I’m a web dev with a wife who is a researcher, and on the side I’ve built a few tools for her work. Web apps are great because cross-platform distribution and compatibility are non-issues. If you don’t need a database or server-side logic, a client-side only application is basically free to host given that it’s ultimately just a pile of static files. You can use localstorage for persistence, and because there’s no server logic you have a lot fewer security implications to worry about.

JavaScript gets a bad rap, but if you pair it with typescript and decent tooling it’s really not bad. HTML and CSS are an incredibly powerful engine for building UI, which is only getting better.

Probably not great to return server stack traces. Otherwise, yeah

I fuuuhuhuhucking hate this condescending, pestering dark pattern that apparently every single designer on the planet is required to use

At first glance I thought it said “extremist kinks”

KSP pulls me in for awhile until some bullshit bug ruins a mission I spent hours on

factorio has stolen months from me

Any decent camera with an m4/3 or better sensor and a half decent lens will blow the best smartphones out of the water. Computational photography can’t beat physics.

Edit: in good light they can get close, but the differences show up quickly in low light, if you crop, or if you look at it on anything bigger than a phone.

Started learning web development.

Totally fair, I agree it is definitely not a good first distro. I think everyone should follow the manual setup process the first time and not use archinstall, because it’s the tutorial which teaches you what’s on your system and how it works.

I’m also not new to the Linux scene, I also run a variety of distros on a variety of machines including servers and I also write software professionally. Arch is fucking great.

I didn’t say it was stable, I specifically said it was unstable. Because it is. I said arch is reliable, which is a completely different thing.

Debian is stable because breaking changes are rare. Arch is unstable because breaking changes are common. In my personal experience, arch has been very reliable, because said breaking changes are manageable and unnecessary complexity is low.

I could not disagree more. Arch is unstable in the meaning that it pushes breaking changes all the time, (as opposed to something like Ubuntu where you get hit with them all at once), but that’s a very different thing from reliability.

There are no backported patches, no major version upgrades for the whole system, and you get package updates as soon as they are released. Arch packages are minimally modified from upstream, which also generally minimizes problems.

The result has been in my experience outstandingly reliable over many years. The few problems I do encounter are almost always my own fault, and always easily recovered from by rolling back a snapshot.

Self hosting is pretty great right now. Immich, Tailscale, truenas, docker, vaultwarden - you can solve so many of your own problems with any old computer you have lying around

It’s not conventional wisdom, but I’m happiest with arch.

• I’m familiar with it
• can install basically any package without difficulty
• also love that I never have a gigantic version upgrade to deal with. sure there might be some breaking change out of nowhere, but it’ll show up in my rss feeds and it hits all my computers at the same time so it’s not hard to deal with.
• Arch never really surprises me because there’s nothing installed that didn’t choose to put there.
• arch wiki

Tempted by nixos but I CBA to learn it.

They didn’t even clean up the rubble

Are the newer ones any better? I’m not replacing my CPU, mobo, and ram for like a 25% improvement

Antennapod and newpipe are the biggest apps I’ve missed since moving to iOS

I love how parentheses on function calls in ruby are optional. Is it a variable? Is it a function? Where does it come from? Who the hell knows! Try to run it and find out, loser

That exact error is why I only want to work in typed languages now

I think the focus on short, simple functions combined with DRY code leads to many early, poorly chosen abstractions. Getting out from under a bad abstraction can be painful.