In my humble opinion, being monocultural as a developer is a path to obsolescence. Be T-shaped: know your specialty really well, but also a bunch of stuff more superficially.

If you have a little hands on experience with Go on top of your Java expertise, you are imo more valuable to your employer. They may even be mid transition from Java to Go, where you would be very useful indeed.

Besides, it’s just healthy to keep learning new things.

Nothing wrong with that, and self hosting can get complex. My recommendation then is to back up the files in your Firefox profile the old fashioned way.

I think Firefox Sync already restores your profile including add-ons, if you log into Firefox. Of course you may not want that for privacy reasons. In that case, I believe there is a way to self host a sync server, but I will have to go look for the repo for it.

Edit: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

As a dev: for all their flaws, web apps are easier to distribute, portable, and have a lot of support in frameworks. They also require little infrastructure in most cases.

As a user: web apps run without installing anything, are mostly portable between my browsers of choice, and run in a sandbox to protect my computer.

Probably 90% of my needs can be served by a web app if it is well designed. If I can’t have a web app, I will look for a flatpak version and failing that I will look for it in my distro.

Yeah, I get it. I’ve had many libraries fail me in as many ways, which is why I consider it lucky to not have to implement my own. I work in .net these days, but there have been times where I had to just dig into the xml inside the xlsx and use xml tools. Those were mostly one-offs, thankfully.

Back when I did Java I had a frustrating experience with IBM’s libxml causing our app to crash after several days due to a memory leak. I didn’t have access to the production environment so it took me probably 3 weeks to find the cause and only after digging through a crash dump provided by the sysadmin. Not related, but you triggered my traumatic memory :)

I don’t know what you’re trying to do with Excel, but based on your posts, I can only wish you good luck. I’m happy to say that I have been able to outsource low level parsing to third party libraries for my needs so far. Well, except the interpreting semantic formatting part. That was on me.

You need another dragon for Excel and its two date systems.

My reaction as well. He was an absolute master of shaggy dog stories. The punchline is not the point, the delivery is.

He may still have enjoyed seeing this. Maybe make another long and hilarious joke about it. RIP Norm.

That’s awesome. My 1993 self is very envious of your rig.

I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.

Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.

I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.

It sounds like it’s still too early to know for sure. But what I picked up was a desire to bring Commodore makers under an umbrella where they can freely use the actual Commodore name and logo for their products. It could fizzle out or it could be amazing. I hope it’s the latter. Anything is better than it just sitting in some VC’s trademark portfolio, unused.

DOM interfacing is lackluster with wasm still, but you can certainly compile rust to wasm.

Yaml editor? Business therapist? Email author? Paid meeting actor? Scrum participant? Office cynic? Idk.

This is a great answer. I will just add that KDE in general exposes more settings in the UI than stock Gnome (but Gnome Tweaks is a thing). If you are the kind if user that just sticks with the defaults, Gnome is probably less confusing to use and what I recommend, but I personally prefer KDE because I like to tweak things.

I have neighsal congestion and now my throat is feeling a little horse!

That’s a great tip! It turns out I must have already tried some of that. I found multiple settings in about:config. Anything with a file picker works (open, save as), but the “open folder” from the Downloads dialog must just not use xdg-open, since none of the settings had an effect on that. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have my Dolphin bookmarks and places.

Edit: Adding this here in case someone in the future finds this searching for the problem. It looks like I’m bitten by the bug described in comment 55 (near the bottom) of this Firefox bug report. TL;DR: it works if I have Dolphin open already, but if not, it starts Nautilus. While this isn’t great, at least I have a workaround.

Thank you for replying, very informative. I think I have most of the actions/types I wanted associated with my preferred ones now. The most noticeable one is Firefox when I open downloads from the menu. I’m not sure if Firefox uses xdg or not? I don’t mind GTK or Gnome at all, in fact I probably have spent more time on Gnome, but I do like when things are consistent.

Looking forward to this. I do have a question for the more seasoned people here: I installed Fedora 41 not too long after its release on a new PC, which has been my daily driver every since. Very happy with it, tweaked everything to my liking. However, by mistake I installed Workstation (with Gnome) and then switched to my preferred KDE Plasma as the DE. This has left some corners of my system with the Gnome look and feel, which is fine, but I prefer if it were more consistent.

My question:

1. Can I/do you recommend that I upgrade Fedora in place? I prefer this if it means I don’t have to reinstall everything.
2. Or do you recommend I do a fresh install anyway for a clean upgrade and at the same time clean up my DE? What is the least disruptive way to do this?

No offense taken at all. I just agree it’s a sad state of affairs.

I don’t mean to be a doomer and I do try to give my kids more than a black and white picture. I’m not a parent who tells them to just suck it up. I support them every step of the way.

But I do try to keep their expectations realistic. I think it’s fair to let them know that what they see in glossy college ads isn’t typical.

Finding a job you actually like can be hard. Working 40 hours a week can be hard. But eventually you will manage it. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the rent.

Usually you have to play the cards you were dealt while you look for better opportunities. Few people can afford to be out of work for a long time. I consider myself very lucky to be able to sit here right now and discuss work/life balance on Lemmy, rather than trolling the Internet for jobs.