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“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

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Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#231

Post by fsflover »

anthk wrote: post #227
butILoveLife wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, you NEED to use Fedora. Fedora is the best OS humanity has ever made. No exaguration. There needs to be the best, and its Fedora. Linux gets a bad reputation because 20-ish years ago Ubuntu sent out free CDs and became the dominant OS. Ubuntu/Mint is part of Debian family, outdated linux. They call outdated Linux 'stable', but its not stable like a table. Its software version frozen. Bugs that are fixed today…

Fedora Silverblue it's better and Cosmic Desktop looks good for a DE in every release (upcoming 44). For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way. If you use Nonguix for Guix, on your own, but I'd only use a nonfree kernel in an emergency (the wireless adapter somehow gets broken and the alternative is to boot the OS with propietary fw in order to buy a new one…

> For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way.

How about Qubes OS? Also the parent never said anything about isolation and roll-backs. Nobody mentioned Silverblue except you. The discussion is about ordinary users, not hackers.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#232

Post by znpy »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #206
tombert wrote: post #63

When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i vi…

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#233

Post by Forgeties79 »

RealityVoid wrote: post #115
eru wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a high specced MacBook Pro, but honestly I mostly use it for vscode tunnels to my actual dev machine. So the only real benefit compared to my MacBook Air is that the screen is a bit nicer, and I can keep more Firefox tabs open, because it has more RAM.

Bingo! IMO, laptops are best used as thin clients and you do the heavy lifting on servers or a box in a closet somewhere. I'va been migrating my workflow to this approach and I'm an embedded dev! My closet does have hw strewn about but once you set it up that you don't have to touch wires it's super convenient. My one gripe with MacBook airs up to m4 was support for only one external monitor. But m4 fixed this.

I thought the single external monitor support was only with the M1. Wild it went on after that

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#235

Post by MITSardine »

kuschku wrote: post #177
jayd16 wrote: post #79

The Neo seems kind of nice but I don't really see how it's more significant than "a nice low end computer." The article reads like its fire from Olympus but a nicer screen and trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs. Personally I think a the Steam Machine will have a better chance to cheat a general computing device into the home of someone not looking for it. The Ne…

For the past decade or so, many children had no access to real computers. Before covid, many households either only had school-issued chromebooks, or only smartphones. With covid causing a rise in remote schooling, many families got laptops, but again often only locked-down chromebooks. There's adults nowadays that do their taxes on their phone, cut videos on their phone, and edit spreadsheets on their phone. And whi…

It's an interesting paradox: the more we made computing accessible, the less we got out of it.

When a PC was expected to boot to an OS and not much else, we had all the freedom - by necessity - to tinker and learn. Hardware was barely enough for most day-to-day usage, so we upgraded relatively frequently and got to know the physical innards as well.

This is all so streamlined today that even computers can be smartphones with "apps", or even just a browser that gets you to google slides and everything else (or the MS equivalents). It was probably a necessity that, as computers became infrastructure, they would become simplified, so 90% of the population can indeed file their tax return online (and the remaining 10% have their younger family members do it).

This also means that people nowadays simply don't know that they can walk into any second hand store and get a $200 PC with a warranty that'll be much more productive than any smartphone if they have the knowledge to use it properly. But was there really a loss? These are, for the most part, people that would not have been able to hop on the internet wagon if it'd relied on maintaining a linux distro at all. That's regarding adults; children now do indeed grow up with walled systems for the most part, and that might be a loss.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#236

Post by butILoveLife »

fsflover wrote: post #231
anthk wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora Silverblue it's better and Cosmic Desktop looks good for a DE in every release (upcoming 44). For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way. If you use Nonguix for Guix, on your own, but I'd only use a nonfree kernel in an emergency (the wireless adapter somehow gets broken and the alternative is to boot the OS with propietary fw in order to buy a new one…

> For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way. How about Qubes OS? Also the parent never said anything about isolation and roll-backs. Nobody mentioned Silverblue except you. The discussion is about ordinary users, not hackers.

Silverblue is supposed to be for normies. Rollbacks are for when you screw everything up.

But honestly I did not like Silverblue. I had a 13 year old gaming computer I installed it on and I couldnt get the ancient GPU drivers installed due to the way things are containerized. This would have been a few commands otherwise.

Maybe its fine for chromebook-like things. I might have picked a bad testcase.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#239

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bigyabai wrote: post #86
hollerith wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one thing lacking in the utilities included with MacOS (which come from BSD).

The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software isn't designed for BSD runtimes, to name one.

So exactly eves “Unix like software” will kids be missing that prevents them from learning about computers?

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#240

Post by zeristor »

znpy wrote: post #232
PaulRobinson wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.

Is this close enough? it’s from 1969, I wonder what became of them:

“Tomorrow's World: Nellie the School Computer 15 February 1969 - BBC”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI

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