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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Normally, the process is:

    • install the packages for the desktop environment
    • log out (not just locking the screen)
    • find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
    • log in

    Having said that, I don’t know what you mean with “graceful”. Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
    Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn’t going to cause much of a mess, though.

    I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess…






  • I feel like there’s just too many different programming workflows, to try to pre-install them.

    Here on openSUSE, there’s ‘patterns’ you can install, which are basically just groups of packages, and they’ve got some pre-defined patterns for programming:

    I feel like that kind of goes in a more useful direction, although it’s still partially questionable what those contain. For example, the Java development pattern comes with Ant as the build system, when Maven and Gradle are more popular, I believe.

    I also have to say that I often prefer installing programming tooling in distro-independent ways, and ideally automated in the project repo, to avoid works-on-my-machine situations.
    Of course, something like Git, Docker, VMs etc. tend to be stable across versions, and I might not care for having the newest versions, but even with those, I think it’s good to install them on demand, rather than having them pre-installed. If the distro simply makes it a breeze to install them, that’s ideal IMHO.









  • As others have already said, Kate should work as text editor. I think, the only thing that’s not built-in is base64 en-/decoding, but you can set that up like this:

    That’s for decoding. For encoding, just change the name to “base64 encode” (exact name doesn’t matter) and remove the “–decode” from the Arguments-field.
    This relies on a CLI utility called base64, which is going to be pre-installed on most distros.
    It’s not entirely perfect, because it’ll always insert a newline, as that’s part of the base64 output. If you do want to get rid of that, you could write a tiny script and then call that script instead, but obviously, you don’t have to.

    You can also install Kate on Windows, if you want to give it a test-ride: https://kate-editor.org/
    (The base64 CLI won’t be available on Windows, though.)


  • Speaking as a software engineer, it’s usually a combination of things.

    The root of all evil is that yes, fixing that thing doesn’t just take one hour, as it should, but rather a few days. This is mostly preventable by having sufficient automated tests, high code quality and frequent releases, but it’s a lot of work to keep up with. And you really need management to not pressure early feature delivery, because then devs will skip doing necessary work to keep up this high feature-delivery velocity.

    Well, and as soon as such a small fix has a chance of taking more than a day or so, then you kind of need to talk to management, whether this should be done.
    Which means probably another day or so of just talking about it, and a good chance of them saying we’ll do it after we’ve delivered this extremely important feature, which usually means ‘never’, because there is always another extremely important feature.


  • My workplace preinstalls Ubuntu, personally I’m using openSUSE. I don’t even think that Ubuntu is particularly bad, I’m mainly frustrated with it, because it’s just slightly worse than openSUSE (and other distros) in pretty much every way.
    It’s less stable, less up-to-date, less resilient to breakages. And it’s got more quirky behaviour and more things that are broken out-of-the-box. And it doesn’t even have a unique selling point. It’s just extremely mid, and bad at it.