I think the real difference between moths and butterflies, from my own observations, is that moths will stow their wings backwards like most other insects when not in use, while butterflies will just fold them upwards, not moving them tailwards at all.

If you’re already going for spinning rust hard disks, why limit yourself to the 3 TB ones? IMHO, these days, spinning rust only makes sense at 8 TB+ per disk.

Gnome is highly international, and has been for most of its existence.

I’m currently maintaining a laptop with kubuntu (for someone else), and I honestly cannot recommend it.

They have kind of messed up the updates in their Plasma flavor, Discover routinely just fails to do the updates with a completely meaningless error message. I suspect the underlying issue is lock contention with the background service “unattended-upgrades.service”, but I’m not sure, because, again, that error message is ridiculously unhelpful. Also, said unattended-upgrades service does not seem to actually be doing any upgrades.

On the last install, also, the attempt to upgrade from Ubuntu 24 to 26.04 LTS, the upgrade failed in a spectacularly fashion that left the system mostly bricked in ways that could only be solved by a fresh reinstall. During the process, a few error messages made it look like the problem was hardware faults on the SSD, except when I then tested the SSD from a rescue disk using dd, smartctl, and iotester from https://github.com/guidow/iotester, I could find absolutely no indication of any faults on that drive whatsoever…

Granted my opinion on kubuntu may be a bit colored, because right this moment, I’m quite frustrated with it.

Also, installing massively important software like Firefox or Thunderbird through snaps instead of packaging them properly is just asinine.

Unfortunately, your existing /home and the ntfs partitions you could remove are in completely non-contiguous regions, so you cannot easily just combine the space. If I were you, I would switch to LVM piece-meal. Ideally, you’d have some other medium were you can temporarily store the current contents of /home while your repartition the drive. Then combine sda2 and sda7 into a volume group and pull just one logical volume out of it for the new /home.

Otherwise, create a new volume group with only sda2 in it (just overwrite the existing ntfs filesystem) using vgcreate, create a logical on top of that using lvcreate, make a filesystem in that using mkfs.ext4, I would add the -m 0 parameter for a non-root filesystem, mount that somewhere under /mnt/, move or copy over all the contents from /home to that mountpoint, taking care to replicate file owners and permissions (I would just use cp -a), then once this is done (and you’ve double-checked that it is because at the next step you can lose data if you’re not careful), umount /home, extend the volume group to include sda7 using vgextend, enlarge the logical volume for the new /home to the maximum using lvresize, enlarge the ext4 filesystem in there to the maximum possible using resize2fs, finally editing /etx/fstab to use that new logical volume as /home and remounting /home.

The nerd inside me automatically wants to correct that to

$ > grass

That avoids starting up one addidtional process.

(Unless the file already exists, and you just want to update its mtime, of course.)

I wouldn’t want to put the air intakes of my Thinkpad directly on the grass like that. It’s bound to suck in dirt.

You still don’t need to turn the AC up to the point where some people start freezing.

IMHO, it’s not the slightest bit unreasonable to just expect everybody in the office to be able to deal with any temperature between 20C (68F) and 24C (75F) without complaining.

Carrying a long-sleeved shirt with you in case it gets a bit chilly is not unreasonable.

If it’s 21 C / 70 F outside, just leave all A/C and heating off. You don’t need them.

That’s idiotic.

then they blast personal space heaters in their offices while the AC is on.

Okay, that’s more than just mildly irritating. That’s massively irritating.

Years ago, we used to use Etherpad for that. Don’t know if that’s still a thing.

They forgot Rockbox. I still have an old Sansa Clip with Rockbox on it that plays Doom with no problems.

Interesting that they clearly know that doing that would be undesirable to the laptop owner.

I don’t think he’s right about America’s founding ideas. Free enterprise, maybe. But capitalism is a different beast, and only came to America much later. The young country’s first taste of real capitalism was the East India Company and their tea trading business. And look how they reacted to that.

I don’t think capitalism was what the USA’s founding fathers had in mind at all. I do think the linguistic conflation of “free market” with “capitalism” is an intentional large scale psy-op designed to make people forget that. And it’s working.

I used to say, if you are not a “computer person” at all, just pick Ubuntu. If you are a bit more demanding and don’t mentally freeze up in front of computers, yet still want a fairly normal and hassle-free experience, choose Fedora.

These days, I’m not so sure about Ubuntu anymore. They have been disappointing in the recent past.

Maybe I should give Linux Mint a try one of these days.

I hope you realize how much more expensive USB mass storage devices have become in the last three months.

Add another square at the bottom left of the grid that breaks out of the grid on both directions and contains OpenBSD.

To me, the whole BCacheFS thing feels like ReiserFS all over again. Including the borderline insane, self-proclaimed genius lead developer with an out-of-control ego, the massive over-presentation of how important this filesystem, or even filesystems in general are to Linux as a whole, the complete refusal to work within established structures, both in terms of process and in terms architectural structures in the software or to even have a mature discussion about how these ought to be like, and even the ludicrous claims about how Linux will be hopelessly outcompeted if it doesn’t put his genius front-and-center before anything else.

At least Overstreet has not murdered anybody.

There’s also the whole selective perception about software stability. You cannot claim at one point that your fs is completely ready for production use, everyone saying otherwise is a hater, and marking the thing as experimental in the config is basically slander against your person, and then shortly later demand that Linux merge some particularly complex and hard to review several-thousand lines patch in a minor bugfix release because your users could experience horrible data loss otherwise. Those are two things that cannot be true at the same time.

Note, filesystems really are hugely important to an OS like Linux. Even so, both Reiser and Overstreet managed to overstate that to an outright comical degree.