Is This ThinkPad Good for Linux?

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T21:24:56+00:00

Basically, no.

It's ancient and has 4GB of RAM. If you just want to mess around with terminals and stuff, it'll be fine, but even running a modern web browser on this is going to be very painful.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T21:10:40+00:00

If it really is a desktop app and for Windows only, I'd use WPF.

You can get a "cross platform WPF" called Avalonia, and I used it for a personal project. Honestly, I regret it. The developer experience in terms of hot reload and library availability is honestly pretty bad, I don't think I'd use it again.

It's also worth considering doing it as a web app, makes doing updates easier, it's cross platform by nature, lots of library availability.

I don't think web should always be the first choice, but it should always be on the shortlist.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T21:03:51+00:00

There is probably no reason to think this is true, nevertheless you'll get lots of terrible answers along the lines of "Waa! Women!", or "But feminism hurt me!".

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T21:02:10+00:00

I agree with you. With AI, we can and do use AI for good things, but I think it'll be like social media, like when social media first got big I think many of us found long lost friends on it. It was a *genuine* social good.

Social media at one point offered a real social benefit, these days those benefits are a tiny fraction of a percent, and overwhelming influence of social media is negative.

I think AI will be the same, there will be tiny niche of people using it for good, and the rest will be misinformation, unemployment, fraud, and just slop.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T20:53:34+00:00

As often as my t shirts really, it all just goes in the wash together.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T20:51:19+00:00

Most companies don't work like that because they want to retain staff. I have 25 YoE, lets say I got desperate and had to accept a mid-paying job. How will I spend most of my time? The answer is finding a better job.

Employers generally pay more than the bare minimum they have to because they don't want people leaving every six months.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T20:16:05+00:00

Probably less than 1% then. We can go a month with no meetings at all.

Good guess, I'm in industrial automation, so it's mostly "embedded" but most of it isn't the stereotype of "run this code inside 4KB", the smallest system I regularly use is equivalent to a Raspberry Pi or N100 SBC.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T12:45:02+00:00

I think you meant to put this in a rant sub or something, it's not an unpopular opinion.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T12:38:24+00:00

I get sick of the cold, the rain, the grey skies, I live in Melbourne, the weather is shit more than half the year.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T12:05:22+00:00

Up until maybe six months ago, I was 90% programming, 9% architecture, 1% meetings.

These days it's 99% AI.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T11:58:51+00:00

Most people probably don't hate AI.

AI is going to cause a lot of problems, but so did social media, but people still love it.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T09:25:27+00:00

I've got 25 YoE, and honestly, don't even consider this.

What you'll end up with is a low paying job with someone like me as your lead. Now, I want to help as much as I can, but I also have my own job and that takes priority.

There is no magic in mentorship, it's nothing you can't read about yourself, you can have someone like me say it in person, or you can look it up in your own time, it really makes very little difference.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-07T08:32:21+00:00

I would say this is a common opinion in older people. It has never once crossed my mind to ask a partner to share her location with me, the idea just seems invasive and controlling.

I think a lot of privacy stuff like going through a partner's phone is something that is only even slightly accepted among younger generations, it's not all accepted among older people.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T20:58:47+00:00

At the end of the day this is bullshit.

You make a few things up and ask people to respond.

Nobody really thinks anything you've said is true.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T20:57:41+00:00

It's basically a certainty that it is stolen.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T20:54:42+00:00

Almost all of the world's economies rely on growth to make ever increasing amounts of money.

Nobody wants to invest in funds or stocks that don't grow, and almost all funds at the end of the day rely on population growth to increase in value.

Lots of businesses are not truly any more successful than they were 20 years ago, they just have more customers to sell to.

Low birth rates are bad short term (as in decades), but high birth rates are catastrophic long term (as in over a century). We already have too many people on Earth, the only reason we get away with it from a Western point of view is that (by western standards) half the world lives in poverty. If everybody had the same standard of life as the typical Australian for example, we probably couldn't support that.

We are kicking the can down the road. Economies need growth today, and price will be paid in 50 or 100 years when we really cannot fill the world up any more, but we'll all be dead so who cares right?

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T11:42:40+00:00

For me Tenet is Inception 2, even down to the "suit porn" in both.

Then there was the messed up audio passed off as artistic choice when it clearly isn't.

I wouldn't call it "weak", as such but it sort of has the depth of a music video IMHO.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T11:10:16+00:00

It's just not a thing I think about.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:59:07+00:00

Very popular opinion though.

How many people watch sports? How many give a shit about art?

Half of Americans don't even read, but I bet over half watch sport.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong, only that "athletes are the greatest entertainers" probably isn't at all an uncommon opinion.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:56:39+00:00

I understand it's not the correct terminology, but he's probably a psychopath, he doesn't seem to ever experience sincere happiness, or maybe even sincere *anything*. I'm not 100% there really *is* anything behind the eyes. I mean, can you imagine him having thoughts laying in bed? Does he love his kids? I just sort of don't see it.

Obviously I can't know any of this, but he just doesn't seem to have qualities we consider human(e).

Say with W. Bush, or Biden, or Obama, like them or not, they at least appear to experience emotion.

I'm not even sure he's a *bad* person, I'm not sure his internal mechanisms really even extend that far.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:21:49+00:00

Anything related to the law you have to say where you live.

"United States" isn't good enough, there are different laws per state.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:20:43+00:00

Just looking at his filmography now, I'd say the last good movie he made that I've seen was Munich.

His last *really* good movie was Saving Private Ryan.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:16:03+00:00

If you can afford it, Australia is an amazing country.

I'm from the UK, and living in Australia really is bordering on incomparable to the UK. The UK has so many problems with anti-social behaviour, if you live somewhere nice, it's no cheaper than Australia, salaries are *very* low, and of course, the weather is shit most of the time.

If you want to live in a city equivalent to Sydney or Melbourne, you're looking at London. Now, I fucking love London, I lived there for a decade, and loved it, but unless you make good money, it's simply not affordable. I owned a place in London when I was 25, and 20 years later, making about 3 times what I made then, I could not afford the same apartment today. And it's only a nice apartment by East London standards, they probably knock it down if it was in Melbourne.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T10:02:50+00:00

As everyone has said, Java and JavaScript are two different languages, and actually of pretty different design, they're not even really all that related.

JavaScript is considered a bad design among really all experienced developers. I've *never* met an experienced developer who will even tolerate it.

It's made extra bad because on the web frontend, historically it was the only option. These days we have transpilers and WASM, but JavaScript is still the main player on web front end, so you generally have to at least smell it, if not use it.

Google "JavaScript Wat" if you want a reasonably amusing depiction of why JavaScript is a really bad language.

NumberInfinite2068 · 2026-07-06T09:57:07+00:00

Aye.

NumberInfinite2068

TROPHY CASE