I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.

Mice can often find ways you wouldn’t believe, but they still have to adhere to the laws of physics, so you might simply not have suitable holes in your apartment for them to enter. But yeah, also quite possible that they can smell the cat and don’t want to enter the lion’s den.

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

Yeah, sometimes I wonder if they do these bad names for the free publicity of people complaining about them. But then there’s plenty examples where the name isn’t just clunky, but rather actively confusing for potential users…

His job is to spread lies and fear, so no reason for him to say something different, if he would know reality…

On KDE, I’d recommend getting a KWin Script for tiling. Krohnkite is what people use currently.

It’s not as buttery smooth as dedicated tiling window managers and it can be a bit glitchy at times, but it is better than one might expect and significantly easier (and likely less glitchy) than trying to get bspwm to work in Plasma.

Maybe they didn’t slaughter her with how many fans she has? Cows can live to be twenty years old. But yeah, probably wishful thinking…

Yeah, after writing that comment, I was thinking, if I do promote it, that means there’s a certain expectation that I’ll integrate or implement functionality that others want. At that point, it becomes less of an egoistic thing. And I’ll be doing more communication and whatnot, therefore less programming.

Maybe that’s the puzzle piece that OP is missing? If you don’t promote it, you have practically no extra work compared to developing it under a proprietary license. In fact, it often reduces the workload, if you can just post it publicly without having to secure the repo.
And you don’t incur costs from giving it away either. So, if you make sure to only put in the work that you want to put in in the first place, you have no disadvantage from publishing it with an open-source license.

Many people enjoy programming, you know. I’ve got like ten reasonably-sized projects and I haven’t posted about them anywhere. Because I built them to scratch my own itch, both in terms of functionality I could use and the itch to build something, no matter what it is. I’m not wasting my time, because I’m doing something I enjoy.

The system for domain names is called Punycode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

But it’s still combined with domain registrars rejecting names like “αpple.com”, which ultimately needs a human to approve names.

There could also be a system like here on Lemmy, where there’s a separate display name, but it still doesn’t really solve the impersonation problem…

The problem is, even if it were solved for 99% of systems, 1% of systems crashing is still a massive problem.

But yeah, I also don’t believe that it is solved for 99% of systems. There’s a ton of embedded systems all over the place, which are easy to forget about.

It is similar to Bluesky, yes. They both got a lot of inspiration from Twitter (before Musk turned it to shit/X).

And I would say that the discussions are more shallow than on Lemmy. Even though Mastodon has a higher character limit than Twitter and many Mastodon instances effectively remove the character limit, it’s still fundamentally a platform for shortform interactions. Infodumping is rarely seen, because you need to create a silly number of chained messages.

On the flipside, though, you get to know people. I do appreciate the time I spent on Mastodon, because of that. It’s a very different perspective as not everything is about discussing cold hard facts, but rather also people’s hobbies and struggles and whatnot.

Not sure what your problem with Discover is. It uses PackageKit under the hood, which hooks into APT (as well as other distros’ package management).

If you want to, you can disable Flatpak and Snap support in Discover’s settings and then it is effectively just an APT frontend.

Here’s a description page for Discover: https://apps.kde.org/discover/

Ah, neat. My phone speakers are far too silent, so I’ll have to fiddle with this in the other direction.

The political renaming occurred in context of France’s opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq.

Jeez, I understand that self-reflection isn’t the strong suit of these people, but you’d think at some point they would consider whether branding the bombing of a country as “freedom” really makes sense.

It’s the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

Oh yeah, I’m in favor of using type hints. People here are also saying that Pyright is more useful, which I haven’t used yet.

I was involved as the unlucky bastard supposed to sprinkle software engineering on top of a Python project 2+ years ago, and I just remember how much I understood right then and there why Python devs thought static typing was cumbersome. Felt like I had to write Java again, except it also didn’t work half the time.

Interesting. If it’s only in the type checker, can IDEs/editors correctly show the type information of inferred types then? Do they call the type checker themselves to retrieve that info?