In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:

Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.

Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.

You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.

Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.

I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

Honestly, I’m still very much in the “classes define what a tag represents, CSS defines how it looks” camp. While the old semantic web was never truly feasible, assigning semantic meaning to a page’s structure very much is. A well-designed layout won’t create too much trouble and allows for fairly easy consistency without constant repetition.

Inline styles are essentially tag soup. They work like a print designer thinks: This element has a margin on the right. Why does it have that margin? Who cares, I just want a margin here. That’s acceptable if all you build are one-off pages but requires manual bookkeeping for sitewide consistency. It also bloats pages and while I’m aware that modern web design assumes unmetered connections with infinite bandwidth and mobile devices with infinitely big batteries, I’m oldschool enough to consider it rude to waste the user’s resources like that. I also consider it hard to maintain so I’d only use it for throwaway pages that never need to be maintained.

CSS frameworks are like inline styles but with the styles moved to classes and with some default styling provided. They’re not comically bad like inline styles but still not great. A class like gap-2 still carries no structural meaning, still doesn’t create a reusable component, and barely saves any bandwidth over inline CSS since it’s usually accompanied by several other classes. At least some frameworks can strip out unused framework code to help with the latter.

I don’t use SCSS much (most of its best functionality being covered by vanilla CSS these days) but it might actually be useful to bridge the gap between semantically useful CSS classes and prefabricated framework styles: Just fill your semantic classes entirely with @include statements. And even SCSS won’t be needed once native mixins are finished and reach mainstream adoption.

Note: All of this assumes static pages. JS-driven animations will usually need inline styles, of course.

When I first read that I read it as lobsters hunting teeth.

Please don’t crack open my molars.

Wouldn’t the half-name actually be “Cla”? “Santa Claus” is the anglicised version of “Sinterklaas”, a Dutch adaptation of Saint Nicholas.

It’s not terribly exciting but I find myself using this a lot:

#!/bin/sh

echo "$*" | sed -e "s/x/*/g" | bc -l

Just a little shorthand for bc that allows me to write “x” instead of “*” to avoid shell expansion nonsense. I put it in ~/.local/bin/= so I can e.g. just write = 17+4x5. Combined with a Quake-style terminal this is much faster than launching a calculator app. It’s a script instead of an alias so it works regardless of the shell I’m currently using.

The call to bc -l could be replaced with one to qalc -t if you know qalc to be present on the system .

Because JavaScript and its complete absence of a standard library is a horrible abomination that should’ve been put out of our misery years ago.

Full stack developer:

The lightbulb is broken. Deploys a lightweight fix that involves 17 metric tons of chandeliers, stadium floodlights, sconces, and the necessary infrastructure to operate the street lights for a city of 500.000. His solution delivers a solid 100 lm of light using only 175 MW of power.

There’s a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

Plugins and extensions could make sense if the site and plugin are designed to talk to each other. But that could be made safer by each extension being able to decide whether to announce itself (and the user being able to override that).

I think you’d like how Exalted handles money. (Note: I’m talking about second edition here; I never got familiar with third edition.)

In Exalted, wealth is represented by a Background called Resources. Backgrounds are essentially stats that represent useful things your characters has in a general sense like wealth, fame, contacts, or a mentor. They go from zero to five.

Resources is a vague representation of wealth. At Reduces 1 you’re one meal away from total poverty. At Resources 5 you have something that passively generates substantial amounts of money for your character, whether that’s ownership of a lot of land or an army of accountants maintaining your investment portfolio. Whatever is is, it works without you having to deal with it.

In terms of game mechanics it’s easy to use: Prices are expressed as Resource scores. If you want to buy something you just compare your score to the item’s.

• If yours is higher, you just get the item as the price doesn’t affect your wealth significantly.
• If both scores are the same you get the item but have to reduce your Resources by one. This represents you having to liquidate a large amount of your assets to cover the price.
• If your Resources score is lower than that of the item, you can’t afford it.

It’s a nice system for a game that doesn’t want resource management to get in the way of epic adventure.

“Unintuitively, there is more than one employer in the world and I happened to work for a different one previously. I know; I’m as surprised and vaguely terrified as you are. Please let me help you put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon.”

“Certainly! What makes you think that there is more than one employer in the world and you happened to work for a different one previously. You know; you’re as surprised and vaguely terrified as I am. Please let you help me put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon?”

Very true. Good coworkers can make work a lot more bearable.

Looking a bit into the company’s business can help, too. If they do something vaguely interesting that can be a bonus. I ignored that once in favor of perks and that got me into the complete disaster area that is fintech. Don’t make the same mistake.

Planes generally don’t go on rails so maybe that’s a factor.

Doesn’t that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?

Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can’t really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can’t even really theme them.

They’re within the European Broadcasting Area like all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea (plus some adjacent ones). Bring in the EBA is more important here than being in Europe is. There’s no reason why Egypt or Iraq can’t participate.

Okay, there is one – most Arab countries refuse to participate while Israel does. But if Israel didn’t participate they’d be perfectly fine with showing up.

Oh, and there’s one big exemption: Australia can participate because they’ve been such big ESC fans for so long that we invited them for the 60th one as a one-off and then decided to keep them in because they’re cool. It’s pretty wholesome, which is very much in tune with the spirit of the ESC.