There are thousands if not tens of thousands of distros. Wikipedia has a really cool Linux family tree.

If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, a distribution or distro is just someone somewhere took various options and put them together. I want this GUI, this init system, this package manager, this set of default apps. Then someone else says well I want this GUI and this init system but I want that package manager and the other set of default apps. Often they have specific use cases in mind, some specifically target gaming, some are meant for workstation use, some like TAILS are specifically for covert communication, some like Hannah Montana Linux are entirely for fucking around.

You have a selection of GUIs to choose from, some like KDE or Cinnamon are more feature rich and the vast majority of tasks can be done through a GUI settings menu, others are more minimal because some folks prefer just directly editing config files, or so that the software is smaller, lighter and faster. The choice is yours.

I might suggest, if you want to take computer tinkering to the next level, learning a little bit of Python, or maybe playing with the Godot game engine. These work on Windows as well as Linux and turn out to be handy tools.

As for whether you should use Linux? Try it out and see.

Isn’t that just everything the Lifetime channel makes?

If you are where I think you are, I have a 7 storey rotor/stator factory there, despite the arches.

I keep a journal in a text file and do what I call “watneying” after Mark Watney of The Martian. Looks a bit like this:

80 rubber plants (4 gangs of 20) will produce 1600 HOR/min. The turbo blend fuel recipe takes HOR, Fuel and Coke, plus sulfur. 15 fuel, 30 HOR and 22.5 coke/min. Need to figure up the fuel and coke in terms of HOR/min

Diluted fuel takes 50 HOR/min and makes 100 fuel/min.

Petrol coke takes 40 HOR/min and makes 120 coke/min.

So we’re talking about 30 raw HOR, 7.5 fuel HOR and 7.5 coke HOR/min. So 45 HOR/min plus some sulfur becomes 45 turbofuel/min.

My play time counter in this game is wildly inaccurate because I spend about as much time looking at the map, wiki and planning in my text document as I do in-engine building factories and shooting piggies.

I found pre 1.0 that trying to feed machines their own waste water is too delicate because if it starves for any other resource or the output backs up it WILL jam with water.

What I end up doing is, I’ll have a gang of machines, and lets say for the sake of math 6 machines that take 600 total water but they produce 300 total waste water. So that’s enough waste water to fully run half of the machines. So I pipe the output of all six to three machine’s input, and then only run the remaining three on fresh water. It may take it a second to start up fully but once it’s going it’s going and it won’t jam on water.

Satisfactory currently has me. I’m just now starting into Tier 9 proper.

It’s kind of an elegant hack IBM did to make floppy drives easier to bother with.

Floppy drives were designed to attach to the computer in a bus topology, sharing all of their data connections. The only wires that weren’t in common were the Motor Enable and Drive Select lines, which is how the computer would tell the drives which one it wanted to talk to. This meant the drive needed to know which drive it was, so there were jumpers on the back so you could set them up as Drive 0 or 1 (which would show up in DOS as A or B). By twisting seven cables (three of which were ground and weren’t effected) and jumpering all drives as Drive 1(B), drives attached before the twist would respond as drive B and after the twist as drive A. That way you didn’t need to fuck with the jumpers. Some later drives even did away with the jumpers and hard wired them as B.

Hey man, you got any of them floppies?

I associate it with cartoons. Bart Simpson has been wearing the same orange shirt and blue shorts for 30 years now. I remember an episode of Doug where you see his closet and it’s like twelve identical sets of white shirt, green sweatervest, tan shorts.

A tan suit

I had one of the very few of them in North America. I don’t think they ever imported them at any great scale. I bought mine used, and it was obviously used as a track bike. It had a cylinder kit that took it up to about 72cc, the damn thing could do 70.

New band name: The Gin Test Dummies.

I mean, you name dropped Netscape. Your next of kin is probably rehearsing the talk where they take your car keys away as we speak.

The topic of discussion is MSN Messenger, its popularity and demise, which puts us in the period between 1999 and ~2008. Especially during the first half of that decade, practically everyone was using IE. And not really liking it, but using it nevertheless.

Yeah “ribbit” is a bit like bow wow. Someone find me a dog that says bow wow and I’ll find you an honest man in congress.

I think I’m up to a 6. Gonna make a trip to the sawmill today to pick up some walnut and maybe some oak depending on how I’m feeling.

It’s possible to look that up in a document called the Airport Facility Directory (which they now call Chart Supplements apparently) but if you don’t speak pilotese you’re not going to make heads or tails of it. Here’s the line that instructs pilots that there’s pilot controlled lighting at the first airport I ever landed at:

Actvt MALSR Rwy 05; REIL Rwy 23; PAPI Rwy 05 and 23; HIRL Rwy 05–23—CTAF

That expands to “Activate Medium Intensity Approach Light System for runway 5, Runway End Identifier Lights for runway 23, Precision Approach Path Indicator for runway 5 and 23, High Intensity Runway Lights on runway 5 and 23 on the Common Traffic Advisory Frequency.” It’s actually weird to me the PAPI is pilot controlled; usually those are constantly on because they’re useful even during the day.

No. I’m a pilot and instructor myself, so I can spout aviation jargon for months. It used to be my job.

Ooh Truth Ache is better.

You could get several band names from that concept.

Five Mile Final

Left Base (or Left Bass?)

Threshold

The Numbers

Clear At Charlie

The Active

Missed Approach

I’ve got a drawer that has a stack of my old phones and devices in it. Among them is the CD MP3 player I’ve had since high school. It’s 24 years old, made entirely of plastic, it followed me all the way through high school and part of the way through college, and it’s in perfect working condition and bears only light scuffs. It might be my midlife crisis coming on but I’m tempted to start using the thing again instead of my smart phone. My PC tower has a 5 1/4" bay, I’m tempted to install an optical drive in it.