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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • My last laptop was an HP Stream. Crappy laptop, but it had a touchscreen. It worked fine whenever I remembered that it had a touch screen. I didn’t have to set anything up, it was just automagicly setup for me on Ubuntu. Couldn’t tell you how responsive it was and that laptop would have been a poor benchmark anyways, but if I touched a button or scrolled the screen, it would do the thing.

    Sorry, I’m old. Prefer a physical keyboard to a screen keyboard any day.





  • Canonical? the US could try but Canonical isn’t a US company so far as I know. The attempt would probably just piss off their “home” nation. That would be the UK, I think.

    Red Hat is another story though. It’s owned by IBM which is a US company, which means it is, in theory, obliged to obey any lawful order of the US government. I say “in theory” because there is a long history of companies here saying “Yes sir, Yes sir, Three bags full sir.” and then doing whatever they want when no one is looking anymore. For examples see Facebook, Google, OpenAI, Exxon IBM, Coke, Ford and… Well just about every company that has been around for more than 20 years and most small businesses to boot.

    Practically speaking, though. These companies are based around open source projects whose source code has been widely distributed. If you need to, (or hell, even if you just want to) fork them, rename the project to avoid trademarks, and move on. Whether you flip Uncle Sam the bird as you do so, your call.




  • Normally I’d say Intel, but given the issues Intel has had with the last couple generations of processors, go AMD if you are looking for new hardware. If you don’t mind used, I’d go with an Intel based Toughbook or Dell Latitude. Both laptops are well supported by the Linux Kernel. Avoid Intel 13th Gen and newer.

    The main reason I like Intel is that, until recently, their naming conventions made more sense. Intel may be slightly more optimized AMD but it’s not going to be enough to notice, especially once you’re dealing with the more high end AMD procs like Threadripper. That said I haven’t used AMD processors since Athlons were king, 20+ years ago now.



  • That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal’s ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.


  • I’m tracking now.

    The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn’t like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.

    I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn’t have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.






  • I agree with @qocu@hexbear.net . It sounds like you are trying to replicate your workflow. Windows and Linux come from different mentalities. There won’t always be a drop in replacement.

    I’m short on time but perhaps I can help with your point 9 though.

    Each distro’s repos are built by the people that use that particular distro. Somebody needed a particular piece of software, found it wasn’t in the repository and decided to package it and perhaps maintain it for the repo. Sometimes this is the original developer, sometimes not.

    All software is built from source code. If the source code is available for Linux, you can compile it yourself. Instructions for how to do so are usually provided by the developer along with the source code, nowadays usually found at their git repository.

    Of course, you don’t have to compile all your own software (it can be a headache, which is why someone came up with precompiled packages), but it is an option if the software in question is not available in your distribution’s repo.

    Your number 1 point: I like Kate, vscode and micro as text editors. They are fairly simple.


  • They didn’t care. You know non tech folk, they don’t care so long as it works. If you’re lucky, they know enough to hit the button with the power symbol to turn it on, but make sure you have step by step instructions printed out for those that can’t figure it out. I wish that was sarcasm.

    In our location it was mostly used for passive tracking of equipment via a scanner on the roof of the truck and tags on the trailers and we didn’t use the software much beyond that. From what I saw of it, it was some native custom application. Used the default Gnome interface and design scheme of the time. Looked to be pretty idiot proof.