
I’m not even sure thinness was something consumers ever would have demanded
I am entirely convinced that most “features” on modern devices are not “something consumers would have demanded”. Sure, different lenses is nice if you’re a hobbyist photographer, but do most people really need more than a single back-facing camera? Do most people want to have wireless earbuds at the cost of not having a headphone jack? Do most people want glass backs and other such gimmicks that make their device more fragile? I’ve been told for decades that the modern economic system is great because competition forces manufacturers to prioritize what is best for the consumers. But in the context of smartphones, it feels like the roles are completely reversed. Manufacturers come up with some bullshit and then mount psy-ops (ad campaigns, online astroturfing) to convince the population that it’s worth their money
Recently switched from a certain predatory fruity phone to a phone from a certain Dutch manufacturer that has removable battery and replaceable parts. At some point, it got water damaged, and the charging circuit stopped working. While I’m waiting for the replacement part to arrive, I can continue using it by charging the battery with a bench power supply. Feels good man!
Context: Even though Chromium has native support for AVIF, a very nice image format, Microsoft goes out of their way to remove it from Edge, which is a chromium fork. Jpeg XL (JXL) (not to be confused with Jpeg (JPG) or Jpeg 2000 (jpg2k) ) is another nice image format, which, IIRC, is only supported in Firefox.
When it comes to pronunciations of obscure computer acronyms, my favourite is btrfs (the filesystem), because I’ve never seen anyone advocate for any specific pronunciation, not even the devs/official documentation. Bee Tree Eff Ess? Bee Tee Arr Eff Ess? Butter Eff Ess? Better Eff Ess? Whatever bloats your goat!
A surprising amount of people get their knickers in a twist over it, which is pretty funny tbh. I like to put it in a lot of my memes just to piss people off haha
Sentence mining so hard the OSMRE had to send an inspector into my Anki decks (lemmy.world)
Never again (lemmy.world)
Aint no way I'm giving some website my real phone number (lemmy.world)
Arch BTW (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
🎵that's life🎵 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
What do you guys do when you want to run unmaintained programs? (lemmy.world)
I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn’t figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I’m trying to get...
AMA (sh.itjust.works)
Why the hell did that stop (lemmy.world)
But hey, at least everyone supports webp now. (lemmy.world)
Context: Even though Chromium has native support for AVIF, a very nice image format, Microsoft goes out of their way to remove it from Edge, which is a chromium fork. Jpeg XL (JXL) (not to be confused with Jpeg (JPG) or Jpeg 2000 (jpg2k) ) is another nice image format, which, IIRC, is only supported in Firefox.
And why you gotta touch my back with those ice blocks 😩 (sopuli.xyz)