Had to do some work with SuSE post Novell acquisition for a customer. IIRC the package manager is a bit odd, but I haven’t looked at it in what nearly 15 years, so I can’t really remember much about it. What I CAN remember involved running packet traces using Wireshark - it was mostly network problems, I think, so nothing to do with SuSE. It was certainly very popular in Europe, though I have no idea what they’re doing these days!

You never know … maybe THIS year!

The way windoze 11 is going - people really hating it - you never know, but I’m not holding my breath. Linux is still very niche, and people are wary of “strange” “new” things, especially FREE ones - where’s the catch? I’ve seen it surge and blossom over the years, but it’s still got a really tiny install base (as long as you don’t count Android and embedded tech, where the OS and kernel are largely irrelevant to the user). But I don’t see people moving over to Linux in droves any time soon, really: I’ve seen too much.

For context, I’ve been using it since [dredges up old memories] slackware was new, so about 1994, when a work colleague and I installed it (off about 20 floppies) onto an old 386sx PC with probably 4MB of RAM. Been using it ever since - and from Red Hat 4 onwards (about 1999) it’s been my only OS on my own computers. I’ve always preferred it, and I’ve seen it grow in so many ways - I’d still use it if it was illegal. I haven’t tried EVERY distro, but I have tried most. These days I mostly stick with Debian or Debian-based distro’s (I’m currently on Mint LMDE).

He’s bang on. LLMs have no understanding of anything: they are literally just statistical models.

Don’t have any experience with this particular model, but I have found that with most printers on Mint you don’t have to “do” anything at all - if it’s on the network or plugged into the USB, the system will find it and install a driver automatically. I’ve used MANY printers with Linux over the years, and some were a right PITA to set up, but so far all the printers I’ve tried with mint have “just worked”. The only problem I’ve had recently was that when I updated to the Debian Trixie based LMDE 7, a bug in CUPS misconfigures EPSON ET2860 when automatically discovered, but it still works on stock Mint 22.3 without manual intervention. The fix is to manually add it, rather than accepting the auto discovered one, so it’s a problem with the discovery function, not drivers, and I suspect it’s due to some kind of quirk with this printer’s firmware that defines how it interacts to discovery queries on the local LAN.

Thanks. Context helps.

Mandatory where?

Salmon reversing aid.

Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?

Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.

HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.

The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.

You’re quite right, Ozone is actually O₃, I got that wrong. I should have looked it up, but I didn’t, hence the error. I’m so sorry I mislead you - can you forgive me? Ozone is actually very interesting - did you know there is a layer of the upper atmosphere known as The Ozone Layer, and that it has a hole in it? Also, Ozone is sometimes produced by chemical reactions and electrical arcs - it has a distinctive, Ozoney smell. As you also made mistakes, I think we are now even - have you ever considered taking up a career as a Large Language Model?

This diagram is wrong on so many levels. Ozone is “charged Oxygen” (O1 rather than the usual O2) so it’s saying you get Ozone out of the Hydrogen side. The bubbles are forming in a place where they can’t get to the output vents, so the accumulating gases would slowly force the water level in the inner chamber down, and thus up through the vents. It’s pretty shit. Is it AI slop?

NPM is not a Linux thing - it’s to do with web applications, so it works on Windoze and Mac too.

I guess I’m the heretic here - I’m currently using Cinnamon DE, after recently switching from MATE, which I’ve used almost exclusively for about 13 years. I always preferred Gnome (even v1) to KDE, but used both in the early 2000’s, but eventually settled on Gnome2 by about 2005, because it was what Ubuntu used, and that was the distro I was using back then. Later, when all the main Linux distros switched to Gnome3, about 2013, it wrecked my workflow - it simply wasn’t possible to do the things I needed to do - though I tried for a couple of months. Mainly things like lack of usable support for multiple monitors, full-screen-first app behaviour, rearranged key-bindings, etc. just made it impossible to work efficiently. I tried most of the commonly supported DEs - LXDE, XFCE, LXQT, plain X-Window(!) and even an early version of Cinnamon, but eventually settled on MATE when it became supported by Debian. I felt at home with it, and stuck with it for the longest of any of them - mainly because it fits my workflow, even through its evolution through different work roles and personal projects. I wasn’t really looking for a new DE, but last year, I refurbished a load of old laptops to give away on Freecycle/Freegle, initially putting Debian + MATE on the early ones. I saw a discussion about Linux Mint, and how it had matured into a really beginner-friendly system, and decided to try it out. I’m by no means scared of doing the technical work to get things running (I was doing tarball installs back in the mid 1990s) but I do appreciate convenience, and Mint was amazingly smooth.

I’d installed Ubuntu for my kids and friends over the years, and still hated the way Gnome3 works, even though it has evolved and some of my original gripes were now alleviated, so as Mint is based on Ubuntu, I was not expecting much. I was totally shocked - it was basically easier than Windoze 10 (which I was adminning for my day job) - printers and scanners, something that have long been annoying to support - worked instantly, and the Cinnamon DE was a revelation - smooth and friendly, and works well with how I like to use a DE. It runs well on old hardware - though 4GB seems to be the hard, workable minimum, and people seem to really like it.

That’s fucking disgusting.