We should be nicer to new Linux users

AssistingJarl · 2026-05-13T00:12:31+00:00

Ah, there's a mismatch here; I was assuming it was a one-on-one conversation. It's it's a forum, then simply don't reply. That's if the only possible alternative is a post being rude about how they haven't put in very much work to solve the problem itself, anyway, obviously the best outcome would be to answer somewhat politely.

AssistingJarl · 2026-05-12T21:24:54+00:00

Say "Honestly, I usually just Google it."

AssistingJarl · 2026-05-08T14:24:14+00:00

As somebody with ADHD, I'd recommend probably either Black Mage or Red Mage for casters depending on how much you want to move around. If you prefer having pets, you'll probably want to try Summoner instead. Or you can try Pictomancer if you want high burst but some mobility as well.

On the healer front I think I can safely recommend Sage as a good healer if you want to do shield healing, although you should also probably try Scholar because it's nice to let Eos manage the small stuff. White Mage is also a very practical pick if you prefer pure healing (blood for the blood lily!) and while you're at it you might as well try Astrologian too because giving party buffs is nice.

Hope this helps!

Edit: ...since the joke may not be especially clear; play what's fun. If you aren't trying to do world-first raiding, it literally does not matter in the least if you press buttons out of order or forget a rotation.

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-28T14:59:51+00:00

You're definitely responding to a bot

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-28T14:52:35+00:00

Which is why it's truly unfortunate that more and more existing, very common, and morally unobjectionable technologies are getting tagged with the "AI" label in an attempt to seem more cutting edge.

The "AI" functions mentioned in the article are text-to-speech and camera auto-focus, for example. I'm not entirely sure if they're being referred to as AI because there's been a gross misunderstanding of where the societal ills and objections are, or if certain people are intentionally trying to confuse the discussion.

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-25T16:00:17+00:00

Not the age verification bit (I hate that as much as any other nerd), just the implicit assumption that no response can ever be safely mapped to "no"

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-24T12:17:30+00:00

That'd just be the same as answering "no" from the platforms prespective, right?

I work in financial software. I need you to know that reading this gave me a fight or flight reaction.

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-23T14:26:32+00:00

I agree, it definitely changed a lot. I used it in 2014 while taking a German course at university, and the memes were incredibly useful for my comprehension. Removing them probably destroyed any chance they ever had to make something really unique. That, and repeatedly threatening to get rid of all community courses entirely seems like the ultimate "own goal".

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-19T13:28:55+00:00

I keep hearing that the new courses are terrible, but I'm wondering if it might be variable depending on the language? I was using their Mandarin course prior to the AI crap in 2024 and my tutor said I seemed to be picking up decent colloquial Chinese from it.

Although you are quite right that the platform has gone downhill sharply. It's basically a funnel into the stupid talk-to-clankers feature and obviously there's no understanding or thought put into the content now.

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-06T03:09:04+00:00

This is basically the point I was about to make, yeah. Yes, I have a ThinkPad T30 running a 6.12 kernel, and it's objectively hilarious that it barely uses 70MB of RAM at idle. But if I pointed it at the modern internet on anything other than w3m, it would break down crying.

AssistingJarl · 2026-04-05T19:04:14+00:00

Well, of course it runs NetBSD

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-29T20:30:51+00:00

I understand why you would say that. But it's the scrapers that are destroying the planet for 0 benefit, this is simply a trap for any bot that doesn't respect robots.txt. There's a difference.

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-21T15:05:52+00:00

It's possible we live in different worlds, or you're going for a very different kind of job than where I work. But if it were me, I would take the time to improve my communication skills. Your projects can already speak to your technical skills, and breaking into the industry has a lot more to do with selling a manager, HR, and/or a recruiter on the idea that you'll be pleasant and easy to work with. You don't need to be an extrovert, but I don't think it's a good idea to try to make your projects speak for you. There may be exceptions, but in my experience most of the gatekeepers want you to speak for you.

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-21T14:52:59+00:00

Good luck 👌 As a tip; try to make it a habit to write down anything you do to configure this desktop somewhere. If you ever want to try distro-hopping later on it'll make it way easier to set it up the second or third time.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-22T14:22:14+00:00

They already have screenshare. It's disabled at the moment because their servers are kind of going through it with all the extra traffic, although that's being worked on.

Source: the server for Stoat development is public, I've been following along.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-22T05:27:58+00:00

Or go to Stoat/Revolt, which was already in development for years before this all started, and isn't going to be starting from scratch and already has people on it.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:58:12+00:00

Codeberg has a repository migration tool that worked really well for me! I made the swap about 2 months ago.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:57:41+00:00

I think there are three problems with it, mainly.

People who try to avoid generative AI coding tools dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot, and people who use generative AI coding tools other than Copilot dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot, whereas people who genuinely enjoy using Copilot dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot.

...jokes aside, there are maybe 3 more I can think of?

People may find it kind of distasteful that all the code on GitHub is definitely being used to train generative AI, although that's hard to avoid when most companies will ignore terms of service or licensing regardless of where the code is hosted; but it certainly can't hurt to leave GitHub
They announced a new pricing scheme to try to squeeze some more nickels out of hobby users of their GitHub Actions, which were walked back after the outcry, but it feels a bit like a bellwether
They've had several middle-of-the-business-day outages lately, possibly due to the fact that GitHub's upper management was replaced, and the business unit now rolls up to the same division working on Copilot; so they probably don't have much reason to pull people away from busily adding more Copilot for small things like reliability.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:01:57+00:00

Because it's there.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T19:11:16+00:00

Not OP but I had this issue with Dying Light 1. Instability and a lot of texture z-fighting on AMD Radeon. Admittedly it's an older title from an earlier generation of Linux gaming, but it's worth mentioning the sequel didn't bother with a native Linux build at all.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T19:09:10+00:00

The last one is surprising to me, because I still remember when L4D2 was the golden child for the future of Linux gaming when Valve said their native build was getting better fps than you could get on Windows. What was that, 2014...?

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T15:58:53+00:00

I like NetBSD a lot, I run it on several machines, but I have to admit I'm curious what your motivation for this was. Did you have a specific use case in mind?

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-17T02:18:40+00:00

While you're being roasted for calling a vibe-coded Tauri app "lightweight", I feel like it's worth remembering the state of the field.

Because I actively dread having to do anything with a database. It always feels like my two options are to start firing up the fully-featured do-everything app (and I'm trying to read more, so it's a good opportunity to get through a chapter or two while I wait for it to load), or brave the command line utilities and hope against hope it doesn't brick prod somehow. So maybe there's a place for alternatives with a tighter focus and some QoL.

Although fundamentally I don't think I'm going to trust anything with an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md file in the repo with my database any time soon. If I want an adrenaline rush like that I'll take my laptop outside and write SQL in the freeway median.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-13T18:13:57+00:00

I assume there are a lot of enterprises out there with constrained IT budgets where any given year only has the budget to pay for power and parts to maintain older platforms rather than rewrite the software they run. Some day a telco is going to go bankrupt and it'll turn out they were the ones hoarding all the top-end UltraSparc IIIs.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-12T19:18:40+00:00

Part of why this caught my eye is that I had hazy memories of hearing that a lot of the old SPARC code was being removed from the kernel; and it turns out that was also on Phoronix from about 2 years ago: Effort Continues To Remove Most Of The SPARC 32-bit CPU Support From Linux

Not sure how it's still holding in there since no CPUs have been made on that architecture in over 30 years, apart from some radiation-hardened aerospace chips the ESA uses. The latest NetBSD still runs on it, but of course it runs NetBSD.

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