bismuthbob

joined 1 year ago
[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 5 points 5 months ago (4 children)

My take: Ride as is if you can stand it, but there's no wrong answer.

I powder-coated a Motobecane of similar age and I don't regret it. The original paint job with hand-painted details must have been great, but decades of sun, rain, and neglect obliterated it. Restoration would have been starting over from scratch so I sandblasted and turned it into an electric blue beast of burden.

Somebody else can restore the original paint job 50 years from now. I'm just keeping the frame safe for them until they're done being born and growing up somewhere. It'll be waiting for them when they're ready.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 14 points 5 months ago

I think that phrases like 'anti-consumer' can stick to any target, so long as they're thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 months ago

Nick Cage: Is that supposed to be me? It's...grotesque.

I'll give you $20,000 for it.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 months ago

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren't playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago

Agreed. My old pebble lasts for over a week, not that I use it for much more than an alarm clock/metronome nowadays.

It does those jobs extremely well, though.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 months ago

Steven Erikson makes a lot of bold choices throughout the series that go beyond plot structure and character deaths. If you don't like something about any particular book, it will probably be absent in the next book.

There are several times where (after 1000+ pages of build-up) he shifts to an entirely different set of characters on a different continent. You get thrown into the deep end and have to start over with no immediate clues about where you are, when you are, who the people are, and what it has to do with what you read before. A book or two later threads start to intersect.

A later book has Kruppe as the narrator, which is fantastic if you love Kruppe as much as Kruppe loves Kruppe.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Malazan Book of the Fallen was like this for me. Great worldbuilding. Big ideas and loads of characters. Lots of obscure detail, all the way down to potsherds and verdigris.

When I finished, I had a powerful impulse to reread the series immediately after finishing it.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 8 points 6 months ago

It got a lot of press when it first showed up and it was a strong default suggestion for new users for well over a decade.

I used it for several years and I initially jumped ship to Xubuntu, so it was clearly good enough for me to want to use something similar at first. The distro-specific changes (snaps, etc.) are more likely to alienate experienced users, whereas new users are less likely to object to things like snaps.

I don't use anything Ubuntu-based these days, but it has everything to do with my specific needs/preferences. Nothing directly to do with the decisions that get bad press among long-term users.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I upgraded in place from 39 and didn't experience any hiccups on my M1 MBA. Works fine for me.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 months ago

I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I'll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don't have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would've thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I agree.

A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven't bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.

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