• 22 Posts
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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • If you like screen or tmux, you might like a tiling window manager like i3 or sway, or GNOME with paperwm extension. It can have real advantages for older folks (like me) which don’t have perfect vision any more, because it is much more conservative with screen space. After a few days learning, it becomes also really fast to switch windows and desktops. This is not black-or-white: The desktop WMs do have keyboard shortcuts and windows layouts which mimick tiling WMs, and tiling WMs may have a few desktop features. The former are a bit more convenient and easy for beginners, while the latter are blazingly fast.










  • Eine sehr interessante Feststellung. Sie lässt mich schnurstracks an die Situation in den USA vor dem amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg denken, als es um die Abschaffung der Sklaverei ging und die Südstaaten bzw die machthabenden Eliten der damaligen Südstaaten einerseits ökonomisch völlig abhängig von der Sklaverei als Institution gemacht hatte, aber andererseits auch noch ihre gesamte Gesellschaft auf einer Ideologie aufgebaut hatte, dass Sklaverei rechtens sei.

    Heute sehen wir scheinbar nicht nur ideologisch -ökonomische Umbrüche von ähnlicher Tragweite, sondern der Symbolismus der Konföderierten wird von Trump noch aktiv beschworen. Es geht heute um die fossile Industrie als Geld und Macht vermittelnde Institution. Die Erneuerbaren Energiequellen, Wärmepumpen, Elektroautos, Abbau des Autoverkehrs im Städten, oder allgemein Decarbonisierung lassen diese Geld- und Machtquellen gerade schmelzen.

    Was dazu führt dass die alte Macht in etlichen Ecken der Welt gerade versucht, die Demokratie auszuschalten - mit Methoden des Faschismus.





  • For me, this result is also not too surprising:

    1. If allowing / using Undefined Behavior (UB) would allow for systematically better optimizations, Rust programs would be systematically slower than C or C++ programs, since Rust does not allow UB. But this is not the case. Rather, sometimes Rust programs are faster, and sometimes C/CC++ programs. A good example is the Debian Benchmark Game Comparison.

    2. Now, one could argue that in the cases where C/C++ programs turned out to be faster than Rust programs, that at least im these cases exploiting UB gave an advantage. But, if you examine these programs im the Debian benchmark game (or in other places), this is not the case either. They do not rely on clever compiler optimizations based on assumptioms around UB. Instead, they make heavy use of compiler and SIMD intrinsics, manual vectorization, inline assembly, manual loop unrolling, and in general micro-managing what the CPU does. In fact, these implementations are long and complex and not at all idiomatic C/C++ code.

    3. Thirdly, one could say that while these benchmark examples are not idiomatic C code, one at times needs that specific capability to fall back to things like inline assembly, and that this is a characteristic capability of C snd C++.

    Well, Rust supports inline assembly as well, though it is rarely used.



  • Another big plus of that approach: If your laptop or PC breaks, you can just move the VM image with Windows exactly like any other file you have backed up (you do backups, don’t you?) to the new hardware and use it as before. This esoecially breaks the problem of forced OS upgrades if the new hardware does not support the old windows version, or you do not have the installer and license keys any more, but the new Windows version does not support your old documents, media formats, or pheriperals like scanners.

    Also, if you modify your Windows install and it might break, you can just make a snapshot of the VM image - which is a copy of a file - and restore it when needed.






  • A few more thoughts here:

    • for a first Distribution, Ubuntu is fine, too. Also, you could ask people arounf you what they know best und whether they like to help you. For example, Debian is a bit harder to install but is rock solid once it runs.
    • if you are concerned about security, you should practice a strict separation between trusted software installed by you, and untrusted data presented to you via web, mail or Internet. Never run untrusted code. Windows blurs that line and this is fatal.
    • In respect to hardware support: Most standard PC hardware will work very well with Linux, even old scanners that have no more Windows driver support. NVidia is the bad exception, and the bad rap is still justified because of Wayland, the new graphics display server. If you are not really poor you might consider to buy something better. The hardware support landscape is different for laptops. Here, refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell laptops are first choice, and also best value for the money.




  • That completely ignores the fact that a human being needs at least half an hour to one hour of light exvercise / physical movement daily to stay healthy at all. If you do not cycle or run, you’d need to go to a gym / fitness studio.

    Also, if you care at all about CO2 emissions, eating vegan or vegetarian food is the way.

    Also, driving 3 or 4 kilometers to a supermarket to get a veggie pizza needs way more energy and CO2 for the drive, thsn for the food itself. You can compute that from the fuel consumption of a car - about 180 Grams of CO2 per person per kilometer, so 1.4 kilograms for 4 kilometers each way.

    Also, often the danger of cycling is stressed. That’s rubbish because of the health effect of physical exercise - the most dangerous aspect of modern life is lack of exercise, and if you use a bike instead a car you are wayyy less likely to die of cardiovascular problems, which are the real killer, not accidents.