Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Stumbled upon this old gold on reddit. If I tell you that my monitor is now not covered in accidentally spat out espresso, I'd be lying. 😂😂😂

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

yesterday my boss called me to his office.
(him) - Please close the door
(me thinking) - My God, this is gonna be serious. He never closes his doors
(him) - It's a common practice here that we buy a new laptop for new colleges. What kind of laptop do you have?
(me relieved and excited) - Well it's 4 years old shit, 8 Gb of RAM, slow
(him) - Great we'll buy you this i7, big SSD, 32 Gb of RAM + new monitor, mouse and keyboard.

I was excited as fuck.

Until he sent me what he bought. It's much worse laptop than that I have 😑 Only thing that is better is it has 16 Gb of RAM.
I guess I'll just take that RAM off it and put it in my machine (if it is DDR3, God please may it be DDR3)

Found an old monitor in our garage and decided to hook it up to my laptop. Yes, I am learning how to use Linux :D

I've uncovered the complot.

I clearly remember buying my first monitor, it was 15 inch, 1024x768. Then I went to a 19 inch 1680x1050 one, then 24 inch 1080p, then 27 inch 1440p...

Now I used two 32 inch 4K screens at work... and I come home, and the three 27 inch screens look a bit smallish, with the old 24 inch one being absolutely tiny on my desk.

It wasn't that tiny when I still owned the 15 inch screen? And my 5.5 inch phone doesn't feel as big as when I bought it either?

So the complot... All monitors slowly shrink over time, and they start shrinking faster when new monitors are brought into the household.

A friend bought a new PC and asked me to help him set it up. He said he got everything working except the CD drive. He said it took him forever just to figure out how to get the keyboard and mouse to work. "I mean, have you ever owned a computer where the keyboard and mouse had to plug into the monitor instead of the computer?"

He bought a desktop PC, and and all-in-one thinking it was a monitor. He had the HDMI going from the all-in-one to the desktop, and was trying to use the CD drive on the desktop.

Wish you could've seen his face when I unplugged the desktop computer and his "monitor" didn't shut off. He looked at the desktop, and then the all-in-one, and said, "Wait... How is it still on?"

He also had his old USB wifi plugged into the desktop thinking that's what was providing him with an internet connection.

Bought a 27" 1080p monitor and decided to use my old monitor besides it in portrait mode. This feels so good, portrait monitor's good for reading tutorials or for writing code. My coolest setup so far!

Just finished explaining to my 13 year old brother that the monitor wasn't the computer... 😧
This is what happens when you get married and leave the house. Your family become technologically illiterate 😔

DevOps required skillset:

* Frontend engineering
* Backend services
* Database administrator
* Security consultant
* Project management
* 3rd party contract negotiator
* Build system monitor
* Build system hostage negotiator
* Paging, alerting, monitoring
* Search server admin
* Old search server admin
* Old-old-new search server admin
* Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostGres, owner
* Agile coach
* No you shouldn't do that coach
* Oh, you did that anyway coach
* DNS: (Optional) It'll replicate when it wants, and how it wants to to anyway
* Multi-Cloud deployment strategist
* Must be able to translate Klingon to YAML, and YAML to MySQL
* Cost analyzer, reducer, and justifier
* Complex documentation generation in markdown that we should have done years ago anyway
* Marketing's email went to spam analyzer
* Wordpress is broke fixer
* Where the fuck does Wordpress run anyway?
* Ability to fix MySql running Wordpress on marketing's dusty laptop

I hate this trend of making a video out of every bit of information or tutorial you can find. Videos are slow, I cannot properly skip forward to the part I need and the people making these videos are hellbent on not editing out their mistakes to "be more genuine" or something fucking stupid like that.

I want some good old text-based guides. I want docs, READMEs and the like. I don't want to hear you coughing and spitting on your ultrawide monitor for 30 minutes only to find out what I need to know is in video 4 of your ongoing paid series.

cw: I need a server to put my node backend

me: sure, I'll run a docker container for you

cw: nice, I've never worked with docker but I learn quickly, I'm already reading the Docker file docs

me: no wait, you don't need to learn anything, you'll be inside the container, so you only need an ssh connection and that's it

cw: this Dockerfile stuff is really complicated, it'll take me a while, but it's ok you don't have to worry, I like learning new things

me: you won't need that, just imagine it's a cloud server with Ubuntu installed, you only have to use it, I'll put node, git and ssh there for you

cw: ok got it, I'll have to learn the commands to run the docker, I'm on windows but I can use PowerShell and stuff I'll figure it out

me: ...

cw: ssh is a linux command right? does it have a push or publish option? how do you upload files there

me: ...you can use a ftp client but you'll need ssh to run the node server

cw: ok, I'm almost done with the Dockerfile, I only need to add git and nodejs, I'm starting to understand this thing...

me thinking: yeah keep doing that, you're such a crack, such a quick learner...

