Luthis, you’re doing God’s work here. You are learning by experimentation and then, importantly, documenting and sharing what you’ve learned. There is absolutely zero wrong and only good to be had in either of those and in combining them, you’re doing service to our entire community.

I REGRET buying an nvidia adapter when I had the opportunity to buy an AMD/Radeon adapter.

During the pandemic, I purchased an GeForce GTX 1650. It’s an older, Turing hardware-based card, so you’d think the driver support would be pretty mature, right? It has been NOTHING but problems.

On nouveau, it’s stable, but 3d acceleration just doesn’t work right. Under the nvidia open source driver, it corrupts the screen after boot and locks up entirely second later. Under the proprietary driver, it freezes on boot a good amount of the time.

Now, once I get it booted, it’s solid as a rock. I’ve gotta crank the engine over five or six times every time I DO boot, though. If I had it to do over again, I’d definitely have stuck with AMD.

“Brave Hero from Finland, you’ve been struck by a bus and are going to reincarnate into–”

“No I wasn’t. That bus CHASED ME DOWN two alleys, over a fire hydrant, into, and out of a Starbucks. It did NOT hit me. You just summoned me here.”

“Err… anyway, this world needs a hero to–”

“Write hardware drivers? A kernel module? Some inline assembly?”

"Err… the demon lord… er… "

“DID YOU EVEN MAIL THE LIST? Hah… Okay. Does this world have logic gates of any kind? I need to get this knocked out as soon as possible. I’ve got the entirety of the bcachefs patchset to review before 6.7 is in release.”

Yeah, that was close to the end of that job. I didn’t want to be there, and that particular manager was really upset that they couldn’t just eliminate those servers. He wanted his folks trained on them, but then refused to actually let them spend any time training on them. I was a scapegoat and took the severance deal ASAP.

“I’ll Become the Strongest Adventurer in the Other World with My Maximum Level Open Source Operating System Development Skills.”

You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.

This. Too many partitions for a home system can get pretty stupid pretty quick. But OP has just the right amount of separation between system and data. I’ve known people that were uncomfortable without breaking /var (or /var/log) off into its own partition, but that’s really overkill for a stable, personal system, IMO.

computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.

I feel personally called out by this statement!

Seriously, the big one for me, is that I like having drive encryption. It protects my computer and data should it fall into the hands of, say, burglers. I also like turning it up to the elevens simply because I’m a bit TOO paranoid. You really need more than 1GB of ram to do argon2id key derivation, which is what fde is all moving to for unlocking purposes, and BIOS just can’t do that. My main workstation is using a powerful, but older mobo with gigabyte’s old, horrid faux EFI support.

Another good one for the security-conscientious person is Secure Boot, meaning that you control what kernels and bootloading code is allowed to boot on your computer, preventing Evil Maid-type attacks: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

That’s pretty far fetched, but maybe not too out of the question if you, say, work for a bank or accountant.

Of course none of that matters if you don’t practice good operational security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor is a thing that any GOOD project or IT department considers. How many of your staff can you afford to lose if they all happen to be travelling in the same bus, on their way to eat at the same place for lunch when an asteroid inevitably punches through said bus and/or diner.

‘Hit by an asteroid’ is a little unrealistic. Sentenced to prison for 15 to Life has happened in the Open Source community at least once before. The project I linked to had a Bus Factor of about one. It’s now ‘old code using outdated APIs’ and is considered obsolete.

I’ve personally seen legal and criminal issues for a single individual cripple IT departments before, meaning their bus factor was also way too low. I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems. Natural disaster, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are very serious existential threats to even the largest of organizations.

Since Linux seems to be a good project, I can’t imagine that the discussion hasn’t been had, in public or in private. Millions of individuals and dozens upon dozens of big corporations depend on Linux, Open source and otherwise. If the bus comes for core maintainers or project leaders we have at least SOME backup.

“Here’s something I made for my school work. It occurs that it might be useful to others in my line of study.”

WTG! You just EXEMPLIFIED the open source ethic!

My favorites:

Mono:

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

Period. Full stop. A line of nothing but exclamation points. The Iosevka family blows every other mono-width font out of the water with at LEAST one, if not more, of its extremely customizable variations.

F/W:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comfortaa

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Rowdies

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway

This almost seems like a good idea… if unicode weren’t already shaky enough.

UTF-8 is, honestly, pretty amazing. It lets you do things like compose latin-character text, and then interpose words like 𰻞.

That’s ‘biáng’, which is, to my understanding, a kind of Chinese noodle dish. It’s apparently the most complex Chinese character, comprising more than 50 strokes. (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+30EDE).

In hex it’s encoded as: 0xF0 0xB0 0xBB 0x9E

So, yeah, only 8 bytes to describe a character that looks like white noise to me unless I zoom WAY in on it! (My vision’s getting pretty bad, tbh. I need it to be about the size it shows up on compart.com to make out the individual radical characters.)

