I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.

Well now I’ve got this song stuck in my head again, which probably accurately describes life with particularly bad peoject management.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whdzP0GHuc4

They say it’s a Gates’way to things, most unnatural…

“Everything’s shiny, Cap’n, not to fret!”

“You told me these packages were supported for another 6 weeks!”

“Your last Pacman -Syu was 6 months ago, Cap’n!”

“My OS don’t crash. If it crashes, you crashed it!”

If you are selling 400 dollar and even 800 dollar laptops, a 100 dollar license is a huge chunk of the cost.

Gonna note that, on those rare occasions I have the funds to madly research the most optimal PC build I can every like…7+ years…the “Oh man, forgot the OS is another $100+!” Always felt like such an insult!

Whelp, now with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed I’ll never have to worry about that again. :)

Exactly, with things like music or pictures, there’s always that bit of doubt that makes it scary to actually delete anything…

“This one is just like the most popular one, but entirely rewritten in Rust!”

Hey I wanted my RGB sticks okay?! Jk hahaha.

You’re right! I think…I don’t have a swap partition on this machine. I think I was gonna set up a swap file but that was a bit more involved post-install than I wanted to delve into at the time…

…but I did get ZRAM working, and that’s pretty amazing! It feels like getting more RAM for free haha.

It wasn’t the most absolutely necessary upgrade in the world, but I feel like it gives me more room to get away with dumb things and course correct in things like Blender, and might come in handy down the line since I don’t see myself upgrading much for a while.

I just now upgraded to 64GB of DDR4 from eBay. But that’s because my Blender projects were getting really big and I’d crashed a few times. Linux is awesome but is really scary how it just hard-freezed or mercilessly thrashes when low on memory. 😬

…That and I finally get glorious RGB RAM lighting up my case. :D weee!

For gaming? I haven’t seen that much RAM be usedul yet. And in Blender… likely because I have a crazy amount of undo levels enabled and have Firefox open…a few tabs…maybe more than a few tabs…maybe a lot of tabs…

YES!!! I used to take so much pride in theming!

It’s actually one of the reasons I really enjoyed Windows ME. Usability was awful, yes, but it came with so many icons and sound packs and wallpapers and screensavers!!

Back in the day I even amassed a bunch of .WAVs cut from movies for computer sounds. It made frustrating fatal errors softer when accompanied by “Bring out yer deaaad!”

Linux really does feel like that again, except it’s actually usable.

Also I’m so glad KDE has login sounds now, so I hear the MechWarrior startup sequence whenever I log in. :)

I’ve noticed this and seeing it all laid out is hilarious. (So, so many JS frameworks omg)

Is this basically so they can forever say: “Well don’t expect it to be feature complete, it’s not even 1.0 yet!” ??

GOT 'EM!

Haha now I kinda feel like this is Endeavour. I’m really liking Endeavour! It feels like Arch but just a bit smoother of an approachability curve. Lovely community, too.

I should mess with Void sometime. 🤔

I will say however, I’ve encountered a few things that were unsolvable because I wasn’t a professional coder with tons of time on my hands. Unfortunately the only solutions were “attempt workarounds” and “wait. :(”

But at least in that case:

• You can generally narrow down this is the case vs. your own config issues.
• Somebody else has the same problem.
• Barring all that, you can bug report!

I run Tumbleweed though, sometimes things happen. (But it’s still shockingly stable!)

I wouldn’t expect people running Mint or Debian to face this nearly as much.

I remember learning a lot of stuff as a side effect of Morrowind modding. :D

I used to work with supporting the general public with computer usage. It was pretty much a nightmare.

I basically decided that, were I ever to become a benevolent dictator, the words “It just says ‘error’”, barring the rare exception where “error” and “ok” were the only things on screen…would result in immediate revocation of citizenship and deportation to wherever a dart landed on the map. If they were really nice, we’d let them throw the dart, or designate a champion to throw the dart for them.

This could work out really well for them! Either way, support staff wouldn’t have to put up with it from that individual anymore.

(EDIT: No, the middle of the Atacama / Sahara Desert, the poles, R’lyeh, nor the ocean, would be valid. I said benevolent.)

…Yeah I’m still working with a mental health professional untangling what that job did to me. Lol

I think another part of this is that you can do a little sleuthing in Linux and generally figure out what’s causing an issue because the error messages are generally helpful!

In Linux, running a buggy / non-starting app in terminal will usually spit out something understandable. I think once we figure this out it spoils us a little.

Windows on the other hand, with anything that actually requires intervention, seems to go out of its way to be obtuse and goes all “contact your system administrator” about it. You spend more time trying to look up and cipher their “error codes” and dealing with unhelpful “support” than figuring the problem. (Which usually involves “nuke and pave a driver” anyway. Lol)

Nice!

Tangentially related: So is Automate The Boring Stuff With Python!

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/#toc

I keep forgetting that one! Thanks! I always use up arrow and then waste time getting the cursor back with maybe the home key or ctrl+ left-arrow LOL

The NoStarch books are excellent overviews for newbies to go beyond being “just a user” though. They’re written in a very friendly and approachable manner. If you’re enthusiastic about learning how the OS works and playing with commands, they’re really good about that! I think it’s cool OP is repping rhem. :)

If someone was like “Hey I wanted to try Linux!” and thought they needed to go through LPIC/LINUX+ doorstoppers or had manuals about the kernel or something, I’d be like “Woah there. Calm down.” LOL