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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I’m shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is “too old” to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.


  • I have a Surface Pro 4 (I think from 2015) and the battery life now is awful. I might be able to get an hour or two depending on the performance mode, I usually just plug it in while using it now. If I forget to plug it in between uses, it will definitely be dead the next time I go to use it.

    Plus it’s starting to feel pretty slow. I do still have Windows on it, perhaps installing Linux would help make it faster but it sounds like it takes some work to get everything working properly so I haven’t bothered.









  • This looks like a C macro. Basically what it does is replaces the word “true” in the code with (rand() > 10). The rand() function will return a random number from 0 to 32767. So (rand() > 10) will very likely return “true” but not always.

    So say you have some code like this: if (someVar == true) { // Do stuff } It would replace “true” with code that usually evaluates to “true” but not always. So every so often your code would just do the wrong thing but it would be hard to debug because it would be rare.

    Granted, in that example you probably would just write “if (someVar)” making this moot, but there are more realistic cases where you’d use the constant “true”





  • One of the great things about Linux is that you can almost always just run whatever distro from the USB drive before installing (and just reboot without the USB drive to get back into Windows) So you can download a few ISOs and try each one for a bit before committing to anything.

    This is nice if there’s anything specific that you need to work, you can try it and make sure it’s usable for you before making any permanent changes.

    For example, I’m legally blind and use a screen magnifier. I tried a few distros to compare the built-in magnifiers before settling on one.

    I’d also recommend using Ventoy on your USB. That lets you just plop ISO files on the drive and choose which one at boot.