• 2 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • 100% agree that it’s horrible wording, but the linguistics nerd inside my brain just has to say: that’s not the passive voice.

    Passive voice would be something like “a store was smashed into” or “a car was driven into the store”, where the grammatical subject is the semantic object. It can be used to avoid saying the subject of the sentence, who’s doing the action, but in this case they keep the active voice and just change the subject from a “driver” to a “car”.

    On another note, it’s also telling that the article first comments on financial damage, then that the driver is unhurt and the car is damaged, and only after that does it say that the store-owner and the two customers were unharmed.


  • The DEs listed for a distro will be ones you can get out of the box, i.e. you install the distro and it already has the DE. However, you can then install pretty much any DE/WM on pretty much any distro. Most of the time, you’ll also get a login screen where you can choose between different DEs, so you can try multiple on the same distro to see how you like them.

    Most of the ‘random desktops’ will be window managers, there are just a few main DEs, which each have a window manager bundled in. If you take one of the separate window managers (which can be tiling, stacking, or a mix) you’ll just have a bit more work to do to make it like you want, but they can have more customisation than full DEs. You can make most window managers look like pretty much any DE, but not necessarily the other way around. If you look at !unixporn@lemmy.ml, most of those are window managers. Saying they’re confusing to understand and you don’t want to have to customise them to make them look nice and add any separate programs you need for a full system is fair, but saying they’re ugly is kinda nonsensical, since you can make them look however you like.

    As for why some distros’ Plasmas look different, that’s just because it is itself quite customisable (from what I hear, the most customisable of the mainstream DEs). So if you install XeroLinux, you could customise it to look like stock Plasma, and vice versa.

    Long story short, don’t choose a distro based on their default DE or vice versa, don’t disregard window managers out of hand (but do if you just want a full out-of-the-box environment), and look at different distros’ customisations, as well as !unixporn@lemmy.ml and similar, to see what DEs can look like you want, but again you don’t have to decide distro based on that.








  • Aha. That all makes perfect sense. I wouldn’t personally have so much duplication, though, and get shift & modkeys on the thumbs to make easy combos, but it’s fine if you want them elsewhere. Do you use function keys that often? I just realised I use them so much I forgot to setup a layer for them, but that at least seems like it could go on one of the pinky keys. And a rotary encoder there would make heaps of sense.





  • Is one of the other framework’s you’ve used Django, and if so, how do they compare? I’ve never used Rails, but as far as I know, it’s a similar concept, with batteries included and MVC architecture.

    If there isn’t anything else that makes it better, I would personally recommend something like Django just because it’s Python, which isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If you are having issues with Python, the answer is pobably a google away, and if you want to do something other than webdev, it’s more likely to be in Python (AI/ML, data science, etc. mainly), including if you want to integrate something into a website. As far as I’m aware, Ruby’s pretty much only been used with Rails, and both are waning in popularity - as you say, you yourself have moved away.

    That being said, I don’t know Rails so that’s all conjecture. If you tell me it’s got something Django doesn’t that makes it easier to use, I’ll take that back.


  • You could do that at the firmware level, with QMK or ZMK macros (or, presumably, whatever other firmware). It might be a long one, but launching an application or the like could just be typing the combination that runs it. I haven’t used KDE, but something like super, then type the name, then enter, should work.

    Having said that, a quick look at keyd proposed by the other replier does seem like it has more than enough capability, and if you have one setup you want to use it for and not move the keyboard between computers, it very well might be the better choice for you.


  • While this generally gets a little chuckle from me, it really needs to die. It’s as old and untrue now as ‘ubuntu is just for noobs’, etc. I have never broken Arch with an update. I have broken it with changes I’ve made actively, but never just an upgrade. If you want to say the install process is unintuitive, or that the lack of defaults for practically anything you actually use is debilitating for new users, or overreliance on AUR is unsafe, or any number of other valid points, fine. But it doesn’t just break everything constantly.




  • I was going to ask you, but then figured I could do my own research and just ask if you think it’s reasonable. According to Our World in Data, the WHO says 4.2 million people die every year from outside pollution. Again according to Our World in Data, road transport accounts for 11.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously, that’s different to health-affecting pollution, and it might pollute more in places where people live compared to something like electricity generation which would likely be further from population, but it’s the best I could come up with. So that would mean we could attribute ~0.5 million deaths per year to road transport. According to Movotiv, there are 1.2 billion vehicles, 70 million daily driving trips, with an average distance of 15 km. That means a total annual distance traveled of ~383.25 billion km. So there’s 0.0035 deaths per year per vehicle, or 286 years per death per vehicle, and 1 death per 91,250km. That doesn’t sound right, and I blame the Movotiv statistics, unless I made a mistake. 300km/year for the average vehicle sounds ridiculously low, so something’s not right. I don’t have time to find the issue or better stats right now, but I might have a look later. In the interim, do you think my logic stacks up, or do you have better statistics?