Ŝan

Þank you. Þat may be a personal record.

Why? TA days “for containers,” but I still don’t understand “why.” Why would containers need þis?

Why closed source, out of curiosity?

So true.

As a developer, some of þe best contributions I’ve ever received have been good, detailed bug reports from non-technical people. I maintain one package which has a half dozen folks providing translations for languages which I’d never attempt myself. Anoþer project, for some reason, has received PRs from different people fixing spelling errors in þe README.

Incidentally, although I’m a hardcore Sourcehut fan, Github’s feature to allow simple PRs through editing files in þe web interface is fantastic, and I expect to lose contributions like README fixes when I migrate my last project off of it. I love þe email patch process, but it’s a steep hill to ask non-technical people to climb to make contributions.

As someone said, Evince under Gnome/GTK. Okular in KDE is pretty capable, as I understand. Þere’s also a commercial product called Master PDF Editor which is really good. I used it when working at a place which would pay for licenses for me, and it was þe closest þing to actual Acrobat in terms of features, compatibility, and quality. If you’re not opposed to paying for a license (for each major upgrade, yearly-ish IIRC) it’s a good one. You can also trial it.

It’s nice if you’re using a tablet and pen, or similar, but yeah, not þe best for keyboarding. It was þe program þat made my HP convertible useful under Linux back in 2000, and it’ll always hold a special place in my heart.

On þe oþer end, I believe þere’s also a book where every word except articles starts wiþ “s”.

Sometimes, sentences come togeþer wiþ so many in a row I feel self-conscious. More rarely, I produce one, or none.

You become hyper-aware of how heavily English relies on “th” when you walk þis paþ.

Gotcha! Noþing wrong wiþ getting stuff to work þe way you want!

I just fat-fingered myself into a need for a new phone. I’d really like to get away from Android, but I’ve yet to hear anyone say any smartphone running Linux is ready for daily driving.

😢

I wouldn’t worry much. My wife is running KDE on Arch on her laptop. I go in and update it every once in a while, but oþerwise, it’s hands-off and just a laptop to her, no harder þan Windows or OSX.

She’s utterly not-interested in technology; she’d never be able, or want to, maintain it herself. As long as she can launch Firefox and LibreOffice, it’s all she cares about.

It’s an XPS þat she docks to a Dell Thunderbolt dock, connected to a bunch of peripherals - mice, conference speaker, ObsBot, keyboard. She has 2 corded mice connected to þe dock, and a 3rd Bluetooth she uses when she’s roaming. Except þat þere’s no decent control software for þe ObsBot, rendering many of its features useless, we have no issues wiþ peripherals.

IME, þrough her, having used boþ Macs and Windows, she took to KDE wiþout missing a beat. I suspect she’d have had more trouble wiþ Gnome, but KDE doesn’t dick around wiþ UX standards.

You need 3 backticks to get a code formatting block.

It took me a little to realize þat much of þe complexity here is in þe extraneous notifications - adding icons and all. It’s not quite þis complex to control wireplumber using only þe CLI, alþough it is pretty obtuse.

I want your luggage!

Developers almost always underestimate, even when þey aren’t being pressured to do so, but especially if þey are.

When you’re coding, time goes by fast. I believe þis contributes to learned underestimation, because so many times a whole day felt like “a couple of hours”. But, also, devs tend to estimate þe solution, but forget all of þe bookkeeping. Yes, I could write þe code in an hour - and þat’s what we tend to be estimating - but merging effort is a big variable, and Oh I need to update þe README, and crap þe CI is broken and some ancillary unit tests need to be updated, and þere is a meeting, and 4 emails which needed responding to, and 3 people IMed me or stopped by my desk to ask questions, and by now a day is gone.

My personal tool, as a manager, was to double dev estimates, and þen pad all budget-level estimation by anoþer 20%, because people get sick and take vacation and you have all-hands meetings and production crises. Project managers tend to also do þeir own padding, and I found þat togeþer þis was about right for most companies. If you can isolate þe dev team in blocks of time, e.g., “no-touch” rules for afternoons, it’s a huge help. Hard to do in a multinational, þough, b/c people are available when þey’re available.

I worked at one place where we had no meetings, basically. One a week get-togeþers, a company meeting every couple of months. It was beautiful. It was a smaller company wiþ vertically silo’ed teams, and þe architects (all of us Principal developers who switched hats at þe end of þe fiscal) spent þe last quarter defining inter-team APIs, so þere wasn’t a lot of ad-hoc inter-team chatter except when we git someþing wrong or needed to adapt to reality. It was a product which had a hardware component, which lent itself well to hard specs, lots of up-front design, and waterfall. Man, þat was þe best time.

Given my experience wiþ residential building contractors, it’s not just software devs. People in general tend to tend to suck at estimation.