palordrolap

I dunno. There are some of us who run Mint not because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we do* and we don’t want to have to deal with any more nonsense than we absolutely have to.

From that small cohort, there are those of us who’ll frown when all we have open is a few browser tabs and the system’s using 8GB of RAM, twice the “recommended” spec. On startup with nothing running it’s over 1GB.

It’s hard not to see it as wasteful when you’re old enough to remember perfectly good machines running on single-digit megabytes. **

* Or at least, think we do.

** Yes, things are much more complex these days. But are they really a thousand times more complex?

There’s at least a couple of puns going on here. You may already know some of the following.

First of all, Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late '80s. It was designed as a system administrating, text processing glue language with aspects of shell scripting, awk, sed, the greps and a whole host of other things.

This is the first part of one of the puns. Perl was, and may still be, used as a filter in command line pipelines.

The other pun comes from the fact that perhaps the most important Perl book, Programming Perl was published by O’Reilly who generally put some sort of apparently unrelated animal on the cover of their titles. For Perl this was a camel.

Camel is, or was, a brand of cigarettes. Therefore this is the second pun. The pack of cigarettes has “Perl” where it should read “Camel” but still has the picture of a Camel, like both the book and the cigarettes.

Cigarattes, of course, often have filters on the mouth end of them, which completes the first pun. I do not know if any Camel cigarettes have these, but that’s not strictly important. Some cigarettes do. Perl-branded Camels almost certainly would do.

The third (fourth?) pun, which may or may not be intended, is that some people think that programming in Perl is damaging to one’s health.

Listen, I’m convinced the next kernel will finally fix the bug that in rare circumstances causes my potato to spontaneously mash itself and start whistling dixie.

… or maybe I’m confusing my potato with my brain again.

… aaas long your potato has a processor better than a 486 anyway.

Webrings need to make a comeback.

Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There’s literally a command called pipewire-pulse related to this.

It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire’s emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it’s just Pipewire that’s acting up.

I’d say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that’s a non-starter. In which case, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire’s working again, assuming it doesn’t do that automatically.

I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can’t even imagine what might be going on.

I never had screen tearing with NVIDIA under Mint, but for AMD I found that something needs to be added to the Xorg configuration to turn screen tearing off.

I suspect the default is so as not to limit the graphics in any way, but I can’t imagine the majority of users want it that way around, so I’m a little confused by that choice.

This website has instructions on how to fix it for Ubuntu, but I can confirm it works in LMDE too, so I assume it works across the Debian family if not elsewhere: https://davejansen.com/quick-how-to-fix-screen-tearing-in-ubuntu-with-amd-gpus/

I’m going to assume you’re not kidding, in which case, no, I mean the first letter of the command name it was called by.

There are already commands that do this. For example, on my machine, ex is the head of a symlink chain that leads to the vim text editor’s executable and if I run ex, vim will know that it was started with the name ex and will start in ex mode. ex was an editor that worked in a different way but was vim’s ancestor, so backwards compatibility is built right in for those strange people who love ex, (or have some kind of automation reliance on it being present).

Usually, the main command has a command line option that achieves the same effect as the special name. Here, vim -e is the less clever way to start vim in ex mode.

For yes, symlinking the name no to it and then calling that should arguably cause it to print n repeatedly, but it doesn’t, for historical reasons, hence my suggestion to go back in time and make it act differently.

(None of this touches on the fact that the GNU philosophy wants nothing to do with clever tricks like this. They prefer to compile separate executables for each and every use case. For example, most Linuxes have dir and vdir as variants of the ls command. Their functionality could have been implemented through this symlink trick, but instead there are three near-identical executables taking up space instead.)

The two commands are not equivalent. sed 11q prints 11 lines whereas head’s default is 10.

Personally I would prefer head -11 in this situation as it more clearly indicates, for the sake of the meme, that something is being removed from the head.

There’s also that head seems to be ever-so-slightly quicker, perhaps proving what we already knew about thinking being quicker than speech.

TL;DR That’s what she sed?

The BeOS command line command set were all borrowed from or based upon Unix and/or Linux (IIRC many were straight from GNU), which is the basis for my comparison.

The kernel and graphics were all from-scratch and radically different from Linux, sure, but the same could be said of Linux when compared to the original Unix, or any of the BSDs.

Haiku is what grew out of the ashes of BeOS. And if you’ve never heard of that, you’re no worse off. It was another Unix-alike that was neither Linux nor BSD which showed early promise but didn’t gain enough traction.

Black and white 80x25 BIOS text screen with the IBM PC ROM font, not unlike the MS-DOS it sought to replace.

Everything else is fluff on top of that, possibly occupying different graphics planes available in whatever hardware is available.

Yes, technically modern PCs and Linux have moved beyond that 80x25 screen for the most part, but its immediate descendant is still in use, often during boot, but also on Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] on many distros.

I caught trouble the other day for saying this. Apparently there are themes for GNOME (even GTK4) that can mitigate the limited colour palette(s). Locked-in window layout choices are a different matter entirely, of course, but we can do something about the colour of them.

$ yes n
n
n
n
n
n
n
...

I kind of want to go back in time and make it so that the original yes always printed the first letter of the name it was called by. That way you could symlink any name you like to it and it would do the right thing. Called as no it would print ns, etc. The optional parameter would still be there for longer strings or alternate uses.

The reason time travel would be needed is that there’s bound to be, or have been, someone who has done something weird regarding symlinking yes that relies on it always printing y when it has no parameter, and the name trick would be a breaking change.

Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.

Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.

Edit: The situation is more nuanced than I had been led to believe. This stays for posterity.

Irony. In GTK4 there literally are only two genders: Dark Mode and Light Mode.

Earlier GNOME was much more accepting of alternative window styles.

Note for second (or more) language speakers of English (and maybe a few first language folks as well): The plural ‘s’ is omitted when a sentence fragment is turned into an adjective. It’s supposed to have hyphens in it as well, though these are often left out.

So, for example, “My PC is ten years old and runs Linux” becomes “My ten-year-old PC runs Linux”.

In the case of this meme, it should be “My 10-year-old PC”.

If the day ever comes that I end up in possession of a healthy late 20th century laptop, I’d genuinely consider putting FreeDOS on it. Not least because I threw away my customised MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 floppies years ago (a regrettable decision).

For later hardware, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

For a middle ground, I seem to remember Puppy Linux, which is designed to run on more limited hardware, runs most things as root. (Though maybe they’ve changed that in the intervening years. Correction welcome).

It’s kind of amazing that this is only anachronistic by four months. Both Bliss and (that image of) Tux are both from 1996, and Tux is younger.

Thirty years ago. Please excuse me while I turn to dust.

~/bin is the old-school location from before .local became a thing, and some of us have stuck to that ancient habit.