I still think a midnight candlelight Christmas church service looks really nice a cozy.

From what I heard Christians did their celebration on top of Yule as a way to blend in and avoid persecution.

They are the biggest player, and thus the baseline for comparison. How can people know how much better something is than Google if they don’t include the stats for Google?

I was looking for Kagi, but then realized they didn’t even have Google, which makes me think the data is probably nonsense and it’s just for the cloud flare thing.

I listen at a reasonable volume from 9 to 11.

Even if someone never runs into a technical issues (which is unrealistic on any OS), simply picking a distro is a hobby of its own. It’s the Windows/PC debate, turned up to 11. As it isn’t just picking a platform. It’s pick your kernel, do you want actual Linux, or Unix with something like BSD, what desktop environment do you want, do you want a desktop environment or a window manager, do you go with one of the big core distros and configure it to your liking or find a smaller distro that matches what you want, what do you want in a distro, what file manager, what kind of desktop theme, what package manager, traditional apps vs Flatpak vs Snap vs AppImage, how’s the community for that distro, the list goes on.

All of that is one decision with Windows or macOS. Getting something pre-installed could solve it, if the person never knew about this whole debate, but they’ll find out the second they try to do anything, because looking up how to do anything will give different answers depending on what is picked, and people can’t help but debate it at every opportunity.

I just watched a video on KDE Neon, within 2:30 he was into the terminal to run a command to get the standard home directory folders so browsers would have a downloads folder to download to. It also seemed pretty slow, and maybe it was running in a VM, but my experience with KDE was always that it was slow and rather quirky with all the panel stuff.

When I checked out a Zorin OS video it took 1 minute for him to say using the command line would really level up your experience and then he tried to push a course on Linux mastery. After the sales pitch he talked about the new upgrade app that made things super easy, but I couldn’t really tell what was going on. It kept opening browsers and made it look like he had to pay for an update? There was some kind of “pro” version. He also mentioned it doesn’t do automatic updates and it’s up to the user, because that’s “the Linux way”. Average users aren’t going to do updates on their own, ever.

Not a great start. Not to mention all the research someone would have to do to even arrive at these distros as their short list. There is more to making an OS usable and not a hobby than just copying the old Windows start menu. Picking a distro is its own hobby.

I did like what I saw with Zorin when it came to having a simple settings option to pick the preferred desktop layout, rather than making people switch desktop environments and install and bunch of plugins and customizations to get to what most people probably want. The way wine was integrated it was interesting, nice if it works well, but I think it might hold some people back form finding proper Linux alternatives to some of their apps (which is another hobby in and of itself).

I may look into Zorin OS a little more, but I still don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who wasn’t looking for a new hobby, assuming they need more than just a web browser.

No way that was real.

The biggest thing holding back the mainstream adoption of Linux on the desktop is that it basically needs to become a hobby. Generally speaking, people want an operating system that gets out of their way so they can use the computer to do stuff they enjoy.

We’re getting there. Though I’m not sure what kind of rule in a CICD process could check to see if a variable name actually made sense. Using snake or camel case, sure, but how does it know if ‘dc_loc_5’ is good or not from the perspective of someone who needs to maintain the code?

I tried going the style guidelines route, but we didn’t have a good code review process to really enforce it. It basically would have ended up being me doing 100% of the reviews. At the time I was just happy to get them to actually use source control properly.

I worked with a guy who was a pretty decent programmer, but his background was really heavy in Linux engineering. His variable names were horrible. He named everything as if it was going to be some CLI command. Even that wasn’t the worst. At one point he had var1 - var17. Having to maintain that code has not been fun. If re-write it if I didn’t know it was going to go away.

I tried talking to him about it many times while we were working together, but he just kept on doing what he was doing.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a lie, but more that most people don’t want to bog down a kid in the details (or don’t know themselves). With the 2000 event getting the double treatment, no one born after 1900 has had to worry about those details, and most people alive right now won’t have to worry about in their lifetime either.

Leap seconds though… we’ve had several of those and most people have no clue.

I told people I didn’t like music, and pretended not to like, when I was young. My sister was really into music, and my dad always had the radio off in the car (I think so conversation could happen), so I thought it was a girl thing and rejected it.

I have since changed my tune.

I just check out Ticketmaster every few months to see if there is anything coming up I’d be interested in.

Breath of the Wild helped with my willingness to explore and discover in open world games.

Maybe their telemetry data showed no one actually used it. I used it a few times in the late 90s to write some papers for school, but who is going to do that now when there are so many other options? Even in the 90s it sucked, but it was all I had.

I distract myself with web forums like this.

Some of those like RSS have been great for decades, but others weren’t so great until Reddit shot themselves in the foot. I tried various Reddit alternative for the last few years, and no people meant very little content. It seemed like it was mostly the developers or admins just talking to each other on most of the sites.

I don’t see how I can have one without the other. If I go to sleep on time, then I wake up on time. If I don’t go to sleep on time, only an alarm will get me up, and I I really blow my sleep time, I’ll sleep through the alarm.