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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there’s a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don’t support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions “8.1 lappies”; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)

    For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.

    100% agree about VMs though.







  • Taking courses which involve subjects that you will likely never encounter in the workforce is a thing in every discipline. Most engineers don’t need to manually solve differential equations in their day jobs, they just need to know that they exist and will often require numerical solutions.

    Getting your hands dirty with the content provides a better understanding when dealing with higher level concepts.








  • Others have mentioned disk usage and desktop integration. There is some truth to them, but shared runtimes keeps disk uasge down (although worse than native apps). Desktop launchers now search /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications by default, but I’m still having issues with themes in one or two niche apps.

    Trust is the big one. The benefit of your distro’s packages is that they are maintained by a limited number of maintainers. Flatpaks have a much, much larger number of maintainers, which is where sandboxing comes in. Flathub now marks apps with lax permissions as “potentially unsafe”, which is a huge step in communicating this to the average user.

    Most desktop apps can get away with having next to no access, as long as they support the appropriate XDG desktop portals.

    Ultimately, your mileage will vary, as there are many classes of application which are ill-suited to being sandboxed. Program launchers, programming languages, IDEs, file managers are a few.