scribblemacher's comments

I work for a IT government contractor right now. We don't do work even close to the size of these exchanges, but even in our work the amount of bureaucracy and overhead involved is mind-numbing. To put a simple form on our web page requires an FRS, SDS, binder of validation documents, review and approval from several managers. It could take months just to make a simple change. Lots and lots of wasted time and grant money.

I spent nearly an entire summer doing this, back after I graduated from High School in 2003. If you just follow the manual and enter the commands blindly, you can do it a lot faster. Instead, I took the time to look up each package I was installing, figure out what it did, why I was installing it, and so forth. Chipped away at it a few hours a week, then went through the process of install X windows, _which was the worst experience of my life_.

Debian testing as been a good mix of "stable" and "new" for me. I was using Squeeze for awhile and it seems like "stable" in the Debian sense can also mean buggy and feature-less. There was a battery eating, CPU melting bug in the Squeeze kernel, and the fix wasn't actually brought over from testing. I'm thinking to myself "how stable is this really if I'm not getting an important fix like that?"

I really want a distro that is minimal but also "just works." I like tweaking things as much as the next guy, but when I'm heading off to work and want to print a shipping label from my laptop quick, I really don't want to have to sit and read a manual to figure out why my printer isn't working. On the other hand, 90% of the time I'm at my computer, I'm just using Vim or a web browser, so running a full desktop stack seems like a waste.

The closest thing I've found to what I want is Debian Testing. I've heard good things about Gentoo, and while I think I'm more than capable of RTFM and doing it myself, and sometimes I enjoy doing it myself--other time, I really do want it to just work so I can get work done too.

I've run into many problems and conflicts doing this. Upgrading becomes a mess and I'm often forgetting why I needed a PPA in the first place. I don't think this is a very good long term solution for people that don't want to re-install their OS every 6 months.

I never heard of Tesla growing up, which is either a sign that my school gave a poor education or a sign that we've recently gone back and looked at this part of our history again. (Or a sign that I was a lazy kid who slept in science class.)

Excellent tool; does exactly what it's advertised to do.

I agree. For reading, high contrast is exactly what I want. Despite all these trends in UX design, the best user interface is still a white piece of paper with blank ink.

I used GNOME 3 for awhile. Of all the heavy, DE-style desktops, I like GNOME 3. I use Awesome WM more often because it's lighter and saves precious battery on my laptop, but GNOME 3 is zippy and mostly stays out of my way.

As long as you can access a terminal quickly, everything else is really window dressing.

The console doesn't exist yet and SquareEnix already is already making FF-remakes for it! I'm happy to see a big name in the gaming business offering some support, but I'm more excited to see some original, thinking-out-of-the-box homebrew games. I want to play the next Cave Story; I've already played FF3 like a bazillion times.

I see my hometown of Harrisburg isn't getting startup love. Kind of surprising; I've heard from friends and family still there that their economy is prettty strong. The cost of doing business there is probably a lot cheaper than the Philly area too.

Using butterflies: http://xkcd.com/378/

I like Gnome 3 in that it made me explore other WM/DE options and think more about what I wanted.

I found Awesome, and though there are some things I don't like about it (or namely, some programs that don't work nicely in a tiling environment), every time I try to use another WM or a DE, I miss the speed and keyboard accessibility of Awesome. It's a blast to use.

I installed KDE for my wife to use. It takes KDE an order of magnitude longer to start than Awesome, for all those services and stuff that it's running--you know, all that stuff I'm probably not even using.

Ouya = Indrema 2012?

To be fair, users aren't Facebook's customers.

As a Technical Writer trying to weasel his way into more developmenty tasks, I find this advice insanely insightful. I spend a lot of time frustrated at my lack of development training, and maybe don't step back enough to clearly define the problem-solution before opening Vim.

Does anyone here at HN identify themselves as a member of the Pirate Party?

+100 for introducing me to apt-cyg!

I've never used anything besides bash before. I use a terminal a lot, but don't really do anything fancy so I thought switching would be a waste of time. Reading the features in fish though made me want to give it a whirl.

I've never understood who exactly is the target audience of Gnome 3 (and, to a lesser extent, Unity). It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

Not only that, I think many of these designs don't make sense to novice users either. I recently let me wife try a few live discs to see which one she liked best (she is very non-technical but was sick of Windows running like maple syrup). She ended up liking Mint's LXDE remix the most because it was simple and very fast. Unity's unifed menus and Gnome's app-not-windows design just confused her. Granted, she's just one person, but if it's not for me (the nerd) and it's not for her (the non-techie), who is supposed to be using Gnome 3?

What confuses me is that Gnome is community driven, and somehow a consensus of intelligent developers decided that this is the direction they want to take the project, despite Gnome's poor track record on mobile platforms and that the design paradigms don't accurately reflect the hardware on which the software is run. You'd think someone might have raised a hand and said "um, this design makes more sense on cell phones, which people are not running our product on."