This son of a bitch is either a retard or is doing it on purpose and laughing at me the whole time, making my life so miserable, but I'm about to go insane with this dude, I'm proud of how I've been able to control myself, BUT ONE OF THESE DAYS I'LL LOSE MY COOL AND FORCE THIS MOTHERFUCKER TO DRINK A BIG POT OF BOILING, SALTY AND STINKING VOMIT WITH A SIDE OF STEAMING DIARRHEAL GREEN DOG SHIT WITH WHITE CHOCOLATE CHIPS WHILE I PUT MY OLD CRT MONITOR TO GOOD USE BY BEATING HIS FUCKING HEAD WITH IT!!!

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

My father's PC is almost dead.
The PSU is damaged and it turns on correctly 1 time out of 250 or more.
There are days that he tries to turn it on at 8am, and it can finally use it at 8pm.

Also the other HW components are old, so I tried to convince him to buy a new PC, there was an offer where they also give you for free a new 24 inches monitor (now he has a fucking 19 inches old one).
But he doesn't want to invest in a PC.
Even if he spends almost the entire day by surfing on internet and watching movies!

So, I recommended him to change only the PSU, the same identical model costs only €39.
But he doesn't want to invest in it... he prefers to lose the entire day trying to use his fucking PC.

I really don't understand why some people just don't want to spend a bit to improve their life!
The comfort is worth it... the time of life you're wasting to use that fucking PC is more important than €39.

I tried different times to find other possible issues, but it's clearly a PSU problem, so obviously I can't fix it using magic.
Not in my father's opinion... "You don't know anything about computer science... nothing! Go to your fucking university (I'm studing Computer Engineering), and study how to fix it!".
While he was saying that sentence, he was beating the case, because he's convinced that it's a better way to fix it.

I want to leave this fucking house right now.

So yesterday evening I was going to play some games. Checked NVIDIA and saw new update (no beta). So I went to install it and it literally fucked up my graphics card.

One monitor stopped working instantly and the other one got this old tv effect like when you had no signal.

Took me two hours to downgrade to my old drivers because I couldn't fucking see shit.

PLS NVIDIA DONT PUSH NEW DRIVERS IF YOU FUCKIN NOT TESTED THEM

I know it is 1 week too late but i dont care. Im aware that my workbench looks like shit but in reality it is a "creative mess"

@Condor Do you envy me now? I have 1054z that is hacked and has all its features unlocked! I have desoldering station and crappy (very crappy) soldering station. In addition to that i got simple sine/square generator that goes to 1Mhz (old communist poland tech - indestructible and great)

Situation with my pc is complicated. My main pc (with the curved monitor)
-i5 3350p
-12 Gb or ram (2*4Gb and another 4 that friend gave me)
-radeon 7800hd (*RIP* cant play games anymore 😥)
-256Gb sata SSD
-2Tb WD blue HDD

In addition to that i have a laptop
i5 4 cores, 8Gb ram, 1Tb HDD, GTX1050

I use my lap for gaming now, i even connected that monitor as main lap.
(double monitors yay!) sometimes i use my old pc for minor things but i use rdp for that, it is great experience! (my lap displaying rdp from my old pc on second monitor that was my old pcs main one 😂 i find it a tiny bit funny)

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

today i had to use an old resistive touch monitor.
what the hell how people can use that thing?
i had to literally punch it with my finger to get a click recognized

Oh yeah, got myself a new vintage 30" cinema monitor. Total pain to push those pixels to such an old monitor, but if you get a nice deal it's still super competitive as a monitor.

