Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?
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@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
The only failure here is you and your CLIphobia, which has apparently lead you to believe all sorts of untrue things.
I guess it would depend on the users the product is targeting. Past a certain point, the perceived cost of learning a CLI is far exceeded by the perceived benefit to them from doing it that way. Charlene from Finance might not want it, but there are many pieces of software that she'll never use anyway.
The product I work on right now requires you to write Python code to use it, and to write embedded C code (or even whatever it is you use to do FPGA definitions) to do anything truly complex. No way are we going to do a complex GUI for that (that would be... challenging to say the least) but our users love it anyway.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
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@HardwareGeek it's like Mason is blakeyrat with the ranting mode disabled sometimes.
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@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
The only failure here is you and your CLIphobia, which has apparently lead you to believe all sorts of untrue things.
I guess it would depend on the users the product is targeting. Past a certain point, the perceived cost of learning a CLI is far exceeded by the perceived benefit to them from doing it that way. Charlene from Finance might not want it, but there are many pieces of software that she'll never use anyway.
The product I work on right now requires you to write Python code to use it, and to write embedded C code (or even whatever it is you use to do FPGA definitions) to do anything truly complex. No way are we going to do a complex GUI for that (that would be... challenging to say the least) but our users love it anyway.
Part of the problem is here that someone told Mason that the CLI was very useful to him in daily work. Then Mason for some reason confused this with his misunderstandings about installing software on Linux. Basically, me calling @Mason-Wheeler a failure is mostly about him not reading what people are saying and once again assuming he knows everything and has all the Right Opinions.
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@HardwareGeek said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
Transitive property of @boomzilla discussion belongs in thread with all the other maths.
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@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
mostly about him not reading what people are saying and once again assuming he knows everything and has all the Right Opinions.
Kinda like kids who don't read math word problems and come up with "solutions".
Filed under: Crossing the threads
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@HardwareGeek it's like Mason is blakeyrat with the ranting mode disabled sometimes.
I think that's probably the first time anyone's equated the two. To me they symbolize opposite ends of the personality spectrum.
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@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
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@jinpa Horseshoe theory covers that quite nicely though.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
I have a lot more terminals open/in use at any given time than that. Because I've yet to find a Git GUI that actually works decently, so everything I do outside of XCode/Android Studio (which are entangled enough with their git stuff that I'm forced to use them) uses a terminal window. Plus a few more for ssh-ing into various systems, again on the command line.
And frankly, I find MacOS way more of a pain to use than windows. Less stable (except when I'm doing hardware changes, and that's not the OS's fault when it can't get past the boot phase), more prone to getting in my way, more hand-holding for adding any kind of serious package (no, the built in app store doesn't have even the tiniest fraction of things I need, and working with Cocoapods and Homebrew aren't any better--worse, in fact, than even apt).
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@Benjamin-Hall I’m only a humble web dev so I can get by with a couple of terminals to do my Grunt commands to build shit, everything else I do in Sublime Merge because our repos are very simple. Some of them literally only have a main branch.
Will agree that MacOS can be way pissier than Windows for things because of its Apple heritage and all reality distortion fields that encompasses (“you’re using it wrong”)
And yes. Homebrew is worse than apt.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Bulb Well, we're specifically talking about Linux here, so let's do a very simple, objective comparison.
In Windows, it's completely possible for a user, even a power user like you and me, to use it for years and years and never have to touch the command line. (Someone like us might dip into the command line from time to time for convenience, for example to write a script to automate things, but it's never necessary.)
It is pretty much necessary if you need more software than just browser and MS office and want to keep it up-to-date. Because while the applications do have installers that you can run from the explorer, it's an inconsistent mess and the only tool that can somewhat keep track of what can be upgraded is chocolatey—which is a command-line third party tool. So pretty much the first thing I do when I get clean Windows install is open command-line.
In all my years, I have never found a Linux distro that could survive a single day without me needing to open Bash to do something that there's just no other way to achieve without the command line.
You pretty much don't need to touch command-line on a KUbuntu. At least a user who wouldn't need to touch it in Windows doesn't need to touch it on KUbuntu either. Now I don't use synaptic, but aptitude, while being terminal, is not command-line either, but rather full-screen TUI. And for that I get something that automatically keeps most of my software up-to-date. And have had that for 20 years. While Windows have only lately been getting that store, and that's still nowhere near as good.
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@Bulb said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
chocolatey
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
Finder is god awful shite. It wouldn’t suprised me if you navigate the file system in terminal. Makes me pine for the days I thought explorer was ok.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Bulb said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
chocolatey
The horrible purple abomination of a hack that somehow manages to keep track of where to download installers of various shit and how to invoke them so they just install without asking too many stupid questions. It is, unfortunately, the only tool that does.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
That's one of the benefits of macOS though - it is (mostly) easy to use but it's also got a proper *nix terminal. Unlike Windows which is (mostly) easy to use but has a terminal that's best described as "better than it used to be".
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@DogsB Finder gives me legit anger issues which is why I thank $deity for Sublime Text’s ability to open entire folders as a project so I can do everything I usually need in there.
