Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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  • 193 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlIs Linux As Good As We Think It Is?
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    3 days ago

    You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.

    Of course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you should want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.

    Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.





  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlCompanies that use desktop Linux
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    25 days ago

    In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.

    The largest company I’ve worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.

    The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that “I don’t need support, I know what I’m doing”. Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.

    TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they’ll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you’ll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.


  • So what? What good is a “progressive” party if they prop up genocide? The Conservatives are going to take the next election precisely because of cowardice like this. Why should anyone consider voting for the NDP (or the Liberals for that matter) if their policies are the same where it matters?

    This is the thing the NDP doesn’t get: principles and passion are what drive Left-leaning voters. It’s not enough to be “not Conservative”. We already have that party. We need a party that taxes the shit out of billionaires, blocks fossil fuels, and yes, stops selling weapons to genociders. Without the courage to be better, they’re just another meaningless colour on the ballot.


  • Taking a principled, public stand on a moral issue and then subverting said statement via a backdoor through the US is sadly unsurprising from Liberals. The NDP however:

    “Canada must not be fuelling the ongoing genocide in Gaza with Canadian-made weapons,” said Heather McPherson, a Canadian parliament member and foreign affairs critic for the NDP.

    Aren’t they still propping up this government? Someone should remind Singh that the NDP are nothing if they can’t have stronger principles than Liberals.




  • Because Ubuntu is the worst of both worlds. Its packages are both old and unstable, offering zero benefit over always-up-to-date distros like Arch or the standard Debian.

    Especially when you’re running a containerised environment, there’s just no reason to opt for anything other than a stable, boring base OS while your containers can be as bleeding edge, crazy, or even Ubuntu-based as you like.








  • I’ve been using Arch for about 15 years or so, and yes, I build up cruft… in my home directory ;-). The system itself is remarkably good at keeping tidy. The one spot to keep an eye on is /var/cache/pacman, as that’s where it stores every package you download before installation and it won’t delete it without you asking it to.

    Any new config file will be saved with a .pacsave extension, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for those, but that’s basically it