I use both, debian on servers and old machines, arch on my desktop. Arch being rough is way overblown in my experience, the install script makes it straightforward to setup and it’s been pretty much painless since I switched to it two years ago, I had experience with debian before that. Both arch and debian have fantastic documentation available.

Debian and derivatives, in my experience, are really well supported so that’s a plus. Age of packages has never really bothered me and cases where I want bleeding edge there’s options for that.

Both are solid options and I don’t think you’ll be upset either way, if you can I’d try both.

I haven’t looked at Nix in detail but you got me interested for 3d printers in particular, already have my klipper config in git if an SD card fails on me, going to have to look at doing that for the os too.

I bought a Brother colour laser last year (which on the outside looks identical to the monochrome one I bought 17 years ago that lives with my parents), zero issues, which pretty much has been my experience with printers on linux (also tried a ~5 y/o & 25 y/o HP LaserJet, one being the cheapest thing I’ve ever used, other being old office equipment, think I tried the Epson ecotank and photo printer my mil has as well)

It’s not terrible advice tbh, even just hand sketches are solid for getting ideas down, makes it easy to translate to cad. It at least helps me think things through and the like.

Get a few pencils with different leads (some harder stuff like 2-4H and an HB) and some nice paper and you’re good, but really anything works, totally have a mockup of my garage on a whiteboard planning where I want to put stuff.

As for cad packages, freecad, as far as I’m aware there are some architecture workbench plugins, and there’s a tech drawing workbench. Coming back to cad after a while I found it super easy to pick back up (coming from solidworks at least)

That’s the predominant one in Canada too, at least in my experience.

Goes with a Chipper Shredder (Woodchipper), sure there’s probably other things named the same way.

For most people though yeah, Debian is rock solid, only went arch on my desktop for nvidia drivers (and HDR), archinstall really simplifies installing it.

Arch and Debian wikis are both amazing sources of information, highly recommend for any distro.

As far as I’m aware, a lot of the core utilities originate back some time ago, stuff like ls, CD, chmod/chown, cat, sed, awk etc.

Now the question is, is a piece of software that’s been maintained or ported since the 70s considered pre 79 software?

You can muffle the beeper pretty effectively with some tape, the old air fryer we had terrified one of the dogs because of the incessant beeping. My coffee scale by default beeps whenever you touch it, thankfully that’s 100% mutable.

I also hate this.

From the arch wiki

sudo -e {file}

Set SUDO_EDITOR in your profile to the editor of your choice, benefit is it retains your user profile for that editor, it’s also less to type. For stuff like editing sudoers you’re supposed to use visudo to edit that. Others can probably give better/more thorough reasons to consider it.

Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don’t think it’s helpful either to preload people with the belief that it’s some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.

Can’t really say it’s 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I’ve depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I’ve seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.

Be honest that I don’t see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of “I browse the internet and use office programs”, you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren’t setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.

Haven’t looked into it but do shops offer lube analysis services? Yeah you could send out your own sample to a lab, having it as a shop service would be way more accessible to people.

Though, in my experience, getting people to commit can be a pain, lots of “yeah I know we have a long p-f interval and it’s super noticeable before it functionally fails, but it’s not that much effort so I’m doing needless maintenance anyhow just in case”, which end of the day you do you.

I’ve used Thunderbird since forever as my go-to client, I used mutt as well for a while and that met my needs pretty well.

There’s a ton of great women in metal, I’ll drop two.

Mares of Thrace, Calgary AB based sludge/post/hardcore 2 piece, guitarist/vocalist is part of the original lineup, it’s heavy and catchy.

I really like Hulder, black metal solo project, some of her early demos are amazing, this version of Into The Crypt of Rays comes to mind, got a wall flag of the art from this in my office.

Powershell, windows terminal and winget are all legitimately nice tools, powershell especially is just stupidly more powerful than it needs to be (and verb-noun syntax is great).

Oh for sure, there’s exceptions to the rule, I’ve been fooled too. Peste Noir, Drudkh, Deathspell Omega, Burzum all end up on essentials lists, definitely contributes.

At least most nsbm sucks and/or have names like “ss wehrwulf division 1488” so it’s usually really easy to avoid.

Still, be great to have another tool to filter bands.

Edit: looks like it’s going to be based on musicbrainz metadata, checked Burzum because Vikernes is a Nazi and Peste Noir, neither of which have an nsbm tag, nor do Grand Belial’s Key or an actual band called Wehrwolf, probably because of how niche black metal is.

I’ve personally used this list as a place to start, not perfect but it’s something. Metallum lyrical content helps as well.

Forgejo Documentation says they should be familiar to people who use github actions, they’re not the same but I found that when debugging some a few months back that github information was applicable, if that helps.

I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it’s far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.

Found upgrades mildly annoying with GitLab, big reason I moved to Forgejo for my personal stuff. Far easier to setup and maintain for me, seems to be happy with caddy and runners are really easy to setup.

I’m not hosting for an entire org though, it’s just me and I keep all my selfhost stuff local only, so obviously YMMV.

I’m a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there’s been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I’ve been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

I’m not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there’s lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they’re boron grades but I can’t recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it’s processed. It’s allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there’s aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

It’s oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don’t need to do things like plan around liquid batching.