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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • My perspective as a physics professor at a public university who has spent most of my adult life in academia. While there’s some true points here, it’s annoying to read such overgeneralized statement. I’m not going to generalize my perspective as truth for all universities, but I doubt my experience is far from ordinary. I doubt the OP is in academia.

    • As someone else stated, funding is an issue. Many programs, departments, and support offices are underfunded and understaffed.
    • While I hate microsoft products, it is simply less expensive to pay microsoft then all the additional required IT staff to self-host servers and email. Salary and benefits to faculty and staff is the majority of a university’s expenses.
    • My IT staff at my current institution helped me access our file system on my linux machine, even though they don’t officially support linux. But this was simply extra work for one of the staff who has a thousand other fires going on.
    • 2FA is available to those without smartphones via USB dongles. And as much as I hate Edge, stupid microsoft Edge allows access to services without 2FA.
    • At my grad school university, we had an IT member dedicated to managing unix/linux system for the physics faculty and grad students.
    • How is it the fault of a University that the majority of the public uses social media? Yes, my institution uses social media, though I don’t think they use facebook anymore… Besides Lemmy, I have zero social media, and yet I am aware of all events going on campus. Everything is notified via university email, not just social media.
    • The majority of math and physics students here learn LaTeX. As someone that has sat on numerous search committees hiring additional physics faculty, latex is prevalent in physics area of academia.
    • Campus PC labs exist all over our campus. Yes, they are window machines.
    • It would be awesome to have local faculty and student created research tools. Who’s going to do it? Between my teaching, committee, and advising responsibilities, I have zero free time. I can’t create these tools. What specific tools are you referring to? Our campus library website is pretty darn good at accessing peer-review literature for faculty and students, with no ads.

    ChatGPT and AI is a giant problem right now in academia. Nothing I do seems to convince students that using AI to do their homework harms their education. If someone knows a solution to this, I’m all ears. I’m tired of people blaming me, or the university, for things we’re trying to find solutions to.



  • I doubt debian is what you want if you want to stay up to date. It’s newish now, but won’t get updates for another 2 years.

    I’ve never run into issues updating to all short term Ubuntu releases between LTS versions when I used Ubuntu. Though I’ve now switched to Debian as I don’t care about latest updates and some snaps consistently gave me issues.

    Maybe Fedora is what you would prefer though?

    KDE is available on any distro. Just need to install it if it’s not the default desktop.








  • Like how small? I tile on my 14" laptop screen and still infinitely prefer it over floating. Workspaces exist so you don’t clutter up one screen too much. Maybe people aren’t familiar with or used to taking advantage of multiple workspaces? I started using them more when i3 introduced me to a simple super+number hotkey system to switch quickly.




  • Yeah, it was a revelation when I discovered tiling. I was always doing work with two windows open, and i’d spend so much time fiddling and resizing the windows. Then i’d open a third window and wouldn’t know what to do with it.

    I used i3 for many years and switched to sway when migrating to wayland. It does what I need and see no reason to try hyprland or other tilers.



  • I would say that mostly applies to the story. Warcraft 3 introduced the epic Arthas story line and wotlk is the conclusion to that. Nothing else they’ve done with wow on the story side has really compared to that. Though if you never played warcraft 3, this may not have as much impact on you. Oh and the story in some later expansions really stinks, such as shadowlands.

    However, from the actual gameplay side, I would argue retail is infinitely superior now. Classes have mechanical depth and options. Max level content is much more varied with raids, mythic+, and delves. Warband features make the game so much more casual friendly, allowing you to hop around on alts.

    If all you care about is the leveling experience and you don’t want to really play much at max level, then classic and especially wotlk is kinda peak wow at that, but otherwise, retail is an improved game as a whole.


  • There’s tons of youtube videos / tutorials on how to create a live usb of a distro, such as linux mint. This will allow you to boot into linux and play around without installing anything and get a feel for linux. It’s nowhere as tech wizardry as you think.

    And if all your games are on steam and don’t have anti cheat things, they’ll probably just all work with proton (linux compatibility tool in steam).