Looking for ideas. Apple offered me $500 for my old laptop, but when I sent it in they say, "Oh, a scratch. We'll give you $100." There's no way a perfectly functioning and upgraded M1 MacBook Air is worth only $100. So I got it back.
Now I'm looking for a good home for it. I don't want money, I want it to have a good life. Two conditions:
It has to help make the world a better place.
I'm not shipping it, so the transfer has to be local to Sydney.
@robpike Just an idea for making a better world. When I bought my framework I gave a thinkpad to my wife and I donated her old laptop to NSW Homelessness Services in Sydney through Givit.org.au. It ended up going to a domestic violence survivor that was trying to end her studies and rebuild her life through a career jump.
I want to see absolutely no sensible and practical advice here. What programming language should I start vaguely and in a chill way teaching myself if I just want to experience something fun or elegant or interesting in and of itself, assuming I have no goal for using it to do anything really (outside of learning)
@thomasfuchs@CStamp@sarajw@iamdavidobrien You add the US international input method and use a [Win] shortcut to switch, same as on a Mac with Ctrl Space. The keystrokes are almost the same but I think I recall they follow the dead keys scheme —first accent then letter.
I’ve been doing this for years as my first language is Spanish.
@thomasfuchs@CStamp@sarajw@iamdavidobrien You do, you have to add the US international layout for it to work properly. Accents are just the tip of the iceberg. Characters like these ¡¿ç ñ require configuring shit to work, exactly the same.
This is a really big deal. Soon anyone on Flipboard will be able to discover, follow and engage with Ghost newsletter authors and readers directly. More content. More people. Same app.
A conversation that keeps popping up in my mind since FOSDEM centers around open source projects and “AI,” and I still don’t know what I think. So let me share some thoughts here on the famously nuance-friendly Internet. 😜
During a chat w/folks from several open source organizations, someone suggested GNOME could attract funding by “sprinkling some AI on it.” Several folks laughed at the topical joke, but then realized it was in earnest. 🧵
@cassidy I agree with this and this was also my reaction when the internet was broken by the statement of AI by Mozilla.
My example was "I want to be able to select text from a video frame".
What I think I needs more framing is the "funding" part, as in "what kind of funding" --there are very toxic funding sources that shall be avoided for the long term survival of the project.
"Immutable" is a very bad name for these kind of distributions, as they are 100% mutable --just in a different way and not while they are running.
They have a "system tree" that gets read-only while the system is running, and a user filesystem that is read + write. In this user filesystem, most system configuration files you may ever need to change are mapped, or an editable copy that takes precedence can be found.
If you need to change the system tree, you usually go ahead and use the tool you are provided with to do so. By doing that, the change is "staged for next reboot", meaning that you must reboot the system to enjoy or regret the changes.
There it is: you have done a mutation over an immutable system. What a disappointing immutability level.
The idea is that you tinker with the system tree as little as possible, to avoid creating dependency issues or stability problems.
That's one for the "Linux never breaks", but anyway.
You still can install native packages on the system tree by doing an operation called layering. But you should keep it to a minimum. I personally create layers for system codecs or modules and a few exceptions where the Flatpak ("the canonical way of installing apps") is not really working for me.
When you have to work with native packages in a very volatile way, as for example when you need to test an application with different sets of dependencies or versions of them, these distributions offer you a more or less friendly utility based on containers.
For Kinoite and Silverblue, that's "toolbox" and uses podman containers.
That is what makes people think that the "immutable" distributions are developer friendly --and they are often described that way.
The problem for the developer(*) is when they (we?) follow the canonical way to install applications, and install an IDE from a Flatpak package.
It takes a lot of work to make a Flatpak, which is a container of a kind, connect to a toolbox, which is an OCI container based on podman. And not always will work. So if you want your the IDE to access the runtimes and libraries you've set up in your toolbox, Flatpak is not a friend.
Here's where people go nuts: what folks think and will yell at you is that: Flatpaks do not support CLI tools, so toolbox is ONLY for CLI tools, and Flatpak is for ALL UI tools.
If you install your graphical IDE in the toolbox, with dnf, everything works like a charm. Because toolbox is for all native packages you need to work with them as a user.
Indeed, I always install Visual Studio Codium in my "developer" toolbox, for the two stupidities I code before killing my next pet project.
Yesterday I connected Visual Studio Code to a toolbox, but, I saw that due to some podman limitation the IDE would connect to the container as root, messing my file permissions. So I went and I installed it inside the toolbox.
Perfect.
And you can create a launcher in your host system --just run "toolbox run --container [name] codium".
In conclusion: "immutables" are not such. They are more solid distributions that, by the way and sorry for not mentioning, allow you to roll back changes you do to the system.
They should be called just "atomic", or just don't bother putting surnames to the thing. They're just cool.
Just go fetch one, create a thin layer with your essential low level packages if you need it (e.g.: drivers, modules, things that won't work well on Flatpak), and play with them.