Thanks for spreading the word!

Silverblue doesnt either… I think you’re right, it’s an immutable distro thing.

At least according to Wikipedia, small amounts of carbon (< 2.14%) in the final alloy are an important component in controlling the ductility, which agrees with what I thought I remembered from materials classes (although I am not a materials scientist). Obviously not using the Bessemer process drastically reduces the amount of carbon necessary, but trace carbon is important.

I mean anything but the atomic distros will dual boot just fine. GRUB is GRUB. I have the most experience with Debian-based distros, but they all dual-boot just fine.

Looks like it from the readme!

They’re ways to search on a specific site from the engine’s search bar. For instance, !gsch cows will search for cows on google scholar from DuckDuckGo. I don’t know how stamdardized bangs are across engines, but they’re super useful if you use a bunch of obscure search tools on the day to day.

Yeah I can explicitly not recommend modern HP or Toshiba laptops for reliability reasons. I’ve had serious hardware and structural issues with both. Also, in general 2-in-1s will break at the hinge in less time than other laptops. Lenovo 2-in-1s specifically have known issues with the hinge which can shatter the screen. If you want durability, go for a more traditional form factor with no touchscreen.

Edit: oops thought you said 2-in-1

Okular usually works well for me, for highlighting and field editing, YMMV.

You’re going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they’re currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:

• Package manager: which are you used to?
• Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
• Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it’s not “normie”, and unless you really know what you’re doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.

For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it. I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.

It should be noted that it seems like Unity bought only part of Weta–the “technical and engineering division”. I don’t think this means that Weta as a VFX studio is going away.

I use LaTeX almost every day for typesetting, and I had no idea you could use it for this complex of graphical representation! This is awesome.

I just noticed Christian Edition and Muslim edition, and was puzzled…this is the best article I could find on them. I think its interesting that religious distros keep showing up, rather than just religious packages being available on package managers.

The LunarVim install process can be kinda a pain to start, but I find it fills a wierd spot between neovim and vsodium – I still use nvim for making quick edits to files (especially in compiled languages) but still use vscode for really big multifile projects. LunarVim just takes too long to boot to be a drop-in neovim replacement, and the file explorer is too unintuitive to use for many files simultaneously, even as a longtime vim user. I like LunarVim, but I think it has its own usability niche, and I dont find myself using it as much as I’d like.

Quite frankly, base neovim is still pretty functional for me, but the complexity of installing extensions just encourages me to use it as a text editor rather than an IDE, which is largely fine by me.

Calling this a green move is somewhat misleading. I think the author pretty much read the marketing copy on Bloom’s website, which doesn’t present the full picture.

tl;dr: This is a great step towards building infrastructure which can bridge the gap between fossil and renewable fuels, but as the technology stands this currently cannot be a renewably-fuelled system. This is important but the article buries the lede as to why: it helps to smooth our transition to renewable hydrogen when it becomes available.

Bloom bills their cells as “low or no CO₂ emissions”, which is kind of true. I’m going to focus on the effects on CO₂ emissions here, but Bloom also talks about reducing water consumption and particulate emissions, which are very valid benefits. The article states that the data center will be powered by natural gas, with the hope of transitioning to hydrogen in the future, so let’s talk briefly about how fuel cells interact with natural gas.

Solid oxide fuel cells perform internal steam reformation of natural gas (DOE source), where if air is used as the oxygen source, methane and water are converted to H₂ and carbon monoxide (DOE source). Yes, that does decrease the amount of CO₂ produced, but CO is an objectively worse byproduct. The only realistic thing they can turn it into is CO₂ via a water-gas shift reaction (which is standard for methane reformation), so a fuel cell still produces one CO₂ per methane oxidized. These do decrease CO₂ emissions, but only because they also slightly reduce the amount of methane which must be consumed to generate a certain amount of electrical energy, not due to a fundamental difference in how they process carbon.

Now, moving to hydrogen is a great goal, and that flexibility in fuel is the real progress story here. However, if they’re talking about moving to hydrogen in the near future, the only technique currently capable of generating H₂ on an industrial scale is the same steam-reformation process which is happening in the fuel cells when they operate on natural gas. Unfortunately, we simply do not have any renewable methods for making hydrogen currently (98% of all hydrogen produced in the world is via coal gasification or steam-reformation of methane).

A small caveat to this is that if the data center was able to source biogas from a fermentor, this would help in at least closing our carbon cycle, i.e. only recycling carbon which is already in the carbon cycle.

Don’t get me wrong, building this datacenter with fuel cells is a worthwhile thing to do, but not for the reasons that this article (or the Bloom website) suggests. It does not substantially reduce CO₂ emissions, even if it is run on hydrogen. However, the important thing that it does do is reduce the barrier for switching to green hydrogen when it becomes available, which is super important! The biggest issue when renewable hydrogen becomes practical will be the infrastructural expense of transitioning to an entirely new fuel source, and we’re currently not prepared for that transition–this is a step in the right direction.

Thanks for coming to my TED rant! Hope this is helpful or interesting to y’all.

For anyone who likes neovim but wants a little extra UI, I’ve been liking LunarVim recently. Unfortunately their install process is not trivial, but worth it IMO. I still use NeoVim for quick editing of files due to the slightly longer boot time of LV, but for extended writing its nice.

I will mention that while I like sending PDFs for things, that won’t work for any sort of collaborative project. I was surprised by how many of my coworkers don’t know you can comment on PDFs just like you can for Word documents, and are totally unwilling to learn how.

Not that thats what you recommended PDFs for, just something I was surprised by and think is useful to know!

Edit: I re-tested the integration, and it went fine this time–10/10 would recommend.

Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.

JabRef is much more feature-rich than Zotero, IMO. It’s what I use, and I love it, but I had issues getting it to communicate with LibreOffice–it’s really designed to work with LaTeX. I ended up having to export to a file each time I updated the bibliography and import that into LibreOffice.

There are also a bunch of reference managers out there–with the exception of Mendeley (curse you, Elsevier, for being the scum of the earth) they can all export and import biblios from each other, so you can try them out without losing your work.

I have a 2021 G15, but it looks like the 2022 G15 is still ryzen, I’ve had really good experiences with it. Ive never fwlt like I needed more screen (15.6" is pretty close to 16"), and the battery is great. Just don’t get it if you need a webcam on the move! FYI, the Zephyrus naming convention is that G notebooks have AMD processors, and the M series have Intel.

Firefox does not support PWAs on desktop, but there is an extension to enable them which works well.