I feel like I understand most of the words and phrases and am still struggling to make sense of it

This article actually helps. I knew that plasma was the preferred name but never knew about the actual changeover. I didn’t realize it was over a decade ago though!! I guess I can still keep saying “I use kde” since I still use all the k* software in addition to the kde plasma desktop environment.

Then what does the DE in KDE stand for?

(Edit: it was more of a joke, but I guess I am serious. Has it officially become not an acronym?)

Kodi and mythtv for me. I feel like I am the slowpoke meme.

Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

There’s a bit more as well. Corporations have been closing their research labs over several decades and chasing short term profits over longer-term-payoff research. All that risk is passed onto university research labs (and the grad students that actually do the work) and heavily subsidized by the government. There is then little to no incentive for a professor to care about teaching and is rewarded for bringing in grant money. Students incentives are papers (and the prestige that follows) and the machine is born.

Basically, the neoliberal project is moving the risk of research out of corporations and the public pays for it.

Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. 2-in-1 from dell.

Touch mostly worked fine. Xournalpp detected pen fine too. When I flipped the screen all the way back, things get wonky though and I have to reset the Wacom drivers. Sometimes it’s fine. I also had to write a xrandr script to rotate the screen to portrait.

In general, it’s mostly alright. I hear that Wayland is much better but I haven’t tried it yet. I do use the stylus quite often for marking up PDFs though and it works well.

It’s been getting absolutely worse and worse with hardware as they shovel crap at you and then also expect you to buy subscriptions to make it usable. Keysight/agilent/ whoever they are had been really annoying about this.

We have a piece of test equipment that runs windows 2000. It has to be quarantined on its own subnet isolated from the rest of the network.

Not OP, but I’m excited about the baked in tiling. Nervous about Wayland as I think I have some stuff that will break, but we’ll see.

I completely agree. I bought one in the preorder days and was a bit nervous. It came in, and it was so much better than I thought. It works and it works well, and is fun to use. I’ve connected to a tv and done “real” work on it to boot. It is some hardware I highly recommend to anyone if they can afford it. The other cool thing is my whole library of steam games are there and still playable.

Oh wow Usenet is still a good spot? That brings back good memories of sailing the seas.

Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.

I put xfce on older hardware.

Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.

I thought that the assembler is a specific program that translates mnemonics into the corresponding machine code. Perhaps in early computing this was done by hand so a person was the assembler (and worked in assembler), but now that is handled by software (and supports various macros). So programming in assembly would generate a stream of text that must be assembled by an assembler. (Although I have heard people refer to programming in assembler as well, just not often.)

I pointed out how that happens already though. Firefox uses middle-click to direct a widgety thing to move the viewport. Other documents use middle click and drag to move the document. The same hand motion will move in two entirely opposite directions. I know some people get really (like REALLY) hung up on this though, and understand that. I just view it as another abstraction I get to move through.

(Also, for me its two entirely different physical movements of grabbing the scrollbar vs scrolling with two fingers, so I don’t even notice. In one, I use middle and ring to move a document around. Another, I’m moving the mouse with a single finger, and then pressing down directly or using my thumb to click and then moving the finger.)

It just depends on your abstraction you’re mentally using. If you think of a sliding moving visual window on a document, then you like the scroll bar mental model. If you think of moving the content itself, then you like the phone scroll model. I have no idea which one “natural” or “inverted” is and don’t really care what the default is.

For touchpads, give me the phone style scroll. For a mouse wheel, give me scroll bar scroll.

It does feel weird that middle click and then move the mouse (I think Firefox does that kind?) will move the view such that down motion movies content up. But instead click and drag (okukar browse function) upward motion moves content up. Again, just depends on your abstraction in that moment.

I can’t comment on specifics. I’m back in linux after several years away in mac land. The snap experience is awful, and confusing. I have not had the same experience with flatpaks. They seem to act more like regular apps that you update. The issue with snap is that firefox will say the snap needs to update, and that the update is pending warning my I only have days (or hours) to use it, but no way to actually do the upgrade. Then it will say its upgrading, but nothing happens. I just keep using firefox, and every once in a while it may say something like the update failed (I honestly can’t remember, since I just ignore any notification with the word ‘snap’ in it since they’re all meaningless). Eventually, when I quit firefox, it might update and quit pestering me. But how knows? Maybe it won’t upgrade, and then I’ll open it again and it won’t be upgraded.

Flatpaks, I can just update in the package GUI (Discover for me, since KDE) alongside other updates, and we roll on.

Distro-wise, I dunno :/ I like ubuntu cause its more standardized in terms of software availability — most things will support an ubuntu package. However, I’m really considering just jumping into debian and going with the rolling releases.

Not the op, but syntactly they are ver similar. And so for minor things like looping over a matrix or making a plot or some calculations, It’ll be the same. Your intro numerical course will not really know the difference. It’s when you get to the packages that there’s massive divergence. Matlab really sells packages that have all sorts of libraries and gui things built in to do some advanced calculations or pre-Canned tool. They also change the package syntax from time to time. For things like signal processing or filter design, the tools reign and most scripts depend on them. Octave has a totally difference package ecosystem and syntax for loading packages.

So for basic things, you can go between the two fairly easily. For anything advanced or for 90% of scripts you download from papers, octave will not work.

Would this mean a copy and a paste of the config folder would bring up a new KDE system to my personalizing without going through konsave juggling?

I think that’s my biggest complaint that I don’t know how to import my desktop config (window decorations, panel layout, desktops, activities, fonts, application themes) into a new install easily or the “proper” way

Yeah, I think this is the real reason its older folks here: We remember the old Internet. The old Internet was interacting and talking to new people. The modern internet is just dodging ads, and making data for companies serving ads.