If you were to count strokes on ‘biáng’, you end up with 5 bytes to encode 11 pen strokes or 2.2 strokes per byte. At 8 bytes to 57 pen strokes, the information density goes up to 7.125 strokes per byte.

So in Latin characters provided by UTF-8, you end up with very similar storage requirements. To encode the much more complex character, you get more than 3 times the information density.

I will never not be impressed with people who get themselves off drugs and have endless respect for that.

Manjaro was NOTHING but problems when I installed it.

I am offended by snaps. I feel they’re a disingenuous attempt to control the FOSS ecosystem.

I am OFFENDED by content blocking and policing. It’s a very blatant attempt to keep kids from getting important healthcare information. It ends up spreading disease and creating miserable people.

I, personally, think that many rabbis would be offended at making a symbol the focus of your worship, and that a certain rabbi in particular would be perhaps more than offended if you made the particular gibbet they nailed him to the focus of your worship.

This. My spouse is working on an online business and needed a laptop to carry around to do inventory with. I happen to have an old Asus 32-bit Celeron netbook collecting dust, so I gave it a bit of a wipedown, installed the latest version of Debian with XFCE on it, and let them install what they needed from there.

So if you get a 64-bit machine AT ALL, it will absolutely run the latest versions of Linux.

(Why is this a thing?

Lots of computers in industry are very low-spec. They use less power and have fewer requirements. As long as there are people who use that hardware and/or are willing to port fixes and new kernel features to it, it’ll keep getting updates. You only run into the ‘dropped compatibility’ thing when really no one is using it.)

I’m always nervous when hearing about new filesystems since a certain high profile news incident a several years back.

I really, really, really hope that Kent Overstreet has a really good relationship with any partner or spouse he may or may not have.

There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.

This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It’s all that’s needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.

The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it’s got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn’t necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.

I don’t think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn’t take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.

Where I’d personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that’s in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It’s harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.

In the ‘modern’ Desktop Linux space, I’d like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I’d like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.

Start with Mint or Pop!OS. I’m not familiar with the Surface hardware, but Mint, in particular, seems to make driver handling a breeze. I’m very comfortable recommending Mint to folks new to Linux.

The last version of PS I seriously spent time to try to get working on WINE was CS2, which is now ‘EOL’ according to Adobe. It’s quite a few years old at this point, so things may be different with newer versions.

There are technical issues, which may have changed since, like PS’s scratch file handling. Adobe stuff in general tends (tended) to simply ignore the fact that modern operating systems all do swap files or partitions and do all their own virtual memory. WINE just didn’t work well with this approach, and various memory-related errors were common, especially when working with larger files.

The single biggest issue for me actually working with the painting tools was WINE tended to vomit when PS wanted to display any kind of hardware-accelerated cursor on screen, like for most painting brushes. Selection tools tended to be okay, but my experience was that when you wanted a painting brush, WINE would simply not render what PS was trying to do, even for things as simple as the round brush outline.

The most immediate thing I can’t find on that list that I need and have run into recently is better single-channel editing. For example, by default you can’t just edit a channel’s alpha/transparency. This makes it very difficult for me to do additive masks. There are ways to do this, but they are much more difficult for me.

One I ran into yesterday, and doesn’t seem to be on the list is an inability to edit gradients in a live manner. Clicking ‘Edit this gradient’ brings up the gradient palette, but most of its menu options simply don’t respond.

There are lines in the roadmap list about improving the tool palettes, but nothing pertaining to these issues.

In the past, I’ve attempted to submit feature requests for selection handling, only to have those requests ignored, or in one case being directly told, ‘That’s not something we’re interested in working on or accepting patches for.’ Investigating others’ requests led me to understand that was a very common thing to hear from the GIMP team.

That was about three years ago. I’d LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing ‘Yeah, we’ll never do that,’ is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.

I’m… very frustrated with GIMP and its development team. I really badly need a good raster editor and GIMP is just not that editor. The GIMP team tends to discourage suggestions and volunteer work that does not originate from within their group, so I don’t have a lot of hope of that changing.

Photoshop on WINE can be made to work, but it’s a terribly bad solution for many reasons.

I certainly don’t want to recommend either of them the way I do other applications and OSes in my list. Even the ones I mention that have frustrations are things I’m still willing to use (and enjoy) on a daily basis.

LEX writes in another reply:

Dump Gimp. Krita is the way.

Krita is great. It’s not perfect, and doesn’t provide some functionality I personally need. However, the Krita team really does seem intent on improving it and making it a better application, and that shows in its development and featureset. In time, I hope to completely replace anything I have to go back to GIMP or PS for.

Inkscape simply eliminated any dependence I had on other vector editors like Visio or Illustrator. It’s amazingly good. I’m hoping that Krita gets to that same place in the future.