Captain Aggravated

How are you installing it? Are you somehow using a Windows version or something?

Do they need therapy? Or do they need a world they can actually fucking live in?

It’s not like either one is available to them.

How are you getting FreeCAD to run poorly? I’ve run it fine on a Raspberry Pi.

Working isn’t worth doing.

Subnautica comes to mind. It’s a survival game with a heavy focus on exploring and a very structured story. Fluff text and the obligatory random documents and audio logs are mostly optional, though the game does have a mystery to solve so some of those you want to pay attention to. No real spikes in difficulty, it’s honestly an easy game.

Condescend further to me. Explain it to me like I’m a woman.

Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

Long about 2015.

This is about maintaining the compromise that is intellectual property law.

IP law has been so perverted that I see a lot of the takietarians around here wanting to abolish it completely. That’s not a good idea. The US constitution empowers Congress to make laws that for a limited time give creators exclusive rights to their creations. FOR A LIMITED TIME. That’s the key feature. I know this is an EU petition, I imagine they have a similar concept of IP. That it belongs to the creator for awhile, and then enters the public domain as the heritage of all mankind.

Do away with copyright protection entirely, and you kill a lot of people’s jobs. The rate at which things will be created will drastically decrease. Throughout the 1980s, how many decade defining or genre defining video games came out of the United States? The nation known for a video game industry crash that decade? How many came out of the UK? How many out of Japan? How many out of the Soviet Union?

Okay so let’s make copyright permanent! Well no, because then you get Disney, a collection of stuffed suits who have MBAs instead of souls holding as much western culture hostage as they can in perpetuity.

So, we compromise. You create something, you get an amount of time of exclusive right of way, then it becomes public domain.

That length of time has gotten longer and longer to the point now that it’s more than 2 human lifetimes long. To an individual human, that’s as good as forever, so it has the problems of permanent copyright.

Especially in the realm of computer software and video games, where the life of a platform averages 10 years. There’s a whole body of software and games written for OLD systems that are still protected under copyright, but finding the copyright holder is damn near impossible. I’ll make up a game: Turtle Adventure for the Commodore 64, copyright 1985 by Bedsoft Inc. Bedsoft Inc was a sole proprietorship operated by Bartholomew Teethwick in Bristol, England. Mr. Teethwick published Turtle Adventure, a typing tutor game that didn’t really work right, and an advertisement for a Pacman clone to release in 1987 was circulated but that game was never made. The “company” was shut down in 1988 and Mr. Teethwick died of AIDS in 1991, unmarried, no children. Who’s going to sue me for posting Turtle Adventure on Github? Whose rights is copyright law protecting here?

Then you get into this model where video games don’t work at all without a central server somewhere. That’s just an end around of the deal. This software is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually. By copyrighting it, that’s the deal you made.

To patent something, you’re required to submit a technical description of your invention in sufficient detail for it to be replicated, because patent law is a similar compromise. You invent something, it’s yours for awhile then it belongs to humanity. You cannot have a patented trade secret. Why do we allow closed source software to be copyrighted?

The rules for software weren’t created for software, they were created for human readable works of literature, and they’ve been misused in ways that benefit large greed-based organizations like Microsoft.

Requiring game developers to publish their server side code when the game goes defunct is holding them to the deal they made when they installed that copyright notice. It is what they owe humanity.

Autokey is software written by someone.

Drivers are software written by someone.

Have you vetted every line of code running on your computer?

There’s software on the computer that does that anyway, otherwise the keyboard won’t work. Feels like an arbitrary line to draw.

Honestly if pressing some buttons to get the computer to do something you programmed it to do is a “security nightmare” I think we should probably just give up, tear down the electric grid and go back to dying of smallpox at 17 like nature intended.

It’s roughly equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows. It’s an application that can intercept key combos or even typed strings and…do basically anything. Let’s say you type a certain phrase a lot, you could come up with an abbreviation so that when you type an abbreviation it deletes the abbreviation and inserts the big thing you type. Or maybe you want it to fire when you press ALT+ y. Or, maybe you want it to do something programmatic, like insert the date and time. Or do anything you can get Python to do.

This apparently does not work on Wayland systems, something about the way it accessed keystrokes in X11 isn’t open in Wayland for security concerns.

Sure, Autokey doesn’t work.

I do think ditching X11 is still slightly premature. For all its more modern features, there’s still a lot that Wayland either hasn’t implemented yet or “can’t do” because of its “security model.”

Once again I’ll say, I’m perfectly fine with the death of the essay as viable school homework.

In my experience, teachers graded only on grammar and formatting. Teaching - and more to the point, grading - effective writing skills is harder than nitpicking punctuation, spelling and font choices, so guess what happens more often?

You want school to mean anything, you’re going to have to switch to verbal or demonstrable skills instead of paperwork. Which society probably needs to do anyway.

The one I like is “Document it yourself.”

Hey, this application exposes a Python API to the user, where’s the API reference? How do I learn how to use it?

We didn’t write it.

Well…could you?

If you want it to exist, you write it.

How am I supposed to do that?

Examine the app’s source code.

Ah, get a mainstream distro like Mint or Fedora, throw Steam on it and start gaming.

I’ve seen two things out of “Men’s Health Awareness Month”:

• The rainbow hair squad bawling about “No it’s Pride Month”
• People posting lazy image macros with lies like “It’s okay to show your feelings” in them.

I have no fucking interest in National Whatever Day or Something Awareness Month. They always end up an exercise in worthless busybody tokenism, and the more of them we put in place the more hilarious collisions we’re going to find. I got a great idea, let’s start observing National Temperence Week as the first week of May, so that we can generate pointless anger at the people drinking Corona and margaritas on Cinco De Mayo. I can hear Latinos now saying “Oh what the fuck have the white people made themselves mad about now?”

The messaging I have seen about “Men’s Health Awareness Month” has mostly been addressed to men saying things like “It’s okay to share, it’s okay to cry, there are five lights.” His lived experience has shown that no, it is not. He is overwhelmingly expected to be stable, and any display of weakness will permanently lessen his worth in anyone’s eyes. Telling HIM to open up when those are the consequences he knows await, addressing the problem as a change HE needs to make is just pissing up a rope.

I’m going to use the movie Fight Club as an illustrative device here: Pretty much all of the men in this setting find their social and emotional needs unmet by the structure of society. The buzzword you see thrown around today for this is “lack of third spaces.” The men in the testicular cancer group have basically only one pain to share with each other: loss of family, marriages, jobs etc. The men respond strongly positively to Fight Club, which at first is basically an underground bare knuckle boxing ring started by a mentally ill man. I have a hypothesis that something like a pickup game of basketball would have served much the same function, that what the men in this setting really need is time to do physical activities with other men, to form those bonds the way men actually do.

On that note, I’ll be right back.

Gentlemen, let’s go on a hike