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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Perhaps worth pointing out that audio volume in general is a mess. The only meaningful number is an audio volume of 0. All the others are made up.

    You can measure the dB, but only for specific pieces of hardware. And in the end, it’s all a matter of perception anyways. Your bass might be thumping at objectively a high number of dB, but the entire audio track still sounds quiet to some listeners, because they listen:

    • on a phone speaker.
    • with a bunch of background noise.
    • with bad hearing.


  • 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.


  • After seeing how excited some folks got during COVID, that’s genuinely somewhat of a worry for me. Kind of like how lonely, young men can be sold on the idea of war, because they think they’ll finally be adored as a hero, you can just as well find preppers who think they’ll finally be adored, because they bought toilet paper before everyone else could.

    In the case of COVID, it was thankfully a disappointment for the preppers, in that the best survival strategy was staying in your cushty home. That will be the case for the vast majority of infectious diseases. But I still bet someone out there had the intrusive thought that maybe they shouldn’t help reduce the spread of COVID, because you won’t be deemed a hero without a real crisis…









  • OpenOffice has seen essentially no development since 2011, when the trademark got transferred to Oracle after they bought Sun Microsystems.

    The project got forked into LibreOffice to dodge the trademark issue, but it’s the same devs, practically the same project, but now under a non-profit organization. Well, and with 14 more years of development.

    So, use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. It will most likely come pre-installed on whichever Linux distro you go with. But you can also try it out on Windows beforehand, if you have concerns.


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDesktop PTSD
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    9 days ago

    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.



  • 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.