• 2 Posts
  • 380 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.

    The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.

    The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.

    Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.






  • Ubuntu has started going off the deep end. They’ve been heading in that direction for a while, but they recently (I guess like 5 years-ish ago) hit this corporatey, money-grabbing, mentality that’s so completely opposite of what made Linux great.

    The feel I get about it is 10 years ago, tutorials were written using Ubuntu because it was an easy distro to use and was a great platform for beginners, so people used that as their platform to teach. Now it feels like tutorials are written using Ubuntu because they’re being sponsored to. A lot of how-tos I come accros have the same vibe as watching a video animation tutorial that uses adobe and oh gosh, it’s also sponsored by adobe. Or a networking tutorial sponsored by Cisco. I’ve actually started just looking to see if another distro is acknowledged before I actually see what they have to say.

    There’s a very different feel if you’re trying to set something up and a website has “if you’re in this family of linux, here’s what you do, or if you’re in this one, do this” versus “so you want to set up x in linux? Here’s how you do it in Ubuntu”. It’s as if no other distro exists.

    Anyway, ignoring that rant. Linux is super stable these days, you can take pretty much any distro and you’ll be fine. I tend to gravitate toward the base distros, like fedora, opensuse, and Debian over Rocky, mint, etc. I haven’t come across one in the past five years that gave me any trouble, except when it came to updated nvidia drivers and wayland. In which case some distros were behind a month or two on getting those updated.









  • I just had an issue with the vscodium flatpak, been using it for two months with no issue in an online course, got to learning GUIs, import module, doesn’t exist. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t there, installed three different python versions of it three different ways, still nothing. Couldn’t even get vscodium to point to a different interpreter that I knew was there (yet it doesn’t say it’s not there, just that some things won’t work). Still nothing. Three hours later, after trying everything I could think of, I realized that it was because I installed the flatpak version when it clicked that it worked in Geany and I didn’t have python 3.13 in my repos, yet that was the only one I could see in vscodium.