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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not a “hater” in terms of trying/wanting to be mean, but I do disagree. I think a lot of people downvoting are frustrated because this attitude takes an issue in one application (yay), for one distro, and says “this is why Linux sucks / can’t be used by normies”. Clearly that’s not true of this specific instance, especially given that yay is basically a developer tool. At best, “this is why yay sucks”. (yay is an AUR helper - a tool to help you compile and install software that’s completely unvetted - see the big red banner. Using the AUR is definitely one of those things that puts you well outside the realm of the “common person” already.)

    Maybe the more charitable interpretation is “these kinds of issues are what common users face”, and that’s a better argument (setting aside the fact that this specific instance isn’t really part of that group). I think most people agree that there are stumbling blocks, and they want things to be easier for new users. But doom-y language like this, without concrete steps or ideas, doesn’t feel particularly helpful. And it can be frustrating – thus the downvotes.


  • 100% monitoring and control doesn’t exist. Your children will find a loophole to access unrestricted internet, it’s what they do.

    Similarly, children will play in the street sometimes despite their parents’ best efforts to keep them in. (And yes, I would penalize Ford for building the trucks that have exploded in size and are more likely to kill children, but that’s a separate discussion.)

    I get what you’re saying, I just think it’s wrong to say “parental responsibility” and dust off your hands like you solved the problem. A parent cannot exert their influence 24/7, they cannot be protecting their child 24/7. And that means that we need to rely on society to establish safer norms, safer streets, etc, so that there’s a “soft landing” when kids inevitably rebel, or when the parent is in the shower for 15 minutes.



  • People aren’t misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they’re doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world’s largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.



  • I use two monitors, and also KDE’s virtual desktops for work. A killer feature for me is that KDE has a window manager option to “pin” specific windows so that they are present on every desktop. This means I can have my terminal and slack client split across one screen and pinned, and then the other screen can contain my “main focus” on each of the virtual desktops - browser, editor, or email. I always can see the chat/terminal but can easily swap the desktop to get to a different focus.

    I know that I could just have everything on one desktop and use the alt-tab to change that main window. But the alt tab is slow and non-deterministic. I may have to cycle between five things before I get to the browser, for example. With virtual desktops, I know where each focus is geometrically, and I can always swap over quickly with my key shortcuts.


  • the_sisko@startrek.websitetoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    If you can’t remember or don’t know the syntax well you can still understand a systemd timer, but that is much hard for the crontab.

    I will agree that it is easier to read a timer than a Cron entry, especially if you’ve seen neither of them before.

    Granted, crontab uses fewer characters, but if you only set up either once in a blue moon you’ll need the docs to write either for a long time.

    This is where I disagree. I very rarely setup a Cron job, but when I do, I don’t need to look anywhere for docs. I run crontab -e and the first line of the editor contains a comment which annotates each column of the Cron entry (minute, hour, dom, mon, dow). All that’s left is to put in the matching expressions, and paste my command.

    Compare that to creating a new timer, where I need to Google a template .service and .timer file, and then figure out what to put in what fields from the docs. That’s probably available in the manual pages, but I don’t know which one. It’s just not worth it unless I need the extra power from systemd.

    This is from somebody who has several systemd timers and also a few Cron jobs. I’m not a hater, just a person choosing the best and easiest choice for the job.


  • the_sisko@startrek.websitetoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Cron may be old but I don’t think it’s “legacy” or invalid. There’s plenty of perfectly good, modern implementations. The interface is well established, and it’s quite simple to schedule something and check it. What’s more, Cron works on new Linux systems, older non-systemd ones, and BSD and others. If all you need is a command run on a schedule, then Cron is a great tool for the job.

    Systemd services and timers require you to read quite a bit more documentation to understand what you’re doing. But of course you get more power and flexibility as a result.