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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I used LeftWM for a while, it’s a window manager built in rust. One of the cool things about it was its themes functionality. You put all your dot files in a particular directory for things like your bar, and then you can save and switch multiple themes with a short command. Had some interesting community ones too like one based on the Star Trek TNG computer terminals. Ended up moving away from it after a while because it just didn’t quite feel polished enough for a daily deiver yet and I got a little tired of the constant tweaking



  • About average. I have a master’s in maths, and am pretty competent at tech stuff. Also do a lot of music. Those are just interests though, really. It’s easy to get caught up on the idea that being good at the skills society deems as “valuable” or “smart” means you’re in some way objectively smarter than other people. I’ve just found that isn’t remotely the case though. People have different interests, I’ve heard “dumb” people passionately talk about things they love, going into complex inner-workings that I would have to also spend hundreds of hours trying to wrap my head around. Also, a lot of the “smartest” people I know are utterly clueless at anything social. Sure they may end up as maths researchers but they can’t pick up on nuances of social interaction.

    Some people would argue that the metric for smartness is a little more set in stone, usually the same people who think that IQ is anything more than an ego-trip to justify MENSA charging people money for a shitty magazine and “proof” that they’re smart. It’s never felt that simple to me though, there are so mant facets of life to be understood and everyone has different understandings of them





  • I’ve got to go with Endeavour. I’m not sure it’s so much that it’s overrated, but more that the community talks about it as a replacement for Manjaro which is far from the case. The installation may be easier than arch but once it’s all up and running you’re going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out. The documentation for endeavour is incredibly lacking too. It’s an unnecessary middle step between a “beginner” distro and arch. If you can’t follow the arch installation guide on the wiki then you’re going to have even more trouble when it comes to endeavour


  • Been using PeerTube on and off for about a year now, been planning on starting a maths education channel on Trom. It’s definitely got potential, but I don’t see the average Youtube user migrating over to it any time soon. The main issue really is that children/young teens are a large portion of the target audience for a lot of big creators these days and the mobile apps for peertube are heavily lacking still. Not helped of course by the fact that one of the better android apps, NewPipe, which allows both YouTube and PeerTube in one place is not on the Play Store


  • If you don’t mind having some outdated packages (or using nix for the few you want to be most up to date) then you may find Debian works best for your needs. Manjaro’s also a solid choice but the team behind it have been in some drama over the past few years so more people are saying to avoid it these days.

    You could use Arch, its installation is nowhere near as difficult as people often state (it’s also got much easier in recent years) but I don’t think it’d fit your “it just works” needs. It does “just work” once properly set up, but the issue is making sure it’s properly set up. If it’s your first time doing that extra bit of configuration then you’re bound to miss a few things




  • 2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just… worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.

    As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn’t use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.

    Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There’s been some frustrations but I can’t see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end