I have thought about making my own with something like PureBasic but, y’know,
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@DogsB said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
Finder is god awful shite. It wouldn’t suprised me if you navigate the file system in terminal. Makes me pine for the days I thought explorer was ok.
Finder's better than Explorer unless you're doing something with an SMB share.
It's not a particularly high bar but still.
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@loopback0 you know what it doesn’t have by default, though?
dir
I never quite mastered the muscle memory to ls by default (unless I need
ls -Al
) and I still get bitten on (just) MacOS that doesn’t alias this to anything.
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@Arantor I'm the other way - I get irritated that
cmd
on Windows doesn't havels
.
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@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor I'm the other way - I get irritated that
cmd
on Windows doesn't havels
.Well, then I have a disappointing solution for both of you: install PowerShell. Now you have
dir
andls
but neither one will do what you want.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Because I've yet to find a Git GUI that actually works decently
I've found SmartGit works pretty well. I do still go to the command line for a few things (like
git checkout -b newbranch
andgit branch --set-upstream-to=name
- the UI is easy to use for the later, but when you have 6448 branches, the droplist to select a branch is pretty much unusable in SG).
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@Bulb said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
manages to keep track of where to download installers of various shit
I finally just wrote a program that keeps track on what version I have downloaded, what version is installed on what machine, and a link so I can click-look quickly. (It's just a fancy spreadsheet, but it keep some history)
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@Parody said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor I'm the other way - I get irritated that
cmd
on Windows doesn't havels
.Well, then I have a disappointing solution for both of you: install PowerShell. Then you'll have
dir
andls
but neither one will do what you want.I know Powershell has
ls
(as an alias forget-childitem
). It's notcmd
.
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@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor I'm the other way - I get irritated that
cmd
on Windows doesn't havels
.I keep typing
l
into mycmd
. (it's an alias on our ubuntu machines forls -CF
)
When I started working on ubuntu, I created an alias fordir
.
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@dcon said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Because I've yet to find a Git GUI that actually works decently
I've found SmartGit works pretty well. I do still go to the command line for a few things (like
git checkout -b newbranch
andgit branch --set-upstream-to=name
- the UI is easy to use for the later, but when you have 6448 branches, the droplist to select a branch is pretty much unusable in SG).Those two commands are 90% of what I do in git, so...
And I have a shell alias that does
alias git-push-new='git push --set-upstream origin $(git branch --show-current)'
, so other than just committing (for whichgit commit -m "message"
works just fine), a GUI would just be another thing I have to maintain across all the different repo roots I'm working on. Which might be 3-15 in an average day.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
And I have a shell alias that does
alias git-push-new='git push --set-upstream origin $(git branch --show-current)'
Hm, just
git push -u
works for me. But I may have changed thepush.default
fromsimple
tocurrent
, which then doesn't insist on the upstream being already set.Though, lately I usually do that from the VSCode. Unfortunately it does not respect the
push.default
setting and behaves like it wasupstream
, so it really only works with the upstream always being set to the same name—otherwise I'd preferpush.default = current
and setting upstream always to master or develop or whatever the main branch is, so that plain push updates the feature branch server-side, but plain pull updates from master.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
I've yet to find a Git GUI that actually works decently,
The one in Eclipse is pretty good, all things considered. It doesn't do everything, but does a lot, to the point where I've not needed to anything with the command line
git
for ages. Even some things like mending repos to remove broken commits that most GUIs fail at.It does require using Eclipse though, which many don't care for.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
What sorts of things did you have to do every day like this?
It's not "every day" so much as "the first day." To get a system set up, you need to install stuff. And so so so very much of the stuff you install, when installing it on Linux, requires you to go into
apt
.You haven't seen a Linux installation for the last 20 years, have you?
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Horse
shoeshit theory
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Microsoft would very much like it if their Store were the same on Windows but the wasteland that is Windows “installation” (and we don’t talk about how many apps don’t ship with proper installers on Windows, it’s surprisingly common to just ship a single binary with everything compiled into it and run that from wherever) makes that difficult.
The latter is still a semi-sane way of doing things, at least compared to the usual Windows way of spraying your shit all over the file system and registry (which is a very nice centralized database used mostly for stuff that has absolutely no reason for being centralized while being completely useless for tracking the one thing that would need to be centralized, namely which packages exist on the system and which one owns what file) and good luck ever removing it even if you manually archive all the installers of stuff you manually installed.
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@LaoC I know, I was more getting at hoe this is very much not a “mastered” situation on Windows. It’s much closer to a shitshow.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
Same here, and thankfully macOS has an actually useable terminal that's not an 80s dogshit emulator.
Oh wait ...
@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
That's one of the benefits of macOS though - it is (mostly) easy to use but it's also got a proper *nix terminal. Unlike Windows which is (mostly) easy to use but has a terminal that's best described as "better than it used to be".
@DogsB said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Finder is god awful shite. It wouldn’t suprised me if you navigate the file system in terminal. Makes me pine for the days I thought explorer was ok.
Yeah, Explorer is really one of the better parts of Windows. Finder has a few very nice features, but in total I much prefer Explorer.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@dkf @Arantor Who said anything about the Windows Store? The alternative is a proper installer, which the Windows and Mac worlds mastered over 30 years ago.
