rollin with the homies

  • 3 Posts
  • 88 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 15th, 2024

help-circle



  • Yeah the Biden administration is going down as a terrible Presidency.

    No punishment for January 6th, escalated war, lost reproductive healthcare rights for women, no functional student loan action, resulted in a more focused Republican party and Project 2025. Genocide in the middle east.

    Now it’s scorched earth on the way out. “But he tried his best” get the fuck out of here.

    We would have been better off if Trump just finished his second term. It wouldn’t be any worse than right now except the Republican Party would be on their way OUT in January instead of coming back in with determination and a new focus and a chip on their shoulder.

    Cutting Trump off in 2021 and letting him come back four years later without punishment is the equivalent to letting a rabid dog out after you finally caught him. You think it’s going to be easy to stop him again?

    Fuck Joe Biden. And Merrick Garland is a traitor.






  • SiS 6326 with 8MB.

    It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.

    The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that’s just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.

    Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.










  • We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

    So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

    When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

    I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

    The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

    I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

    My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.


  • Not specifically waiting on right to repair, but older electronics have four things going for them:

    1. Very well documented: or you can just ignore the pieces that aren’t documented after so many years. This means they tend to work forever with Debian / Slackware / OpenBSD.
    2. Cheap / easy to find parts: the esoteric stuff falls by the wayside over time.
    3. More reliable: by virtue of the stuff that was going to die due to defects, dying in the first 18 months of use; and
    4. Generally easier to work on.

    So all of my laptops all cost well over $1000 new (EDIT: I’ve never purchased a laptop new in 25 years of using laptops exclusively). But wait a couple of years and suddenly they’re the price of a couple nice meals. Wait a bit longer and you can do a curbside pickup. And when something breaks, I can fix it myself with cheap replacement parts instead of waiting on warranty repairs. Also, going back to the documented thing – used MacBooks used to be great for Linux, but then the butterfly keyboard and T2 chip became a thing and I know to avoid them because that keyboard was never solved and ended up being replaced after multiple class-action lawsuits.

    Time works to our advantage in many ways.