Sort of a meeting, sort of an informal interview, I've dialled in from the home office and my audio setup includes a standalone mic and some noise cancelling headphones. It's going really really well when all of a sudden I see something in the preview window of my webcam feed.
Behind me, looking very concerned and confused is my 73 year old Nanna who'd decided to pop in and see me as she was passing by.
It's common for me to keep the front door locked, but my Nanna has an emergency key and knows I don't always hear a knock at the door, so let herself in.
So she's now in the house, calling out to me and she can hear me talking, so follows the sound of my voice thinking maybe I'm on the phone. Walks right into the office, where the door is behind me, eventually puts two and two together to work out that I can't hear her and finally sees herself on my monitor. She panics and goes to hide in the corner of my office, almost underneath my workbench because she's old and doesn't know where she would or wouldn't be visible from.
The rest of the meeting went really well, but overran by at least half an hour. Meanwhile I can see my poor Nanna hiding away in my peripheral vision.

We had a co worker that we once pranked by doing the old flip screen trick (ctrl+alt+down keys if I remember rightly). Except when he returned to see that his windows desktop had been rotated, he physically picked up the monitor and tried to balance it on its head to correct it. Nevertheless it subsequently fell over and we pointed and laughed.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

About a year ago I found this old desktop in my storage room. I plugged it into a monitor, started it, opened a game, and the game was running at about 5 fps. Unplugged it, opened the cover, saw loads of dust, got rid of all the dust, started it again. Fps increased 1000%.
Moral of the story is, CLEAN YOUR FRICKIN COMPUTER.

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

Working on a module in an old shitty system. It takes 150 seconds to boot the fucker for debugging, which gives me one minute of debugging before the inevitable crash. Four minutes of debugging costs me 10 minutes of watching the loading splash screen.

I'm about to send my keyboard on a journey, straight through my monitor.

One of the few good things dell ever made are it's monitors.

They must be good. People never fucking throw them away. Back when I did repairs I came across *so* many customers who just stocked monitors away like squirrels preparing for the god damn ice age. Three dell monitors here. Five there. Every where a monitor. Old McDonald had dell farm, E, I, E, I, O.

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

My department bought a new monitoring monitor because the old one was broken.

Actually it wasn't, someone just unplugged the power cabel. *facepalm*

I was 11-12, the year was 1995. My mom was so sick of me screwing up the business computer (286), she bought me an old XT at a garage sale. It had a monochrome monitor and a 40 kB HDD. I taught myself qbasic on it. I knew right there I wanted to build stuff in code for a living.

My OS is trying to tell me something about my old CRT monitor 🤔

I can't get any work done at work... The potatoe they gave me for a laptop is 5 years old, Every day I was approx 2 hours (no joke) for it to power up, open up my visual studio solutions, connect to the VPN, and open my browsers.

Then my fucking shit computer loses connectivity with one of my 2 monitors every 15 min so I need close the lid, reopen it again so it "picks up the monitor" then wait another 5 min for my windows to respond.

Agh!!!!!

It's frustrating too cuz my boss ordered me a new computer 2 months ago. But cuz I work for corporate bozos it took them 2 months just to process/place the order for a new computer. So now I have to wait even longer just to have a functioning computer.

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

I use my PC mainly for gaming, Anime and home stuff.
Pc is a big tower under the desk btw.

Main monitor is a 34", 1440p, 60hz from LG (it's rather old). Second one is a 29", 1080p monitor from Phillips which I also could rotate. I really have no idea what I should use it for and I never really put it on anyway.

I could do more or less professional recording for Twitch or whatever but I'm to lazy and no pro, so I only use it for some multiplayer game sessions.

Questions or ideas how to optimise my setup are welcome.

Cable management is a mess btw.

Well paid java dev. But the HW/SW-Stack is awful.

Monitor: single 1600x1024
5yr old notebook, old i5, magnetic hdd
Forced to use windows 7
No maven server
No CI server
SVN but no git
Eclipse, no intelliJ
No sonar server

There are days where I just can't take it anymore.

So my boss got a call from a company, trying to sell a piece of software supposed to monitor your ink levels and send you an email, if they are running low, so that IT has a chance to send new before the old one runs out.
They wanted something like 20$/month/printer, so guess what I'm developing now...

My grandmother recently died and me and my brother were wondering what was to happen to her 10+ year PC (Dell optiplex 760). I could find a use for the monitor and my brother wanted to use it as a server. We asked around at the family and everyone seemed ok with that except for one guy..

Apparently the PC is still in "prime condition" running Windows 7 after an upgrade from Vista. It has 'a graphics chip or something like that' and is better than any laptop on the market right now. (I actually had my HP zBook 15 g3 with me). He claimed it wasn't some old worthless piece of junk and most family members would probably be interested in this machine.

