Worked perfect, I had it doing something on-screen in 15 minutes, had it mostly mocked up in 30, and had it polished and pretty with error handling in an hour. Will make for a good demo on Monday.
When you have some people not doing it, that's fine, they own their time. When you have have almost no one doing it, that's a cultural issue. I'm saying Linux/Unix man pages have inherent and probably very old cultural issues leading to a lack of baked-in examples.
I believe that. Others may have had a different experience to mine. I was always searching for a class that would give me the “real” Linux experience but nothing really exists like that, I think you just have to live with the tools for a bit.
> I've been told to "google it" more times than I could ever count and not once have I perceived a condescending intent.
Personally, when someone answers "google it", I read it as "fuck off". If you don't want to help me, just don't; no need to explicitly say you won't.
However, it's totally different if you say "you should read about concepts X, Y, Z", because that gives me keywords to search for.
> If I turn to my coworker and ask [...]
Well that's a bit different than asking a question to strangers online. Of course sometimes it makes sense to ask a coworker, though a quick search beforehand never hurts.
I think the root problem is that writing documentation sucks and people just do the bare minimum. I am hoping that AI making docs easier to create will help make them more usable all around.
Perhaps not super simple but it will have been broken down into named parts. In the days before spreadsheets were as capable as they are now I worked with plenty of quite old engineers who would write Fortran instead; their Fortran was always better than the spreadsheets that they later produced.
The degree something is well-designed and comprehensible is based mostly on the developer, not the tool. A spreadsheet with named ranges/tables, cell comments (sparsely, where necessary), clearly-defined tabs, etc can make debugging or reverse-engineering a breeze. The visual aspect of Excel can also help debugging immensely, i.e. conditional formatting of cells failing validation, filtering to isolate subsets of data, etc.
I will certainly agree that it is quite rare to come across a spreadsheet that is perfectly-organized, on the other hand a ton of developers write horrible spaghetti-code too. Further, a 10+ year-old spreadsheet will open right up in Excel... while a 10+ year-old data project is often written in a language you've never used before (or hoped you'd never use again).
There might be good courses, aaaaand there was a pretty decent hands-on series linked recently here (or on reddit, or ... somewhere! and I can't find it now, sorry :/ )
That said, as the sibling comment by sanitycheck mentioned, start using it. WSL2 is pretty okay.
Oracle is heavily promoting its cloud services by offering a pretty beefy free tier (24GB RAM, 4 vCPU aarch64, 200GB SSD, +1 IPv4 address)
I'd start with self-hosting a bunch of stuff. Just for fun. Whatever interests you. Try things with and without Docker. Write a Dockerfile, build it, run it. Write a systemd unit file, enable it, start it, stop it, disable it, mask it, etc.
Buying a (second hand?) laptop and installing Linux on it instantly provides a ton of interesting challenges. Which distribution? Which version of the distribution? How to partition the disk? Encrypt my files? Only my home dir or full-disk encryption?
Try KDE, try Gnome, try Xfce. Try Ubuntu. Try Arch (because it's hype, also it's a rolling distro, also pacman - its package manager - is pretty nice) ... I don't like RedHat-based distros, but ... millions do. Who knows, maybe you'll like it. (Try Fedora.)
Okay, you set up your Linux desktop. For you it's definitely the Year of the Linux Desktop. Congratulations! You're irrevocably one of us now. (I'm typing this on a shitty Windows 10 laptop, while a feet away a newer, but even worse Win11 laptop sleeps and ... I've been using Win10/11 on my big "dev" box for years (for playing 5+ year old games, obviously) ... but ! finally got fed up with BSODs and ~6 weeks ago I've installed Linux on it again ... then I moved and it's still in a box in storage :(((( )
Oh, yeah, this reminds me. Try Wine! Definitely try Lutris. (StarCraft II is free now, works great on Wine.)
That's it! Absolutely nothing else. No need to learn shell scripting, no need to open the terminal, no need to know just enough python to be dangerous. No need to know what's DKMS, nvidia drivers will just work. Everything just works! Bluetooth headsets and network printers too!
15 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadPersonally, when someone answers "google it", I read it as "fuck off". If you don't want to help me, just don't; no need to explicitly say you won't.
However, it's totally different if you say "you should read about concepts X, Y, Z", because that gives me keywords to search for.
> If I turn to my coworker and ask [...]
Well that's a bit different than asking a question to strangers online. Of course sometimes it makes sense to ask a coworker, though a quick search beforehand never hurts.
I will certainly agree that it is quite rare to come across a spreadsheet that is perfectly-organized, on the other hand a ton of developers write horrible spaghetti-code too. Further, a 10+ year-old spreadsheet will open right up in Excel... while a 10+ year-old data project is often written in a language you've never used before (or hoped you'd never use again).
That said, as the sibling comment by sanitycheck mentioned, start using it. WSL2 is pretty okay.
Oracle is heavily promoting its cloud services by offering a pretty beefy free tier (24GB RAM, 4 vCPU aarch64, 200GB SSD, +1 IPv4 address)
I'd start with self-hosting a bunch of stuff. Just for fun. Whatever interests you. Try things with and without Docker. Write a Dockerfile, build it, run it. Write a systemd unit file, enable it, start it, stop it, disable it, mask it, etc.
Buying a (second hand?) laptop and installing Linux on it instantly provides a ton of interesting challenges. Which distribution? Which version of the distribution? How to partition the disk? Encrypt my files? Only my home dir or full-disk encryption?
Try KDE, try Gnome, try Xfce. Try Ubuntu. Try Arch (because it's hype, also it's a rolling distro, also pacman - its package manager - is pretty nice) ... I don't like RedHat-based distros, but ... millions do. Who knows, maybe you'll like it. (Try Fedora.)
Okay, you set up your Linux desktop. For you it's definitely the Year of the Linux Desktop. Congratulations! You're irrevocably one of us now. (I'm typing this on a shitty Windows 10 laptop, while a feet away a newer, but even worse Win11 laptop sleeps and ... I've been using Win10/11 on my big "dev" box for years (for playing 5+ year old games, obviously) ... but ! finally got fed up with BSODs and ~6 weeks ago I've installed Linux on it again ... then I moved and it's still in a box in storage :(((( )
Oh, yeah, this reminds me. Try Wine! Definitely try Lutris. (StarCraft II is free now, works great on Wine.)
... also, ask questions! (There's even a guide for asking questions! http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Oh this reminds me of the howtos. So backin the day there was this https://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html :) before youtube videos took over.)
That's it! Absolutely nothing else. No need to learn shell scripting, no need to open the terminal, no need to know just enough python to be dangerous. No need to know what's DKMS, nvidia drivers will just work. Everything just works! Bluetooth headsets and network printers too!
(ps. I lied, sorry!)
Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...