On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

We were each given like a quarter teaspoon of grounds and a toothpick.

I was taught that Jupiter had 17 moons, Saturn has 12 and Pluto has 1. Many more have been discovered since.

Then there’s the whole “different areas on your tongue taste different flavors.” Like you only taste sweet with the tip of your tongue, the middle tastes salty, etc. I remember being given various substances by my fifth grade teacher like sugar, coffee, lemon juice, table salt etc. and we tried putting them on different areas of our tongues and we were like “…no, we taste everything everywhere.”

I distinctly remember my fifth grade teacher trying to pull that.

Not while Ticketmaster exists.

I don’t remember one in TIS-100 or Infinifactory.

There’s a pretty good Solitaire game built into the Zachtronics game Shenzhen IO.

It doesn’t sound like a medication’s marketing name, it sounds like the name of an open source project: a complete garbage fire.

This is Lemmy, you can say kill here. In fact, please do. It’s weird that we’re doing that Orwellian shit to the kids.

LibreOffice runs on Windows and I think MacOS, I would install it there to try it out especially before jumping OSes.

LibreOffice, unto itself, is fine. There’s an alternate universe where we’re standardized around it instead of MS Office. The main issues you’re going to run into is working with people who use MS Office. LO’s compatibility with Microsoft’s formats is imperfect. If you’re collaborating on, say, a powerpoint presentation with classmates, expect LibreOffice Impress to mangle it.

I’ve been out of school for awhile now, and as an adult running a household it’s all the productivity suite I’ll ever need.

I’ll be honest here: Wanting to try out ElementaryOS “because it’s pretty” and having no experience with Linux…I foresee this ending badly and shortly. Something isn’t going to work exactly the way it does in Windows and a hissy fit will ensue. I recommend taking an image backup of her machine before installing Linux.

Fake news.

The hospital? What is it?

“I should probably buy another box of nitrile gloves.” excellent decision.

I was teaching flight school by the time I was 23. I started studying the books at 14 and started flight school in earnest at 16. It’s called teaching adolescents to do shit.

That’s gonna be fun for cases like c/trees. Someone somewhere will get the joke, someone somewhere won’t.

I bought a Dell Inspiron circa 2014 intending to run Windows on it. I was dabbling in Linux playing with Raspberry Pis, but didn’t really have designs to run Linux on my main computers. I found Windows 8.1 so unlivable that I tried out Linux Mint.

That laptop just kept dying.

I went around and around with Dell support for a semester about that damn laptop. I was going back to school, I bought a laptop for school, I didn’t get that fucking laptop. I did an entire semester of coursework with a Kindle Fire and two Raspberry Pis (a 1B and a 2). They finally replaced the damn thing with a different model, that was missing a lot of features I had ordered. Dell is at the top of my goddamn blacklist.

Anyway, the first x86 machine I ran Linux on, Linux compatibility wasn’t a factor, and then I really didn’t get a choice anyway because I didn’t get the machine I ordered. But I’ve had dental surgeries that I enjoyed more than Windows 8.1.

In the early days, Linux Mint needed a kernel update to support the trackpad. I’m still not convinced the dedicated GPU ever worked. I had an external docking station that was very meh. It did the job though, I actually still have it in service. It won’t run Windows 11 I don’t think but modern Linux runs just fine.

I’ve since built two desktops with Linux compatibility in mind which have worked very well, and a little Lenovo thing to use as a shop tablet which…could be a lot better.

I suppose this is why Android occasionally refuses to take your fingerprint and says “for your security, enter your password.”

See? That’s great branding.

Europe isn’t a region, it’s a brand.

Another woodworker:

Huge +1 for a bench plane and a shooting board. Even in a mainly power tool shop, you can make things much more precisely square or mitered if you shoot them.

For marking cuts, use a knife not a pencil. When you use a pencil to mark your cuts, you limit yourself to guiding your tools with only your vision, not unlike a Tesla. When you score the line with a knife, you create a reference surface (one of the two sides of the cut, hopefully the one against your square) that has no thickness, and you can feel when a knife or chisel clicks against that surface. For saw cuts, you can use a chisel to pare away a little bit from the waste side to form a knife wall, which forms a little ramp that will guide a saw against your reference surface.

Wax literally everything. Wax your work surfaces, tablesaw top, jointer beds, planer bed, fences, plane soles, bikini lines, saw plates, screw threads…wax literally everything.

Learn how to do most common operations by hand. Square some rough lumber by hand with a bench plane. Chop a mortise with a chisel. Cut a tenon with a backsaw. Make dovetails by hand. Even if you’re a power tool woodworker and you’ve got a jointer and a thickness planer and a table saw and a rapidly growing number of routers, knowing how to do things by hand will help you understand just what it is you’re doing.

Do not suffer a dull tool to live. If your tool is getting dull, sharpen it. Sharpening is kinda personal, I think if cilantro tastes like soap to you you’ll prefer oilstones, if you have that tendon in your wrist you’ll like waterstones, if you can roll your tongue you’ll prefer diamond plates and if you have more money than god you’ll buy a Tormach. They’ll all sharpen a blade. Find the system you like and use it. If your tool is dull, sharpen it. Put it away sharp, don’t put it away dull.

Use your ears. You can tell a lot about what’s going on with a tool by listening to it.