For those who aren't ready for Suicide Linux yet, there's `sl`, a command that mildly punishes you for not being able to type `ls`, available in most distros.

  sudo apt install sl

So if you're not ready for SL you can try sl, which uses little letters so it's not as scary. Nice.

Years ago I installed this at work for new linux users as a prank. They will hate me forever.

I've got 'sl' set to 'ls "$@" | rev'.

`sl` is my favorite first package to install in any distro to get see if the package manager works :)

I’m boring, my first (on rocky lately) is epel-release followed by htop or btop.

The idea that society is required to forgive crime is pretty Christian, though.

that part of Christianity somehow is lost on Americans somehow.

> "court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible.

Exactly. One option is for the person themselves to be able to ask for a LIMITED copy of their criminal history, which is otherwise kept private, but no one else.

This way it remains private, the HR cannot force the applicant to provide a detailed copy of their criminal history and discriminate based on it, they can only get a generic document from the court via Mr Doe that says, "Mr Doe is currently eligible to be employed as a financial advisor" or "Mr Doe is currently ineligible to be employed as a school teacher".

Ideally it should also be encrypted by the company's public key and then digitally signed by the court. This way, if it gets leaked, there's no way to prove its authenticity to a third party without at least outing the company as the source.

The USSR spent its demographic and industrial transition on this. When you have a booming population and a low industrial base, you can squeeze the people a lot harder: they still see that their lives are improving and the lives of their children will improve even more. This means you can continuously consume their savings via inflation, stoking the national economy.

South Korea famously did this very well, turning from a war-torn former dominion of Japan into an industrial and cultural powerhouse.

The Soviets went all-in on building a military-industrial complex without growing their civilian economy, basically eating all the gains their growing population provided. Very charitably, you could say they went all-in, expecting to win the conflict with the West and get their economies "for free", but badly miscalculated their chances.

Local LibreOffice forks. And MS Office, of course.

MS office is pretty secure and private once you put a "Great Firewall" that blocks most outgoing/incoming connections.

By knowing all your tax deductibles?

For which you have to file them first, for which you need to know the specific rules applying, for which people are using an expert, or AI.

No, the other party should file them. Charities can file the lists of donors etc.

What other party? They often don't even know you or if you can use something for tax or not. Pretty much everything can be used for tax deduction, it all just depends on circumstances. I know, many countries have a really broken privacy-situation, but I don't think it would be realistic that every shop is preventive filing every receipt and forces every customer to give them their tax-number so they can link them..

Wait, shops aren't filing their receipts in the US?

I was in my teens when I discovered this site. I am now forty. I have been tying my shoes quicker than the average person literally for the better half of my life.

I would put all bars at the top. On a touch-enabled screen it's much easier to touch something at the top than something next to the keyboard, so I move the taskbar to the top on all my Windows two-in-ones.

Shout out to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher for forcing this behavior even on Windows 11.

Why not at the side, though? Better use of the vertical space and no issues with touchscreens (interactable items on top, hand reaching from the side). That's how I do it on every desktop/laptop machine I own.

I don't remember why I did that, tbh. Having it at the side works as well, I agree.

> - the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet

The Wi-Fi password is "four words all uppercase, one word all lowercase".

> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO

Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.

Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.

NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.

Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.

GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.

Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.

There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.

Linux is great, but IMO macOS is vastly superior to both Windows (by far) and all Linux distros I tried.

It's keyboard-centric and its shortcuts are much easier and quicker to use. For instance, CMD + left/right arrow for home vs having to reach for the home/end button. CMD + Q ("quit") vs. (I think?) alt + F4. CMD + C still works in the terminal, shortcuts are always the same across apps, etc.

It's extremely consistent across apps and dialog boxes, which isn't the case with Windows and even less Linux. For instance, from any app browsing for a file will open the file browser with my preferred settings, bookmarks, and position. All apps handle high-DPI correctly and consistently. Most UIs follow Apple-provided guidelines, shortcuts are consistent across apps, etc.

While not required, it focuses on drag and drop vs. clicking, which is much quicker and 100 times easier to use. For instance, dragging a file from a folder to a "Browse" dialog box to select the file vs. clicking 100 times to navigate to it.

Most importantly, most of the times things just work. To install apps you normally just drag an icon into the Applications folder. Windows still makes you restart in certain cases (because it locks files, I think), Linux still has the problem that app developers don't provide easy-to-use installers.

Obviously this comes down to personal preference.

Windows is just a disgrace despite being the most popular OS for 40 years but it's good for gaming. Linux gives you the freedom to do whatever you want and fix things if you don't like them. macOS normally provides a consistent experience if you just want the thing to work and move on.

If I had a compact Linux laptop for work rather than a MacBook I'd be raw dogging NixOS already rather than using nix-darwin. There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.

The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.

Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.

All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.

> There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.

Unless you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad. The Continuity feature, seamless copy&paste between devices, notification mirroring, iPhone mirroring, and being able to move my mouse cursor from my macOS onto the iPad are things I’d really miss when switching to a Linux desktop.

Yeah. My last corp engagement forced Win10 on me. At least I can install WSL2 and have a sane dev environment. You can run Leenucks on a MBP in a VM, but why? If I want a machine that randomly can't recognize it's boot drive, I'll get an HP.

Ah yes, Linux on a laptop: wifi, sleep, graphics - pick any two

I've never had any WiFi issues, and I think most people who started using Linux in the mid 2010s have the same experience.

Graphic though, yes (I had as much sleep issues on windows than on Linux). Especially the dual graphics intel/Nvidia. I still have to force environment variables to launch my games with the correct GC

Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows.

But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)

Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.

It's not 2005 anymore, most distros work 100% on install

Maybe. And then what’s battery life like - half, one 3rd?

I have an x86 HP tablet that dual boots Windows 11 and Linux. I don't have specific numbers, but battery life is better on the Linux side.

It's better than Windows, but obviously worse than Mac (both hardware and software reasons).

My laptops don't kill themselves waking up in my bags so I could argue it's at least 5x better than windows.

Things moved on nicely in 20 years, you should try it for yourself.

What is the deal with waking up randomly with the lid closed on Windows?

I can't figure out why Windows has these crazy bugs that aren't addressed, aren't a huge company with almost infinite resources..?

Why can't they make Windows work properly, it's been 40 years... :-/

AFAIK, Microsoft and/or Intel pushed to remove the usual sleep S3 state and use a less sleepy state to be able to access network and display notifications. As if it was a tablet or a Macbook.

This is (of course) badly done, and tested as well the rest of Windows, so it results in laptops waking up in bags, choking thermally, and not going back to sleep.

Where did I say I haven’t?

You wouldn't be asking questions like this if you had, you'd know the same answers found in this thread.

Just like the other replier, people who put words into others mouths are extremely annoying. And in both of your cases, come off as fanatical. I'd love to run Linux on a laptop (and have tried many times) but have actual work to get done.

Seems like you're just being obtuse for fun, which I also find extremely annoying.

Mostly similar - sometimes better, sometimes worse. It's not 2005 anymore.

Hm i have all three

Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime.

But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.