According to one of our adjuncts: “Windows just works for dev, why are we teaching Linux at all?”

He didn’t last.

Apple isn’t alone in that. More and more sites and programs are become space inefficient.

Not all of us have dual 36" ultra high rez monitors for you to waste the space with more and more area round every element. I know you’re proud of your UI design skillz, but it’s getting really ducking annoying.

I had to send in a screenshot of one Google page for editing contacts. 90% of the screen was fixed sized menus and the contacts photo. The last 10% was a tiny scrollbars box for editing a very long list of options. The devs responded basically “meh”, though a few months later it adjusted to be a bit better. Do they ever test anything that’s not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?

I did the same thing with the Linux machine there, but we got it up and running with a sweet potato using a patch set for the kernel and cross compiling it from the basic potato release. We did find the drivers for the VGA card we salvaged from a scrap pile too! Got it up to the full 640x480 supported by the card.

You could say it was a sweet setup.

I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.

It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!

I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.

Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/attiny10

Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.

They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>

#! Linux was amazing. So simple in the UI, but plenty of features if you wanted to set them up.

Been there! It was Avery different time.

The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.

I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…

Yeah, our big democracy talk is just like the pirates code from Pirates of the Caribbean: flexible, with a strong vein of selfishness.

I was given a logging on a RedHat server in 1997. It was operated by a fellow student in the dorm.

My school taught the engineers how to use SunOS for class, so it wasn’t a huge leap to start using a telnet connection to a local Linux machine.

Within a few months I was dual booting an older desktop Linux/Win95, and away I went. Since then it’s been about 90%+ of my daily computer use on Linux machines.

When the US tries it’s hand at nation building, and our government diplomats, consultants, and mentors are making suggestions to nascent nations in what kind of republic framework to use, we do not suggest the same Constitutional system we have. We normally try to guide others to a variation of parliamentary systems with a weak president figurehead.

Our own government knows not to use it’s own model for other nations! It’s not that we’re exceptional, just that we’ve beaten the odds so far. We used to try to copy the US system other places, but they kept failing to executive branches that seized power. How the US held on as long as it did is a wonder. That said, it looks like our exceptional run is effectively over. The fox is in the henhouse and Congress is cheering the bloodbath.

Back when a PROM really meant something.

You could also drop into a serious bios-style motherboard manager to really control booting and hardware configs.

Wow. I haven’t seen a Sun keyboard like that in … geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.

No! I’ve used OSU’s mirrors for years. This would be a notable hit to OSS resources.

Because when I move left in tabs, the cursor isn’t clear which tab I’m on. It also tried to sit off the left edge of a terminal in some editors because it aligns with the right side of the character (the tab), instead of the left.

I do see how tabs are a better option : they allow the one editing the file to decide how wide the indentation is. That’s actually good User Interface design, by separating the data from the rendering layout.

I can see the argument both ways, but I like to use spaces so the visual and editing interfaces are more standard.

Would it be better if I clarified by calling them “ball bearing balls”? Or would that lead to my unpleasant pummeling by steel balls?

I haven’t looked into it too hard yet. I saw some design that would allow remote GUI rendering for Wayland, but it likely won’t be the all in design for network transparency that X11 had (has).

I use SSH with X forwarding for all kinds of system maintenance and demos in my CS courses.

15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.

Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.

The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.

Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.

I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.

Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.

That’s part of the power of the term. Globalism is a valid term for a view about how integrated international markets foster economic and social benefits, while Globalist is often used as a racist dogwhistle. Racists often use small variations of accepted terms to conflate and low key their hatred in public venues.

It would be very hard to start a show like Sesame Street because of the fascist right. Swings and roundabouts.