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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I used Debian for a bit many years ago. It was great for all the reasons you are tired of Arch (I had tried Gentoo before Debian). When Ubuntu came out, I was quite happy with it. It had the stability of Debian, but was a bit more polished and had better support for new stuff without sacrificing stability.

    I’m moving on from Ubuntu at this point, and have tried Mint, but not Mint Debian. It’s nice enough. I’m curious what Debian is like these days though. I haven’t used it in a decade at least.


  • Kethal@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldEveryone loves snaps
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    11 months ago

    Snaps are ways to ship software where everything is bundled together and the developer doesn’t need to sort out dependencies on the distribution. This often makes the package bloated. It has no direct benefits for users, but it makes life easier for developers. This, indirectly, users might get access to some software they would otherwise need to compile if no one’s got it readily available for the user’s distribution. Ubuntu appears mostly to be using it because they don’t want to bother sorting out dependcies. On Ubuntu, and only on Ubuntu as fast as I know, some packages in apt will install the snap version silently, which, I think rightfully, annoys a lot of users.

    There are similar alternatives, like flatpak, which also bundle dependencies. Some aspects of snap are proprietary to Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, so you’ll find people who are ok with the somewhat bloated software if it makes software more widely available, but aren’t happy with a proprietary format in what is largely an open community.



  • It’s mostly a clean installation. You can copy the contents of your home directory, which is where personal configuration files are stored, in the hopes that some stuff will transfer, but surely that won’t be complete.

    You could also try dual booting, installing two OSes and you’d choose which to run at start up. You can configure these so that files on one are accessible from the other. This is pretty easy to do if you’re even slightly tech savvy.

    I’ve found that the shiney new features are usually buggy. If you’re into helping improve things, using and fixing the new stuff is a great way to contribute. If you’re reasonably tech savvy, you’re going to be able to figure out any distribution. With few exceptions, they’re all easy enough to use. I even doubt the portrayal of Arch in this comic. If you’re not into developing stuff or just want to get your feet wet before diving in more, starting with Mint is easy. And it’s also easy enough to switch or expand if you decide to try something different later. There’s not a lot of lock in with Linux stuff.


  • Mint is a based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, so the guy on the left. The comic implies that it’s easy but not quite as easy as Fedora. I would say that it is easier to use than Fedora.

    Setup is simple and unless you’ve got something unusual going on on your computer, then everything will just work. Since it’s based on Ubuntu, most Ubuntu information will also apply to Mint, and that’s nice because there is a lot of information about Ubuntu.

    Not everyone would care about this, but I personally don’t like chasing updates and constantly installing the latest versions of things. All Debian distributions favor stability over cutting edge features, whereas some distributions are set up to try to get the latest changes quickly. Ubuntu leans very slightly toward cutting edge compared to stock Debian, but Ununtu has Long Term Support (LTS) releases which are supported for, I think, 5 years. Ubuntu also have other releases with shorter support times. If you’re using Ubuntu and favor stability, you need to pay a little attention to what you’re installing. Mint is based only on Ubuntu LTS releases, so Mint favors stability.




  • Could you elaborate on this? Is this new community restricting specifically mentions of Musk, or is there a broader difference? In particular, there are a lot of people claiming that Twitter is a tech company and that it belongs in tech news. Is that also the view of this new community or do you consider Twitter a social media company, with only tangential and generally not newsworthy actions related to technology?












  • This is one of two “warts” that I know of in SI. They wanted a coherent set of units, coherent meaning that no nuisance constants are required to convert between dimensions in the set. The system at the time was gram-centimeter-second. To expand things to all dimensions I suppose it was simpler to use the larger units, like J = kg m^2 / s^2 rather than trying to make a new unit for energy, etc. You’d think they’d have just come up with a new name for mass units and defined it as 1 kg, something like 1 prot = 1 kg, then all of the coherent units would be ones without prefixes. Someone must have really being going to bat for the word “gram” though, because now we have this pretty stupid rule that the coherent units are all of the ones without prefixes, except mass, which has the coherent unit of kg. And then also, prefixes are used to scale the coherent units by appending the appropriate letter to the coherent unit symbol, except for mass, for which g is treated as the coherent unit, even though it’s not.

    It’s not the worst thing, but it’s pretty stupid to explain.