Because when I move left in tabs, the cursor isn’t clear which tab I’m on. It also tried to sit off the left edge of a terminal in some editors because it aligns with the right side of the character (the tab), instead of the left.

I do see how tabs are a better option : they allow the one editing the file to decide how wide the indentation is. That’s actually good User Interface design, by separating the data from the rendering layout.

I can see the argument both ways, but I like to use spaces so the visual and editing interfaces are more standard.

Would it be better if I clarified by calling them “ball bearing balls”? Or would that lead to my unpleasant pummeling by steel balls?

I haven’t looked into it too hard yet. I saw some design that would allow remote GUI rendering for Wayland, but it likely won’t be the all in design for network transparency that X11 had (has).

I use SSH with X forwarding for all kinds of system maintenance and demos in my CS courses.

15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.

Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.

The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.

Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.

I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.

Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.

Conservatism consists of one core value: there should be laws that protect, but do not bind, the in group while the same laws bind, but do not protect, the out group.

Last weekend I used a scrubber to delete every post and comment from my 15 year old Reddit account, then deleted the account, so I’ve finally burned the boats on the move. Lemmy is perfectly fine as it is. It’ll ebb and flow for users, but I’ve been happy for a year here now.

In US college football: Washington State University vs. University of Washington. WSU cares about it a lot. UW… has bigger fish to fry.

I bought a 386 motherboard that needed a patch. Not software, but by soldering a wire between two pads. You just basically figure it out and went from there with a soldering iron.

Build the computer from parts? Sure. Soldered it like it came as discrete components? Also sure.

Tech savvy is often in context of when you were learning in your teens to early twenties and then what of that skill set is still applicable today.

We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.

Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn’t even see it download before it was done.

I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There’s all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.

It sounds like you want to bring Sorcerer Linux back.

The packages were kept in the Grimore and you cast spells to build, install, etc.

https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=sorcerer

It was a very early source-based distro.

Desktops: Linux (Mint)
Laptops: Linux (Mint)
Phones: Linux (Android)
Servers: Linux (Debian)
SBC: Linux (Armbian / Raspberry Pi OS)
ESP32/ESP8266: Arduino (I’ve never really taken to MicroPython)
ATMega 328P/etc : Arduino

Huge congrats to the team and my condolences on the loss.

FreeCAD is a huge part of my engineering toolkit and your work is greatly appreciated.

I expect that the 1.0 will be in the Debian repos by about 2026 and I’m looking forward to it. Stable distros be stable distros. :-p

I had to scroll way too far down for this one, but it was the first one I thought of.

Another one would be Gary Indiana

For a loose definition of “me” and more “my parents when I was young” was a mid-70’s Fiat. I have lots of memories where we waited in some parking lot or by the freeway for a tow truck or some other help to arrive.

I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.

It was quite early for me. I shouldn’t post when delirious.

That doesn’t make them correct. The strength of the belief has no bearing on reality unless it’s combined with evidence to warrant that belief.

I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.

What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.