I was also surprised how well it works, but you genuinely just sploosh water with a mild bit of pressure at it and it comes off.

I’ve been using a hand-operated travel bidet, which is basically just a squeeze bottle with a nozzle, and that still gets me perfectly clean. Definitely much cleaner than with toilet paper.

Does cow milk bubble in some special way? Like, you can make bubbles rise even in water, but I’m guessing, that’s not what we’re talking about…

The thing is that many people who “like milk” don’t think of the taste of freshly milked dairy milk. I grew up with skimmed milk that got treated with ultra-high-temperature processing. The cow taste was hardly there and it wasn’t why I liked milk.

I liked milk, because it made cereal edible and because I could put chocolate powder into it. The cow taste rather even felt out of place.

Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say “dotfiles”, I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don’t have to deal with the dotfiles myself.

I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

OpenOffice has seen essentially no development since 2011, when the trademark got transferred to Oracle after they bought Sun Microsystems.

The project got forked into LibreOffice to dodge the trademark issue, but it’s the same devs, practically the same project, but now under a non-profit organization. Well, and with 14 more years of development.

So, use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. It will most likely come pre-installed on whichever Linux distro you go with. But you can also try it out on Windows beforehand, if you have concerns.

It is similar to Bluesky, yes. They both got a lot of inspiration from Twitter (before Musk turned it to shit/X).

And I would say that the discussions are more shallow than on Lemmy. Even though Mastodon has a higher character limit than Twitter and many Mastodon instances effectively remove the character limit, it’s still fundamentally a platform for shortform interactions. Infodumping is rarely seen, because you need to create a silly number of chained messages.

On the flipside, though, you get to know people. I do appreciate the time I spent on Mastodon, because of that. It’s a very different perspective as not everything is about discussing cold hard facts, but rather also people’s hobbies and struggles and whatnot.

Man pages are displayed in less (which acts as the so-called “pager” here), so you can search man pages interactively like you search in less. And you do that by pressing /, then typing your search term and pressing Enter. Then you can jump between results with n and Shift+n. This is also how search works in vim, by the way.

Perhaps another tip in this regard, to search in your command history with Bash (for re-running a command you’ve previously used), you can press Ctrl+R, then start typing your search term. Pressing Enter will run the displayed command. To skip to older search results, press Ctrl+R again. If you want to edit a command before running it, press → or Ctrl+F instead of Enter.
This UI is a bit fiddly in Bash, but worth figuring out.

As for Fish, it’s great for new users, because:

• it has a much more intuitive Ctrl+R UI, displaying all the search results interactively and not behaving weirdly in certain situations.
• it automatically sifts through your command history as you type and suggests the most recent command which starts with the prefix you typed. You can fill in its suggestion with → or Ctrl+F, or only use the next word from it via Alt+F. You can skip to older matches with ↑, which is then a proper search like Ctrl+R in Bash, so not just prefix-matching. And yeah, overall just really useful, because it’ll both make it quicker to run frequently-used commands, and sometimes suggest a complex command which I didn’t even remember that I once ran.
• its tab-completion shows short descriptions of what most (sub-)commands or arguments do.

But:

• don’t set it as your system-wide default shell or there’s some chance of shell scripts not executing correctly. What you should do instead, is to set it as the startup command to run in your terminal emulator.
• the syntax of Fish is somewhat different to that of Bash, which can be confusing when you’re still learning the Bash syntax. It’s not the worst thing in the world, as it basically only affects scripting and more complex command chains.
  Scripting is not a problem, because you can throw a shebang into the first line to use Bash syntax (#!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash). You should add a shebang to your scripts anyways.
  And running more complex commands isn’t too big of a deal either, because you can run bash in your terminal to launch Bash, then paste the command into there to run it, and then quit back to Fish with exit or Ctrl+D. Typically you’ll know to run bash, because Fish’s syntax highlighting turns red after you’ve pasted a complex command.

It’s the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

I find ants and bees and such interesting in this regard. They work together more seamlessly than humans do and arguably have a higher form of sociality.

Especially in Western cultures, we humans like to think of the individual and compare ourselves to the individual of other species. But that is a logical fallacy.
Are you smarter than an ant? Sure. But are you smarter than a human-sized ant hive? That’s a far trickier question to answer…

Yeah, I don’t like when corporations put stuff like that into their ToS, but at the same time, I 100% understand why every open-source license under the sun has it. You’re giving it away for free, so you don’t want people to sue for more than you’re providing for free.

Mastodon.social is currently very much in the latter camp of giving things away for free. I also understand that a service is yet another beast than a piece of software, since they hold your personal data and may leak/sell it. But yeah, at this point in time, I wouldn’t want someone to be able to sue Mastodon.social out of existence. I guess, it depends a lot on how it’s formulated in the end…

Those Spectacle changes look good. The old UI made some amount of sense, if the primary use-case was taking complete screenshots, but even for that, there’s probably a single shortcut to do that directly.
And I do find, I generally want a smaller cutout these days, because you can just fit more stuff onto modern displays, some of which is going to irrelevant.

I’ve never used Facebook, but I’ve seen people say that Friendica is quite similar to Facebook (in case you care about that).

Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.

Well, it didn’t feel like I’m tweaking to my needs (that came afterwards on top), it rather felt like I’m just undoing design decisions that someone made to cater to their specific needs.

And I named the time mainly to give an idea of how much there was to tweak. My main problems were:

• That I could not undo some of those unusual design decisions.
• That it doesn’t exactly make the system more robust when you need lots of non-default settings.

Well, that was just kind of one example to illustrate that it isn’t just a static screenshot, you actually see what’s going on in real-time. It’s also useful when you’re running a longer operation, like OS updates or encoding a video, and want to see when it’s done or that it hasn’t failed. You can just tell when the command output has stopped moving or a popup has appeared…

But thanks for the recommendation anyways!

I certainly think that it has many eccentric design choices. It’s not going to be for everyone. Some parts of it, I also think just look bad, which I had to customize. Well, and openSUSE’s theming made a big difference, too: https://simotek.net/tech/projects/opensuse-e/enlightenment-on-opensuse-13-2/nggallery/thumbnails

“Retro” is also definitely a word I would use, though more positively connoted. It has *different* eye candy to the usual desktop designs, which is a big part of the charm. In a sea of flat designs and tiling window managers, it stands out as its own thing.

I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.