Huh. I wonder… could you create an EMP mine powerful enough to fry the electrical system of a car or motorcycle? Interesting idea.

I use a convenience package on top of stow (yas-bdsm), but yeah: stow is foundational.

IME, beyond the install, it’s all distro- and desktop-specific.

• How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like “Install software”, but on Arch (you’d have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you’re helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
• Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called “settings”, I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there’s can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
• One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don’t think that’s an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can’t remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that’s Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that’s because he couldn’t find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
• Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don’t think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There’s a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller… well, that’s very specific and again varies by controller. I don’t think you can cover all of these edge cases.
• Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there’s a lot of moving parts. It’s not just: go to the game’s web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
• Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I’d guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE’s relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they’ve learned to look, which aren’t always where they are under KDE (I can’t speak much about Gnome - I don’t use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn’t as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that’s my experience.

Not that kind of “use!”

That’s… a big gap. I think I’d just be confused all the time if I had to switch between them.

I’m lucky. I live in a place where stonecrop is native, and it grows like a weed. Except it doesn’t spread (quickly), and I love the look.

We had some landscaping done and they moved some stonecrop and forgot to move one back. it wasn’t even planted; it just grew right there where they’d left it!

Great plants.

Also, biological monsters would overheat very fast.

That’s why they tend to breath fire n stuff.

Old Godzilla movies got it right. He did look like he was walking on the moon. Not bouncing, but he probably had atrophied muscles from being in the water all the time.

Poor guy. Overheated and tired, no wonder he was grumpy!

That’s brilliant. The thumbnail spoils it… at least, it shows me the punchline.

I don’t know why; it just popped into my head. Maybe because the float would just make snacking easier for the sharks?

Edit: because my home server insists on rewriting all image URLs to proxy requests through that server, and it often breaks things. I gotta re-home.

https://files.catbox.moe/6awpqm.gif

C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

I can think if plenty of situations where system time is

• Optional
• Unreliable
• And even potentially disallowed by the user

In fact, if you don’t set up your containers right, the system time is almost always wrong.

This is really good to hear. As someone who hasn’t used Windows since 2004, it’s easy to lose perspective of how daunting a self-switch can feel.

I’m glad to hear your experience is going well. I know you’re experiencing many little annoyances and things which seem harder than they should be, but are not focusing on those. It’s always good to hear the perspective from a new user!

If that’s the only error mechanism, sure. Exceptions in most languages tend to be relatively expensive, though, and most have a cheaper idiomatic way of returning error codes; you’d want to use those if they’re available, right?

Does Rust use exceptions a lot? I don’t know. V has panic and catch, but you almost never see them. Idiomatic is Option (?) and Return (!) values, which I thought V borrowed from Rust. Go does the (val, error) tuple-ish return thing, and while it too has catchable panics, they’re discouraged in favor of (error) return values.

Depends on the language. “Higher level” is a pretty broad field!

At first it wasn’t an issue: I used Voyager for this account, and Interstellar for the alt. Then I decided I liked Interstellar’s interface more and started using it for both. Both list the account in most places, but Interstellar doesn’t show it when replying.

I started making enough mistakes that I played with the settings and discovered Interstellar links the color theme to the account, and now I can easily tell which I’m using.

I’m certain I’ll continue to make mistakes. Thorn is surprisingly seductive, but the real issue is that auto complete and autocorrect on my phone keyboard has decided that the correct spelling for “the” is “þe”. I could correct it, but I feel bad for it; it’s just trying to he helpful.

Gosh darn it, am I using thorns in this account again?? I didn’t mean to.

I recently learned that only Icelandic does that. Eth was dropped early in old English, and thorn was used in both places. Additionally (as I understand it, now), while thorn was a direct “th” (voiced or unvoiced) sound, even when eth was in use it want orthographically a simple replacement for voiced “th”.

I guess Icelandic kept it, but eth was not in use through most of the old English, medieval period. And then the Normans came, and fucked written English completely up.

It’s not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of “Hushabye Mountain” is played, if music isn’t already playing.

Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I’m on my third). So I got a wall switch that’s turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

All year? Please tell me “Halloween eyes” is just “scary eyes” and that you do this all year.

Interesting. Our sensors don’t see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they’re a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn’t see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I’d have to figure something else out, because our’s get everywhere.