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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • nous@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlGetting used to Helix
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    14 days ago

    IMO the best thing is to just start using it. You will start to pick things up fairly quickly then. Puzzles don’t often ingrain different ways todo things and often focus on weird or niche things that don’t come up as often. They can be a nice supplement to not a substitute for just using it in real world usescases.

    I do also find it helpful to read the shortcut keys on their site to get a feel for what is available. You won’t remember everything but it can be useful to know what is possible. Then when you hit a problem you may remember reading about something that can help and go look it up again.




  • Just dont format the drive when installing a new distro. BTRFS or not you can delete the system folders manually first if needed but I believe that some if not all distros will delete the system folders for you (at least ubuntu used to do this last I tried). And if not you can do it manually.

    It does not matter if you have a separate partition or not for /home installers won’t touch it if it already exists except to create a new user if needed. Remember, all the installers do is optionally format the drives, mount them then install files into those drives. If you skip the formatting and manually do that partitioning (or using an existing partition layout) it will still mount and write to the same places regardless of it they are separate partitions or not. So a separate partition does not add any extra protection to your home files at all.

    But regardless of what you do you should ALWAYS backup your home data anyway. Even with separate partitions or subvolumes the installer can touch or delete anything it wants to and you can easily click the wrong button or accidentally wipe thing. At most preserving your home saves you from restoring from a backup it should not be done instead of backup.


  • By far the most important thing is consistency

    This is not true. The most important thing is correctness. The code should do what you expect/want it to do. This is followed closely by maintainability. The code should be easy to read and modify. These are the two most important aspects and I believe all other rules or methodologies out there are in service of these two things. Normally the maintainability side of things as correctness is not that hard to achieve with any system of rules out there.

    You must resist the urge to make your little corner of the code base nicer than the rest of it.

    Uhg. I really don’t like these words. I agree with their sentiment, to a degree, but they make it sound like you should not try to improve anything at all. Just leave it as it is and write your new code in the same old crappy way that it always has been. Which is terrible advice. But I get what they are trying to say - you should not jump into a area swinging a wrecking ball around trying to make the code as locally nice as possible at the expense of the rest of the code base and other developmental practices around.

    In reality there is a middle ground. You should strive to make your corner of the code base as nice as possible but you should also take into account the rest of the code base and current practices as well. Sometimes having a little bit better local maintainability is not worth the cost of making the code base as a whole less maintainable. Sometimes a big improvement to local maintainability is worth a minor inconvenience to the code base as a whole - especially for fast moving parts of the code base. You don’t want something that no one has touched in 10 years to drastically slow down current features you are working on just to keep things consistent.

    Yes consistency is important. But things are far more nuanced than that statement alone. You should strive for consistency of a code base - it does after all have a big effect on the maintainability of the code base. But there are times that it hampers maintainability as well. And in those situations always go for maintainability over consistency.

    Say for instance some new library or an update to a library introduces a new much better way of working. Your code base is full of the old way though. Should you stick to the old way just to keep up with consistency? If the improvement is good enough then it might be worthwhile. Ideally if you can you would go though and update the whole code base to the new way of working. That way you improve things overall and keep consistency of the code base. But that is not always practical to do. It might be better to decide that the new way is worth switching to for new code, and worth refactoring old code when you are working in that area anyway but not worth the effort of converting the whole code base at once. This makes maintainability of the new code better, at the expense of old less used code.

    But the new way might not be a big enough jump in maintainability of new code that it is worth sacrificing the maintainability of the code base as a whole. Every situation like this needs to be discussed with your team and you need to decide on what makes most sense for your project. But the answer is not always that consistency is the most important aspect. Even if it is an important aspect.


  • Consistency as a means to correctness still means correctness is the more important aspect. Far too many projects and people that go hard on some methodologies and practices lose sight of their main goal and start focusing on the methods instead. Even to the point were the methods are no longer working toward the goal they originally set out to accomplish.

    Always have the goal in mind, once your practices start to interfere with that goal then it is time to rethink them.


  • There is no problem with having home on a different disk. But why do you want swap on the slower disk? These would benefit from being on the faster disks. Same with all the system binaries.

    Personally I would put as much as possible on the faster disk and mount the slower somewhere that the speed matters less. Like for photos/videos in your home dir.

    /boot can be anywhere though if you are getting a grub error that suggests the UEFI firmware is finding grubs first stage but grub is having issues after that. Personally I don’t use grub anymore, systemd-boot is far simpler as it does not need to deal with legacy MBR booting.


  • My point is the different levels of just working are subjective, not objective. I personally have spent far more time fixing bugs or just reinstalling ubuntu systems then I have over the same period for Arch systems. So many of my ubuntu installs just ended up breaking after a while where I have had the same Arch install on systems for 5+ years now. Could never get a Ubuntu system to last more then a year.

    Everyone has different stories about the different OSs. It is all subjective.


  • nous@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlWindows doesn't "just work"
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    2 months ago

    You can cherry-pick examples of problems from every OS. That is my point. They all have issues that you may or may not encounter and quite a few that would make people from other OSs scratch their head and think what the hell the devs are thinking. Pointing out one issue of one OS does not change any of that.

    Which is proven by the other replys to your comment - others dont find this issue to be as show stopping as you do and just live with it or dont use it at all. How many issues do you do the same for on your favorite OS?


  • There is no perfect OS that just works for everyone. They are all software so they all have bugs. People how say an OS just works have never hit those bugs or have gotten used to fixing/working around or flat out ignoring them.

    This is true of all OSs, including Windows, Linux and MacOS. They are all differently buggy messes.

    Linux is the buggy mess that works best for me though.


  • Once had a missing semi colon at the end of a c header file. The compiler kept complaining about the c file and never mentioned the header. Not all errors lead you to the right place.

    Though most of the time people just don’t read them. The number of problems I have solve for people by just copy pasting the error they gave me back to them…



  • Realtime is important on fully fledged workstations where timing is very important. Which is the case for a lot of professional audio workloads. Linux is now another option for people in that space.

    Not sure Linux can run on microcontrollers. Those tend to not be so powerful and run simple OSs if they have any OS at all. Though this might help the embedded world a bit increasing the number of things you can do with things that have full system on chips (like the Raspberry pi).



  • That is a bit more expensive and complex. Looks like this is configured with a couple of resistors for 5v from USB which is simple to get and a voltage reg to drop down to 3v3 optionally. Full PD requires a chip and active negotiation for higher voltage levels. Though there are chips that do that it does increase the complexity and cost and soldering skills a bit. Might not be worth it if all you work on is 5v or 3v3.




  • First thing I typically do when that happens is update my system and reboot. This is useful for ensuring everything is in a known consistent state and there is no weird runtime issues that happened since you last booted. And it is always good to upgrade before you reboot to ensure you are booting the latest kernel and drivers.

    If that does not help then I would start by closing down steam completely (ensure it is not running in the systray at all). Then launch steam though a terminal and start the game as you normally would. You will hopefully see some logs for the game in the terminal. Though it is very game dependent as to if that will be useful at all. If not I would look online to see if the game logs anything to any other file as some games tend to do their own logging or have a flag you can enable.

    If the game gives you some logs and hopefully an error message you can then see if it is useful to you and if not try googling for that error and the game name. I find this tends to dig up more specific help for games then general searches for terms like wont start or crashes though sometimes those general terms can find a solution as well.

    Note: if you try to launch steam in the terminal and it is already running you wont get any logs at all from it - it basically just forwards things to the main instance or quits as it does not need to do anything. Only the first instance you start will give you and useful logs.