My condolences. And as much as I hate Posit/Workbench, some of that is on your IT department. If I’m reading your comment correctly, you’re having issues because it needs admin privileges to update some things, namely packages. That’s honestly a very simple fix, they just need to grant your user NTFS write permissions to the Rstudio/Workbench install directory locally (and maybe some registry keys, but that’s not definite). That’s it. It’s a 10-second permanent fix and no more UAC prompts for you.

What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?

Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit’s documentation isn’t great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that’s even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There’s a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees’ blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it’s entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn’t some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it’s an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.

Their support is absolute shit too, it’s truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won’t get anyone who actually knows WTF they’re talking about until you’re escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it’s the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it’s their product at fault. It obviously couldn’t possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we’ve previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.

Don’t even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It’s even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially “nothing,” and the other is “firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful.” That’s not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that’s the problem.

So yeah, if you’re not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they’re absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don’t have any real competition.

Lots of those in C# now, especially with Unity coming along like it did.

On Error Resume Next never before have more terrible words been spoken.

Every time I’m reading a PowerShell script at work and see -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue I want to scream into a pillow and forcefully revert their commit.

I’ve actually done it a few times, but I want to do it every time.

The fact that Firefox isn’t listed as a browser alternative but Brave is throws any credibility that this article might have straight into the garbage.

Suggesting Brave anything throws its credibility into the shitter, much less multiple times in multiple categories.

It has become copypasta, but it is pretty much a direct quote of something Stallman said.

God I love the Cisco Call Manager default hold music and I don’t know why. I don’t mind holding at all when it’s this.

I’m considering switching everything to Debian eventually, but there’s a couple dedicated repos that make using Fedora on my laptop much easier for now.

I’d recommend against that. Debian is fantastic for a server, but I think it leaves a lot to be desired as a workstation OS as compared to Fedora.

You can get it there/make it that way, but Fedora is just better from a user experience/convenience perspective out of the box.

The tipping point for me was getting a sitewide ban for commenting “It’s always OK to punch a Nazi.”

A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.

Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.

Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

SQUEAK

really wish Linux would could up something similar.

I mean, it kinda already exists. Just run it in a Docker container and remap the users in the container to non-existent uids/gids on the host.

If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.

This is a very Desktop/workstation-centric view of the situation and you’re completely neglecting 3/4ths of the story. Linux is already hilariously dominant on the on-prem server and Cloud side of things. Like, it’s not even close. Pretty much any website you visit, the odds are overwhelming that it’s running Linux. Even Microsoft runs most of the underlying infrastructure for Azure and Github on Linux. Android is the #1 mobile phone platform in the world, which runs on, you guessed it, Linux.

And it’s already monetized to the gills. Red Hat has multi-billion earnings per quarter, every quarter, and Canonical is almost certainly going to IPO this year.

It’s already dominant in pretty much every space it touches and it has been for a very long time. Desktop/workstation is pretty much the singular exception to that.

When you see “Account created: 1997”.

“These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones.”

I have boots older than some people that are posting on Lemmy today…

Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.

I agree with everything you said except for this. Opinions are never wrong since they’re subjective, they’re just fucking stupid.

The only answer is Ublock Origin.

Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.

If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn’t zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.

Fwiw, Linus made a post today and said they’ve already arranged to compensate billet for the prototype.

That has very strong “I’m sorry that I got caught” energy.

It’s a motivational button.

You know how someone is a Linux user? Don’t worry, they’ll fuckin’ tell you. What’s worse? Tesla drivers or Linux users?

I’m going with “People with bad reading comprehension who find that the best use of their time is to make inflammatory off-topic posts that shit on millions of people for no reason other than having nothing better to do with that time.”

Linux is relevant to the “big supporter of Steam” point because Valve has invested so much in making Windows games Just Work™ in Linux. It wasn’t just mentioned for no reason and it has a direct connection to/supports the point they were making and the rationale behind it.

Please reevaluate the things that you choose to be.

Would need to lean on AI for something like that, I think. Keep the normal human-acted main cast/supporting characters, delegate everything else to AI.

It’s already been done with a Skyrim mod.