I didn't try to argue because I realized he was not at all knowledgeable about technology and I didn't want to be disrespectful.

Going old school, but...
Does anyone else want to literally reach over and strangle people who move your desk items, including swinging your monitor around, using your pen and paper, moving your fan or bottles, or other things?

Mystery of the day: Why do some devs still insist that code looks bad if it exceeds 80 chars/line? These days, nobody prints it anyway and a 15" monitor can easily display 120 chars even with the font scaled up to be visible to my old, lousy eyes.

With .NETish names, lines like "var myVar = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration((fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None)" tend to look weird when broken into 80 char lines.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

First exposure...
When I was a kid, my parents would put on Tom & Jerry and other cartoons on an old family computer (you know - yellowed plastic, big, bulky tower, and an even bigger CRT monitor) for me to watch (Windows 95 didn't cut it, so they booted up Geexbox from CD)... Sometimes the playback would stop / the volume would be too quite - so I had to figure out how to control it by myself, without the help of my parents... Slowly, I was able to boot up Windows, and use my father's CD collection of All-In-One CDs (utilities and games). Later we were able to afford connecting to the internet through our phone landline - it was all downhill since then. Nowadays I'm helping my dad when it comes to computers (he's currently learning how to use Excel properly). :-)

Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...

Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.

A bit later...

I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.

Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?

Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?

Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.

THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.

I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?

No.

Not my week for tech.

5 year old 21" desktop monitor burns out. 2nd monitor, so at least not completely down.

Then my toddler reached for my root beer and spills it on my 1 month old laptop. I quickly pull the plug and turn upside down, get it wiped off and pray. Next day, arrow and enter keys a little sticky and battery is blown. The 2 exact fucking reasons I bought the new laptop. (keyboard issues and battery)

Keep em coming tech gods.

I was at a car boot sale (mix between a flea market and yard sale for the Americans out there) the stall next to me was selling a PC tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for £10. So all day I was trying to sell my old toys (I was 9 at the time) but only made £5.

At the end of the day I went to the stall and asked if he would take £5 for it, he then game me it for free as he saw me trying to sell my toys all day.

Fuck Google! I'm trying to write a fucking parential app that I can install on my little sisters phone, because I won't download something that is meant to monitor activity on a child's phone when I am capable of writing one. Problem is, I test it on my phone which has Android 10, because I am not keen on testing with a slowpoke out of wood brick that the target phone is. Android 10 does not let you do a single shit that is needed for a parential software. You try to turn on airplane mode to prevent messages from arriving and such? Well.... nope, you can't. Okay... airplane mode is too drastic. Let's try turning off WiFi and Data. Fuck me, you can't do that either. I gave the app fucking system permissions and It laughs in my face when I try to access some simple shit like... WiFi state. Miserable. I wonder if it will let me mute the fucking volume on the phone. I guess It won't, because "You shouldn't set these things on a user's phone.". Well, fuck that. That's exactly what I need. That old brick does not have built in parental settings. Jesus.

Just A BASIC book with some examples and a old Radio Shack Tandy computer (with the TV as monitor). A zillion years ago.

This Macbook Pro (2017 model I think?) is probably. the worst computer I've. purchased in my life. Really, the worst electronic device surpassed only by my old Xbox 360.

Not only is t he keyboard absolute shit. as. you can see from the way this was typed and riddled with extra spaces and dots, but apparently. the way the monitor was built doesn't. let y ou simply replace the flex cables if they kick the bucket, you have t o replace. the entire screen. Because reasons.

It seems it was a common issue but. they won't fix i.t without charging you for THEIR fuckup.

Never again.

We got new workstations today and the following happened:

Me: We got your new workstation but your screen doesn't have the right input to use it, so we'll exchange it too.

Her: No! I love that monitor!

Me: Well you won't be able to use the computer if you don't wanna change it.

Her: There has to be a different way!

Me: Okay I'm going to get some adapters and we'll try again.

After literally 30 minutes of searching I finally made it work.

VGA->DVI->HDMI->DisplayPort

That just felt so wrong.

Me: So it works now

Her: Thanks but why does it look so bad?

Me: It's because of the old monitor.

Her: Oh... *10 seconds silence* Then I'll get a new one.

So, was testing a classic Mac an old friend sent over and realized an interesting convergence had occurred in my office.

