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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I can actually imagine my grandpa doing this. I wouldn’t call him a computer wizard by any means, but he has surprised me before. He will just go to the library, and have the librarians find printed computer magazines which would deal with various connectors, learn about HDMI and composite. Then proceed to find another magazine which has reviews of adapters and take a bus to the big electronics shop to ask about adapters and have them place the order for one.

    He actually did this when he needed to digitize some tapes. Granted, he ended up with a firewire-connected external sound card and a tape deck from a hi-fi store connected to Audacity, when all he needed was my old walkman, a 3.5mm cable and Windows Recorder, but hey, it got the job done.

    He used to be a researcher and he somehow sees these things just as requiring time to find the right source of information… And time he has.

    I could imagine someone’s grandma being the same.






  • I feel like there are some missed opportunities

    • Sensors that don’t work because a proprietary driver is missing
    • Having to add repositories to get wifi working
    • Voice assistant that only works if you know terminal command parameters by heart
    • More tool windows
    • More xorg.conf to get displays working
    • A flame war about the relative benefits of obscure infrastructure componemts
    • 7 package managers, 3 if which are needed to install 90% of needed software. The remaining 10% somehow still needs to be installed via shell scripts
    • Completely new UI in each version, still looks like it was designed by german ocelots in the 90s