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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • One thing to understand here is that it mostly depends on the “desktop environment”, which is basically the GUI of the system. (Imagine you could have the Windows XP GUI on a Windows 11 PC. Or the macOS GUI on a Windows 11 PC.)

    Distros intended for desktop use will typically come with a certain desktop environment by default, so to some degree, you can talk about the distro, but yeah, there’s just gonna be a strong correlation with their default desktop environment.

    To my knowledge, GNOME and (recent/Wayland versions of) KDE have good support. Most comments here imply these two desktop environments, so for example Ubuntu, Fedora and POP!_OS are typically GNOME, whereas Kubuntu and Nobara are typically KDE.

    Some folks here also mention Linux Mint and LMDE working well, which use the Cinnamon desktop environment, so I guess that works well, too. Cinnamon is somewhat based on GNOME.
    Well, and Elementary OS’s whole shtick is its Pantheon desktop environment, which is also based on GNOME.

    So, basically, as Elementary’s Pantheon is its own thing, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work, but I would not be surprised.
    As someone else already said, you can use a Linux Live USB to try it out before installing. You should be able to just follow along the installation instructions of Elementary OS and shortly before you actually install things, you should find yourself in Pantheon and can try it out.


  • I mean, B does make some amount of sense, if you realize that it’s supposed to give you the maximum among the parameters (so you’d normally call it as Math.max(5, 3) === 5).

    Well, and you can call that with zero parameters, because you can spread an array into it, which might have zero length. And then given these conditions, and if you don’t want to throw an error, then -Infinity is kind of the least bad remaining option, as it’s likely to generally work with the rest of your logic.


  • I also have basically only my personal experience to go off of (from studying computer science), but I never had to plug hardware into my laptop. Printers were available over the network and the one time we worked with hardware, they had dedicated lab PCs there, which had the necessary software pre-installed.

    From what I’ve heard on the internet, that’s quite a common theme. Lots of hardware equipment is ridiculously expensive, so you don’t go buying new equipment when accompanying software doesn’t work on newer operating systems anymore. Instead, you keep a PC around with that old OS and the software, specifically for operating that hardware.



  • I guess, kinda? In my head, a Verein is definitely more of a hobby/socialising thing, but I do have to say that “club” certainly doesn’t feel impactful enough. Like, Germany as a whole would fall apart, if you took the Vereine away.

    For example, the Red Cross is an e.V. here. There’s e.V.s that support the local voluntary firefighters (although those are also organized by the municipality). We’ve got big-ass nature preservation e.V.s that do really important work in suing awful corporations. Local sports organizations and orchestras and whatnot are also organized as e.V.s. And perhaps the most relevant in this community is the KDE e.V., which helps organize/assist the wider KDE community.

    So, yeah, some of them definitely do work that one might expect from a charity…


  • It’s easy to set up a cache, but what’s hard is convincing your devs to use it.

    Mainly because, well, it generally works without configuring the cache in your build pipeline, as you’ll almost always need some solution for accessing the internet anyways.

    But there’s other reasons, too. You need authentication or a VPN for accessing a cache like that. Authentications means you have to deal with credentials, which is a pain. VPN means it’s likely slower than downloading directly from the internet, at least while you’re working from home.

    Well, and it’s also just yet another moving part in your build pipeline. If that cache is ever down or broken or inaccessible from certain build infrastructure, chances are it will get removed from affected build pipelines and those devs are unlikely to come back.


    Having said that, of course, GitHub is promoting caches quite heavily here. This might make it actually worth using for the individual devs.









  • I have a web music player that I’ve developed, and while it was never really intended to be used by others, I thought I had generally followed accessibility best practices. After using it for about two years, I realized that I never even implemented keyboard shortcuts. 🫠

    Which is to say, one shouldn’t assume devs to know what they’re doing. At some point, I’m also just a user and I use software like everyone else does, meaning I pick out a path that works for me and then I hardly look left and right from there.
    Features not being tested when you don’t use them yourself, that happens with any feature. But it’s much worse for UI features, because those are difficult to automate tests for. And accessibility is in an even worse spot, because it necessarily opens up a separate path, which is going to be invisible to me as a user, so it gets covered by neither automated tests nor by me just using the software.

    I have to go out of my way to test accessibility, which means I have to be aware that a change I’m making might introduce a regression. That’s genuinely how lots of amateur developers work, which is probably the best explanation why accessibility support is often so amateur-ish…




  • I think the main reason why Word is losing mindshare, is because it was designed for paper. The whole formatting system makes the assumption that there’s a fixed width and height into which your text and images fit. In reality, a phone screen is a lot narrower and a widescreen monitor a lot wider.

    Markdown never made these assumptions. For the most part simply because plain text reflows to fill whatever space you give it. But there’s no way to position an image either, I imagine mostly for simplicity’s sake. It can look goofy at times, but it never looks broken.
    That’s why I can write this comment on my phone and someone else can look at it on desktop and it’s perfectly readable in both scenarios.