That’s what people think of these days? Grrmbl.

Reminds me of some old, old, old tech humour bit where some biz manager ended up in fistfight with the head of IT support because both thought they were in charge of “ERP” and the biz bro felt the IT nerd was overstepping his boundaries. It ended with an email from the CEO that clarified a few acronyms: “ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP = Emergency Response Plan. Hopefully this clears things up.”

Reminds me of the Cathode Ray Dude’s video on [the nicotine ad display] (https://youtu.be/WbqOvBHVpbw). Weird aspect ratio display, with an industrial PC with an immensely locked down Linux system.

Ohhhhhh the newbies don’t remember EsounD (Enlightenment Enlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn’t work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don’t realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.

It’s a “beginner-friendly” distro so people might subconsciously think you should “graduate” to use something “better”.

Which is ridiculous, of course. No reason to switch if it works for you!

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.

As pointed out, Goodreads has been owned by Amazon for a good while. And they also own slices of some other similar book sites (LibraryThing, for example, and some other site that was merged into Goodreads).

Also, to avoid doing unpaid labour for Jeff Bezos, go from Goodreads to Bookwyrm!

What I need is “this post really seemed like a good idea when I was drunk, but in retrospect, maybe it’s not”.

On my Windows laptop, multi displays barely work with any logic at all.

Last time I used macOS it pretended that displays worked fine (but they didn’t).

I’ve not used Linux much in hotplug monitor setups but I assume the situation can’t be worse.

Back when the original Tux drawing was made, we didn’t have boot partitions. In LILO days, the bootloader barely fit in the MBR and the kernel was located and loaded with sheer magic incomprehensible to most mortals. So that’s why Tux has no shoes.

Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!

Dear lazyweb (or lazystodon or lazyverse), are there dead simple scripts for periodic backup? You know, something you just authorise to act as a client and then stick into a crontab to run daily/weekly and it’ll keep a local copy of your stuff. Preferably something you can just install via pip or gem or (oh please gods no) npm.

Nah. Tried to imply that everyone has sex. Even if you’re not thinking about it. (Especially if you’re not thinking about it.)

Ah, I thought Windows always used its own paging file thing located on the Windows NTFS drive, and couldn’t be made to use Linux swap.

If so, enabling that thing probably isn’t a good idea if you are dual booting, yes. Can see all sorts of problems coming from that.

It’s an Unix derivative. To get the fundamental software thing working, someone has likely had hot gay sex. To get the modern software going, someone has had hot transgender sex, hawt furry yiff, and autistic sexual intercourses. …What I’m getting at, sex won’t make Arch unbootable. Guess you just personally fucked up somewhere.

What

Linux swap partitions have no bearing on Windows boot times. Or Windows in general. Windows doesn’t care about partitions it doesn’t recognise. (It might, on occasion, fuck with the bootloader though, but I hear it’s a little bit less of a headache in UEFI days)

These days Windows boots really fast to the login screen (which has a reboot option).

If you log in, it’ll start loading all the usual shit, and that will take a few moments on SSD. (And a few geological megacycles on a HDD.)

My first instances were mastodon.lol and kbin.social. Guess I was unlucky.

(Someone on the interweb:) “Hey, you should try KDE Connect”

(Me:) Uh, I don’t use Linux on my laptop and that’s the computer that I use the most

(S:) “Well it also runs on Windows.”

(Me:) Really?.. Holy sh- HOLY SHIT, this is so much better than every shitty cloud sync package, and that Google app they keep renaming every time I look at it so I can’t remember what it’s called this week

I started out with Slackware 3.0. It broke all the time. Tried Debian. Was happy ever since. Tried Ubuntu on laptops but later decided it’s just Debian with extra steps so I went with Debian after all.

I’m always like “du shows disk usage of files, and df shows how much of disk is free”.