This is the exact hole that had me quit Gentoo so many times over the years. When I stopped trying to be cool and just set my system up with KDE it finally stuck and I’ve been happily using it ever since.

Once you’re past setup and understand package management, what is a distro but a desktop environment, after all?

Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.

Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.

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I suppose I don’t see what is conceptually challenging about chords; they’re just physically annoying and require memorization. Most people are used to control key chords at least, so emacs benefits from that. Whereas vim requires a deeper shift in thinking.

Memorizing chords is conceptually simpler than taking on a modal mindset. I sure got pissed at insert mode plenty of times while I was learning vim.

Thankfully this was during my college masochistically-acquiring-skills-that-make-me-feel-cool phase where I was also learning LaTeX, so I just focused on the future gainz. I’m so glad I did on both counts.

Sign language is speech, it’s just non-verbal speech.

What ways do you mean? More than just expert-systems, I’d imagine.

The repair cost is ultimately the most significant, that’s true.

We’ll have to see how statistics play out in the long run: that’s where the non-anecdotal evidence for Toyota’s supremacy comes from.

Cheap cars definitely are more reliable if you pick the right brands. On all the other points it just doesn’t make enough of a difference to me to justify the enormous cost increase.

Our $10k used Camry is still kicking ass over ten years later and hasn’t ever needed work more extensive than replacing leaking struts. The reliability truly is astounding.

EDIT: But, let’s not talk about my camera-buying habits lol

For podcasts and audiobooks and even incidental music listening $10 panasonic buds go the distance for me.

When I’m sitting down to enjoy music at home, then it’s the $80 sony studio monitors. Still excellent value.

Give me my headphone socket back, phone makers :(

What do you mean? Payment isn’t anti-FOSS at all, it’s just a lot harder to make money when the source is libre.

There is a middle ground for sure. Installing an OS sounds like a solid unit in such a curriculum.

I’m totally with you. I just think the level of informed choices that we nerds seek will not be attainable through a reasonable gen ed curriculum. It would be an improvement, though!

I genuinely think the push for bigger maps has been a significant toxic influence on game design. Just look at Yooka-Laylee or even Banjo Tooie TBH. That’s to say nothing of the modern open-world genre.

I feel the same way about photorealism. I want artistic interpretations much more than I want rote simulations.

Only computer nerds think this way. People have a finite time and capacity for learning, and if computers can serve their needs without spending a large fraction of that precious resource it would be terrible to mandate such an expenditure anyway.

I wish we could all be completely educated and independent in every way that matters, but it’s not possible.

This is why people on lemmy are confused about a lack of adoption. Federation is significantly confusing and subtle; we’re just mostly dorks with the pre-inclination to get it.

I too have to watch myself to keep from falling into the hole of blaming the dumbing-down of computing systems on a moral failure of users. It is not.

Really, the fact that you treat anime as a monolith is the wildest part of this take. I’d love to know how you came to such a deep undersanding of the skill that goes into all anime.

People almost always mean positive punishment when they say negative reinforcement.

I wish more people understood this. Insurance is an extra cost paid to protect from catastrophe. Anything that saves you money on a regular basis is not insurance: where does the extra money come from?

Pet insurance is another bizarre misunderstanding of this nature. Unless there are procedures you are unwilling to forego to save your pet, but completely unable to afford, you are throwing money away in the long run. The entire actuarial profession exists to ensure this fact. Take what you’d spend on premiums, and invest it in a good savings vehicle instead.

That’s super interesting. I adore RPN on caclulators and had never heard any drawbacks well-articulated.

I ended up switching to ‘Simple Keyboard’ for this exact reason. I’ve actually gotten a lot better at phone typing since I’ve been forced to do so. I can go nearly as fast as I used to, though I do have to keep the keyboard in my peripheral vision.

Phone keyboards aren’t nearly as tiny as they were in the OG iPhone era!