In the attached shot you can see the following:

Center: A Macintosh LC III - effectively the last of the 68k Mac line
Right: A PowerMac G5 - one of the old cheese graters, and the last major release of the PowerPC line
Left, under the monitor: A 2020 Mac Mini - effectively the end of the Intel Mac line

The LC III gives a startup chime, but I wasn't able to get a video signal out of it using the Apple-to-VGA adapter I was using. Otherwise I'd be posting a shot with all 3 up and running.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2

In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.

In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.

The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.

The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.

Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet

Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system

None...

My work desk is ordered chaos. It's an unspectacular white desk.

To the left paper for taking notices... And a collection of notes highly unordered.

In the top left corner of the desk the router.

Middle (front to back): Color sorted post it's with my backlog and all the stuff that I need to keep track off.

Keyboard, Monitor

Right (front to back): mailboxthingy, post it block, utensilo (made of bamboo)

That's the working desk. Like the "shining knight in armor"....

Next to the working desk is the play desk, a large kitchen table with a 5mm thick black rubber (keep your dirty thoughts for yourself ;)) as insulation and scratch prevention.

There is usually utter chaos.

Banana PI R2, test router, old hardware, hardware storage cabinet, screw and other small part cabinet....

And to the right is a large chest of drawers where I cram everything in that doesn't belong anywhere.

I'm pretty boring I guess.

Except you are kinky for old hardware and lots of weird stuff noone uses nowadays...

Then you're in heaven I guess.

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

some old time clients finally decided to pay me, so I had a bit of cash on me (I feel rich, lol).

here's the thing: I am torn in between buying a second monitor and investing in that server i planned to build in a previous rant.

I could just save the money, I dont know if I am being extra right now, I remember when I just had half a laptop screen to work with, now i have a this used 24 inch monitor I bought for cheap now I want to expand with another 24 inch probably. this arrangement will make things a bit comfortable and faster for me but it still wont affect me if I dont get it...........ok I'm talking too much

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

Can someone suggest me a good monitor for programming and​ gaming? I have a really old one right now and need an upgrade.

Couldn't figure out why I had to make so many cats meow to learn how to program. I wanted to move things on the screen and create sounds. Then, dug up an old c64 and programmed myself a monitor and got into assembler which was a breeze compared to programming dumb text outputting felines.
After learning computers from the ground up, I started realizing that C++, C#, Java etc. actually wasn't at all about constructing and deconstructing cats or its base class animal.
I had one final go and it all just clicked!

First laptop I ever owned (around a decade old) continues to live, just in another form. After the first 6 years, the battery died, half the keyboard doesn't work, and the monitor began to fail.

But it still works, so I have decided to give it new life. Gonna make it a new body, add an SSD, new battery, substitute screen, replace keyboard... Maybe this is too costly. No, it must be done.

Finally install a lightweight Linux distro. It shall be glorious!

Why is it that every monitor i buy/use is subpar compared to an almost 10 year old lg "monitor tv" that my mom bought back then and was used almost non stop for 5 years?

Just spent 600$ on a samsung something something, its curved and freesync and whatever and then i put it next to the old lg and the samsung is so washed out and flickery.

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

People of devRant, I need your help! I am finally buying a new laptop - ive been using a Dell N4140 for the past 4 years and I absolutely love it. But it's about time to retire the machine and upgrade.

I'm a programmer, I don't play games and haven't used windows in the last 2 years. Im looking for a 4-8GB RAM under $1000K. I plan to replace the HDD with an SSD. 13' is too small a screen and i feel 15.6' is slightly on the large side. I have a 21' external monitor anyway. My old dell was 14' and i loved it. And looks really matter for me. Alsooo, I dislike having a number pad. Its useless for me.

I know I'm picky. I can't afford a MacBook right now (about to graduate from university), but if you could help me in finding the right laptop, I'd be really grateful!

Thinking very VERY seriously about pushing the button on this.

iMac 10-core Xeon W, 64GB DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64X, 2TB SSD

$6,727 plus tax $403.62 and then another hundred for shipping before fucking December in 'rona.

Could sign up for Apple Pay and do $600 payments for 12 months 0 APR... shouldn't be too bad of a problem provided the world holds together that long... And if it doesn't, then this is my last computer... and I guess it'd be nice to go into the afterworld with a freshly upgraded rig.

