palordrolap

This has bell curve meme vibes. I’m just not sure what the middle guy would be saying.

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I’ve been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer’s been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I’ve thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I’ve had an Xorg update. That’s more of a “your graphics card is so old Mint doesn’t really support it any more” problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren’t quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

The find command could be your friend for getting a full depth count. Something like:

find /path/name/here/ | wc -l

Or just:

find . | wc -l

for the current directory.

There’s also a command called locate (often with another letter in front, but accessible by just that word) which maintains a database of filenames on a system that can be used, provided it’s installed and has built that database.

Pro: Faster than churning the disk every time with find. (Though disk cache can help alleviate some of this).

Cons: Can get out of date with a changing filesystem. Harder to search for relative paths like .

locate -r '^/path/name/here/' | wc -l

… would be roughly equivalent to the first find example.

Cinnamon’s Nemo (GUI) file manager shows folder item count in the List View’s “Size” column rather than a byte value. It started as a fork of Nautilus (now GNOME Files), so that and its descendents may also have the same feature.

The equivalent GNOME gio list command line command doesn’t seem to do this.

It wouldn’t be too hard to whip something up in Python, Perl etc. if you can’t or don’t want to install anything else for some reason.

e.g.

perl -wle '$a=$ARGV[0];opendir D, defined $a && -d $a?$a:".";@x=readdir D; print -2+@x'

is a Perl incantation that will return the number of entries in the current directory, or the supplied directory if that’s added as a parameter after the command.

The -2 in there subtracts the count for . and ... That’s off by one for the root directory where there’s no “…” but that’s rare and I didn’t want to add too much for a quick proof of concept.

Personal project a while ago. Had an idea in my head that I needed to rewrite using a particular language feature but had been putting it off because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the implementation details.

Eventually decide to sit down and plug away at it. Find the code already uses the language feature.

I had either written it with that language feature in the first place or had been back at some time I don’t remember and done the work I didn’t think I was capable of doing.

I could still be convinced that it was done by pixies or the whatever might be the programming equivalent of shoemaker elves.

Self-administering amnestics

Ah, I see you have discovered an infinite loop. Not that you’ll remember.

At a guess, it’s because the function of preserving file dates and times is more likely than setting the port to something other than the default, so it gets the lowercase character, whereas ssh doesn’t do anything with files so the port option gets the lowercase character.

The inconsistency is annoying though. I wonder if they could make ssh’s -p option case insensitive so -P works across the board. (Maybe -P is reserved for some unknown future purpose?)

A work-around would be introducing long options and having --port be the option’s long name across all the commands, but then, that comes with its own problems.

This, or wmctrl that has some overlap. OR if this is Wayland (and not Xorg), whatever alternatives for those the window manager provides.

Anyone know what those are?

“Bounds checking, mobof–ker! Do you speak it?”

The card’s Nvidia. Mint comes with the Nouveau driver which doesn’t quite cut it, at least not for me. Maybe some of that’s baked into the kernel these days, I’m not sure.

Earlier Mints (LMDE included) provided an installable package of the OEM legacy driver for cards as old as mine, but Debian 12 (which LMDE 6 is based on) doesn’t.

I should point out that graphics works without the OEM driver, but it doesn’t work well. Work is offloaded to the CPU that the card is perfectly capable of doing.

Not if it’s really old. My dinosaur is over 12 years old and Debian stable (on which LMDE is based) no longer officially supports my graphics card.

If I want the graphics to work properly, I have to install the proprietary driver the hard way, and reinstall it every time Xorg updates.

There are alternatives but all of them require more work or giving up features.

(And no, I can’t just buy a new computer.)

Obligatory meme versions (contain strong language):

Oh no

Oh f–k

“Where do you think we are?”

To use the trash as an analogy, I even picked up the bag and walked around with it a bit (the tab was open. I know I looked at it and scrolled down), but did it make it to where it was supposed to go? (information can into brain?) Doesn’t look like it.

Clearly I did not. And now I am concerned because I thought I did.

The jump from 7.x right to 24.x had me thinking this was an AI generated article at first, but the main LibreOffice website does indeed show that the new version number is 24.

EDIT: The article literally talks about this and I missed it. Twice. I would like to claim to be on drugs, but sadly(?) this is not the case.

The choice of 24 makes me think they’ve decided to switch to using the last two digits of the current year as the main version number, rather than the previous arbitrary increases, but I can’t find anything obvious about this on the site.

Their current release schedule is every six months, and as long as they don’t accelerate the way web browser releases do, this probably wouldn’t come back to bite them.

The sub-version being .2 and it being February soon makes me wonder if that’s intentional as well.

As for commentary on LibreOffice itself: I use it every once in a while, so I don’t dig deep into its feature set(s) at all. In a previous update I noticed a few things had been moved around in Calc (the spreadsheet) which I’m still getting used to, but by and large all I can do is appreciate those working on it and, for whatever it’s worth, thank them for their efforts.

The latest Mint (21.3) does have experimental Wayland support. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Some systems already have this implemented. For example, on my machine open is /usr/bin/open which links to /etc/alternatives/open which in turn currently points at /usr/bin/xdg-open.

Users of GNOME-derived window managers might also want to look into the gio command that abstracts a lot of GUI things through the command line. Most of the functionality duplicates more basic commands, but these use the GUI’s API / behaviour where possible.

The best example might be gio trash which can delete things to the desktop Rubbish/Recycle/Trash bin rather than vanish them completely as rm does.

A pity there’s no xdg- wrapper that encompasses gio and whatever KDE and others do though. Maybe that’ll happen one day.