No no.

• Manual tiling works far better for me than the automated control in i3/sway. This is because I use some established layouts, for example Emacs Window with Rust code in the right half, in the left either firefox with docs, or a shell running cargo test, or another shell running jiujiutsu commands, or refreshing test files, and so on. And I switch rapidly between these all the time.
• A tiling WM makes much better use of screen estate, especially on my 40 inch 4K screen, but also on the laptop.
• I do most of the time programming, writing or reading, and for this, it is ideal to switch views back and forth with a single keypress.
• I like to focus on one thing at a time, and this is required if I want to work in a nice flow state. For this, StumpWMs ability to switch workspaces fast is great.
• I found it is great to automate frequent actions with wm-generated input from the wm. Say I am in the browser and want to capture the current URL for a project-specific bookmark list. So, I make s function that goes to the address bar, selects all, copies to clipboard, selects or creates an emacsclient window, finds a file called bookmark.org, pastes the URL there and lets me add a description.

What could also work for me is the tiling style like in GNOME PaperWM or Niri. But I haven’t tried it extensively due to GNOME breaking on my last Debian stable upgrade and unwillingness to spend more time on it. And I am more than happy with StumpWM.

An inportant general fact is this: Things that you use all the time, do not necessarily have the same shape and UI as things that one uses once every three months. For the first, terminal interfaces with a lot of hotkeys might be suitable, for the latter, perhaps GUIs with menus.

I had, 17 years ago, a D-Link DNS 232 NAS with an Arm CPU. It ran a pirated (GPL violating) version of Linux. A lawsuit happened, and people published a free version which could install debian in a chroot. I ran an nginx webserver on it, and MoinMoin wiki. The wiki was a tad slow because the box had only 32 Megabyte of RAM (yes, Megabytes). But it worked nicely for years. Had to take it down when Python2 was not supported any more, since MoinMoin developers never managed to port it to Python 3.

Yes. Keep the old box for games on Windows only and try out stuff on Linux.

Be sure the laptop hardware is fully compatible. It is not worth thetime to work around crappy hardware. If it isn’t, buy a refurbished Thinkpad.

I use mainly StumpWM, a tiling window manager which uses concepts very similar to Emacs. For example, one can define key chords, bind keys to lisp functions, and auto-generate input for a program window.

If it isn’t available, I use i3, or occasionally GNOME.

I’ve found similar issues with NVidia cards.

A probable cause is bootloader/initrd issues since these need extra initrd support when booting, and a couple of things can go wrong in updates. You could try to chroot into the system and reinstall the kernel, initrd, and graphics driver.

Oh, and hibernate doesn’t work with dual-booting Linux distros (it does not leave file systems unmounted), and although grub was once designed to dual- and multiboot distros, dual-booting is problematic today… I think some (graphics?) driver stuff can get put into the EFI partition where grub updates can step on other distro’s feet.

I’ve been using linux for about 20 years and have never used a tiling WM. What are the benefits?

Depends a lot on what you are doing. For programming:

• much better use of screen real estate, more code fits on your display - you need to work less from memory
• the above is even more useful if your vision is not perfect.
• very fast switching between e.g. terminal and editor. This is very well suited for repetetive workflows like edit - compile - test - read documentation
• good for keyboard-centered mode of work, like writing code.
• good if you want several screens / workspaces for working on several somewhat separate tasks

For the record, I am using StumpWM, a manual tiling WM. If it isn’t available, I prefer i3wm (or sway) since it is standard. But I like the manual layout control more.

That’s not how it works. Kernel modules are part of the kernel and need to adhere to its license, which is GPLv2.

What are the best ways to support such projects? We absolutely need diversity of projects and infrastructure. It should be a big lesson that putting everything into one single repo site is Not A Good Idea.

The slicer is Open Source yes, but not the printer firmware or software.

The firmware is not unlikely to be linux-based. And hardware drivers for Linux are part of the kernel which is under GPL license.

The core point is: The printer runs FOSS software with a GPL license, but the company has modified it with the purpose to tie it to their own cloud service (like these HP inkjet printers for example).

See also:

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/

That’s misinformation,. Rob Pike, Co-Author of the first Unix, described in The Practice Of Programming, a book published in 1999, how they were fuzzing these tools.

I am using Unix/Linux for over thirty years now, and the older I get, the more I like it simple.

Debian with Arch in a VM, and Guix as extra package manager on top of both for programming projects. I use Debian for stable stuff and Arch for new stuff.

Stumpwm as manual tiling window manager, or i3wm, or Sway if the first is not available. Somtimes GNOME.

Emacs with language server (lsp-mode) for programming. Vim frequently at work for embedded tasks.

Gollum wiki or Zim wiki for knowledge management.

I am thinking since a while that AI tools, as useless as they are generally, could for once become helpful in checking freshly developed code. Even if the actual code is smart, most bugs are in reality pretty dumb.

By the way, in the medium term, generalizing this development from the kernel to general distro packages, this could be a good argument to prefer using a rolling-release distro like Arch, SuSE Tumbleweed, or Guix over “stable” Distros like Debian or Ubuntu.

Debian has real advantages (it has one of the fastest response times to security vulnerabilities), but rolling release distros do have the advantage not only that they in theory can update fast, but that the dependent packages only need to be compatible with the latest version to ensure stability.

You could think that this development puts open source projects at a disadvantage.

But this does not seem to be the case: AI tools can also be used to automatically disassemble and even decompile closed-source code machine code, leaving it open to the same kind of analysis.

❤

The terms on the right to use user data in section 4.1 are also a bit surprising. I’d expect that from a social network like Facebook, but not from a text editor.

Oh, and I suggest to search the Arch wiki for suggestions for Linux software that match what you want to do. The packages named there are usually available in other major distros, too!

That also happens to be good advice if you want to reduce addictions that are caused by “addictive by design” platforms and parasocial media.

In a nutshell, it is like controlling smoking: Not doing it at all is often easier and costs much less energy, than controlling the extend of usage.

One reason for this is that such a decision shifts your sub-conscious fous from "Should I do this on Linux or Windows??“ to: “How do I do this in Linux - or what might I enjoy doing instead?”