Welcome!

For a while now Linux has been better at most personal computing things except gaming. And for server uses an even longer time.

There are some specific hardware/software situations where you’ll need Windows but it’s unlikely to happen at home. Unless you have very peculiar hobbies.

khm, khm
let gender

please don’t use deprecated syntax

I’m using their optimized x64v4 repos on an otherwise plain Arch. No idea about any performance difference, I just want to make sure all the CPU progress in recent years doesn’t go to waste.

👏

Cursor is not really anything that I feel a need to customize. It’s a pointer that changes shape according to context, and the default implementations usually do it at least decently.

TIL Winamp was still active as a project

Alpine for example uses musl, and Gentoo offers it as an option.
I don’t completely understand the benefits, my own programming experience is several layers away from inner workings of an OS, but at least some distros claim there is space for improvement.

The role of a distribution is to curate packages - select the right combination of versions and verify if it works together. Providing package repositories is also a big one, imagine if you had to compile everything on your machine yourself on every update (khm gentoo khm).

Other than that there isn’t really a lot of space for innovation. After you have a kernel, some base packages, package manager, and maybe a DE, you can install everything else yourself.
The main point of differentiation these days in on the package management side - do you want a rolling release, or a more conservative approach.

There is one point of innovation left, but it highly technical and somewhat risky for everyday users - libc alternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can’t really be replaced by the user.

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Specifically for a job of Linix sysadmin, probably yes. If you can afford it do a certification, it will help you stand among other candidates with no work experience.

For other IT jobs it’s not so relevant. Linux is technically on the servers but the infrastructure is hidden from you by multiple levels of abstraction.

There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time

In most companies there’s no incentive to write good code. It does the job? Keep it. Oh it costs 5x in AWS costs than it theoretically could if it was a good design? Who cares nobody even understands infrastructure costs

It’s not something that you can really experience directly as the end user. It’s a base on which other features can be built. Most obvious would be fractional scaling.

It can’t be repeated enough: never pre-order a game

Just reminded me of an argument trying to explain that arithmetic with floating point numbers is not always correct to a coworker who was a mathematician just starting in software dev.

In a mathematicians mind the fact that an arithmetic operation can produce inaccurate result is just incomprehensible

Good luck connecting to each of the 36 pods and grepping the file over and over again