IDK, Please talk some sense into me about how stupid this would be.

Also to factor in... I need to buy a new machine one way or another SOON. Or else I need to wipe my main and be out of commission for at least 3-4 days which could cost me a few grand on its own... and then also still buy a lesser mac for my daughter.

Why an iMac and not a cheese grater similarly priced? If I get the iMac I can give my current iMac to my daughter for school. My old 2015 iMac isn't holding up to my use anymore, but should be fine for a few more years for a high schooler to work on. If I get a cheese grader fine, but factor in at least another $300 for a minimum 27" 2K monitor.

Any reason to even think of a refurb trash can design? Are they too old now?

General thoughts on why this entire rant is retarded? Like. I too dislike Apple, but I need them. It's love/hate. But god if I do this I'm buckling in for the next 5 years... tax write off would be nice I guess.

Can't really back down the specs any because I dual boot windows and do some gaming. Need 2TB so I can give Windows and Mac a TB each (and I still have 8TB external).

Don't really want to go lower than the Vega 64X because even that benchmarks poorly against many cheaper cards... for gaming (but does do better for some other tasks)...

Ugh... talk me into or out of buying another god awful expensive mac.

When my one of my two twelve-or-more-year-old Belinea 101920 displays has one of these local distortions just on that one very important word...

Fuuu!!!

I'm currently on elementary.

I have two monitors, one plugged to my Rx 560 and GPU and the other to onboard graphics.

Despite this my main monitor is rendered on the Intel inbuilt GPU and I have stuttery gui on my primary monitor.

(My second one is an old monitor and I can't find VGA to dvi converters, on Windows it just works so I haven't had an issue)

Please help me guys !

!rant
tl;dr I should start writing sitcoms

So my mind is going crazy. Last I night I had a dream about a colleague. He was working on a kind of smart photo frame thingie, which should be published to stores like walmart and so on. Also his 30th birthday was around the corner and his soon to be wife was driving him nuts. So the stage is set for some action. I was visiting him along to said store on the publishing day since he was that paranoid as his job was tightly connected to the success of this project. Anyway now the whole thing gets this tragic comedic type of feeling. He is about to go through a mental breakdown in the very store. Destroying things, yelling like a gramps and stuff you know from sitcoms. I swear at some point he did loose his pants. Also the staff didn't give a damn about him. I was trying to clean his path of destruction so that no one takes note of this. Of course I failed gloriously. This thing goes on for a while. Finally in some kind of credits scene he was sitting in front of his laptop reading a blog post about the success of this thingie. After an insanly long pause of suspension he was starting to kiss his monitor in relief. I swear to god there was fake laughter somewhere in the background like in the good old sitcoms.... Never eat pizza right before sleeping....

Alternative for Control board (Display)???

So I took out the monitor of my old laptop ,and I'm planning on using it as my new secondary monitor. BTW I'm from Nepal, and it is not possible to find any control board available in market for the spare LCD.

So could anyone suggests me with an alternative for the control board for my spare monitor?

Thanks in advance.

My college labs have iMacs for us to work with, which is rather cool. The thing is that they're 20-inch early 2008 with C2D 2.66GHz and 4GB DDR2. Add an old HDD and El Capitan to the mixture and you have a really sluggish computer that even takes time to open Safari.

I feel sorry for the ones that actually have to use them to develop os iOS with them... I'm just using them as a second monitor.

Well this is in fact just me reminiscing, instead of telling anecdote.

My first PC was a pentium two, the cpu casing being those horizontal ones, and a big bulky monitor resting on top of it; all white. A white mouse, two white speakers (you know the ones). I was perhaps just about 6 years old, and I used it the first bunch of times to play Mortal Kombat, and Sega's Moto Racer 3, and watch animated disney movies but mostly mickey mouse on VCD. I guess my habits of gaming and binge watching started way too early.

I bought a software from FastSpring which claimed it could stop automatic updates, but I was late entering the key for it. Wouldn't you know that a fucking update came in before I could stop it: what geniuses these fkg assholes at MS are! Changed every goddamned setting, killed my old printer, can't find the second monitor, changed the start menu, power settings. FUCK YOU MICROSOFT, YOU ARE DUMBFUCK SHITHEADS TO NOT ALLOW ME THE FREEDOM TO OWN MY OWN COMPUTER! And who the fuck in the government allowed this shit to happen?? The land of the free, my ass.