Wait, so going to the store to search for "foo" or going to the command line and type "apt-get install foo" is unacceptable, but googling where the fuck to download foo, then run "foo-installer.exe" is much simpler? And how is that different from downloading a .deb / .rpm and running that?
Also, that thing then comes with yet another background service running as Administrator checking for updates. And next you're telling me Windows Update works correctly, too.
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Yeah, Explorer is really one of the better parts of Windows. Finder has a few very nice features, but in total I much prefer Explorer.
Maybe Explorer is better than Finder, but it's not as good as Thunar.
I found out recently that the find box in Explorer doesn't work very well. It was telling me that a file wasn't there, but I had reason to believe it was. Opened PowerShell and found it no problem.
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@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Finder's better than Explorer unless you're doing
something with an SMB shareanything involving a network that might possibly not respond immediately.FTF my experience (which admittedly mostly dates from before 2015). Does it still completely freeze up while waiting for a network request to time out?
Though the one thing I still miss in other file managers is the "Nested folders as columns" view, which is by far the most convenient GUI for navigating folder hierarchies.
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@LaoC said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
What sorts of things did you have to do every day like this?
It's not "every day" so much as "the first day." To get a system set up, you need to install stuff. And so so so very much of the stuff you install, when installing it on Linux, requires you to go into
apt
.You haven't seen a Linux installation for the last 20 years, have you?
He's just never used one with a GUI ergo no GUI package manager!
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
And next you're telling me Windows Update works correctly, too.
Not works correctly. Mastered. Know the difference!
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@dcon said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
DAMN YOU PEOPLE, CLICK THE 'DELETE ON MERGE' OPTION IN YOUR PR!!!!
This disabled one?
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Speaking of which, now I need to install PHP 8.2 (alongside 7.4 and 8.1) via Homebrew.
Guarantee that installing the @8.2 formula will update every fucking thing (not just the relevant dependencies) and break my dev environment just like the time I installed 8.1…
Edit: sure enough, it was trashed - but past me did a lot of the fixing up necessary to unfuck this the last time so present me can just run a script to unfuck it and get on with the day.
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla it would possibly blow his mind to discover that I use MacOS every day at work, and for all its 'famous' ease of use, I still have 2+ terminal windows open every day...
Same here, and thankfully macOS has an actually useable terminal that's not an 80s dogshit emulator.
Oh wait ...
The best thing about the macOS Terminal is that it remembers your scrollback across reboots. Installing an OS update loses far less working context than on Windows because of that one thing.
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@dkf @Arantor Who said anything about the Windows Store? The alternative is a proper installer, which the Windows and Mac worlds mastered over 30 years ago.
Wait, so going to the store to search for "foo" or going to the command line and type "apt-get install foo" is unacceptable, but googling where the fuck to download foo, then run "foo-installer.exe" is much simpler?
It's just so much more to find the scam site that tries to get you to run the malware installer first, then when you've found the correct one, get the wrong bittiness (too bad they scrapped Windows for SPARC and MIPS, but with ARM coming up there will be more opportunities for getting the right bits and wrong CPU again) and when you've downloaded the correct one, resolve the dependencies by hand if and when the installer tells you it can't find
%IMPORTANT_THING%
.And how is that different from downloading a .deb / .rpm and running that?
It's multimedia-supported, malware-enabled and not for free, duh!
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Yeah, Explorer is really one of the better parts of Windows.
Prior to Windows 11, yes. Beginning with Win11 Microsoft is trying their hardest to make Explorer useless and retarded. They haven't completely succeeded ... yet ... but I'm sure they won't give up.
Finder has a few very nice features
A while back I bought an iPad which I hoped would be a replacement for my 10 year old laptop that finally died.
But I was never able to figure out how to do the things that I did in Windows using Explorer, and the people at the store couldn't seem to even understand what I was trying to do. Apparently the idea of connecting to a shared folder on my home network is some sort of bizarre, unknown thing in the Apple world.
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@LaoC and with bonus DLL Hell if it wants, say, a super specific version of the Visual C Redistributables from a given year…
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@Gern_Blaanston if the ads thing in Explorer turns out to be a real thing and not a “tech demo” that went rogue, alternative file managers will come back into fashion.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Apparently the idea of connecting to a shared folder on my home network is some sort of bizarre, unknown thing in the Apple world.
It's in the Files app. Tap the icon top right, Connect to Server.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@LaoC and with bonus DLL Hell if it wants, say, a super specific version of the Visual C Redistributables from a given year…
Yes ...
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@LaoC and with bonus DLL Hell if it wants, say, a super specific version of the Visual C Redistributables from a given year…
Right now, I'm going thru ubuntu hell trying to install a .deb package. In a VM with no internet access (because who the fuck knows how networking in VIrtualBox works on a ubuntu host). And that package is dependent on other things.
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@loopback0 said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Gern_Blaanston said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Apparently the idea of connecting to a shared folder on my home network is some sort of bizarre, unknown thing in the Apple world.
It's in the Files app. Tap the icon top right, Connect to Server.
And yet, people who sell iPads don't seem to know this.
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