Indeed, women are neither uniform nor immutable.

In a good long term partnership you both make an effort and can often find hot and interest in each others interests.

Yeah I'm not offended as such, but I am often mystified.

I've never found it very simple, and it lacks so much by the way of tweaks that unless if perfectly fits then tough.

For standard desktop stuff, XFCE is excellent. It's efficient, be straightforward, and customisation is possible but not necessary to get started, and generally very unsurprising in what it does. It's not a trend chaser so every version is just an updated spin on the one before.

I generally use FVWM, which, well you'd likely hate my config, but I've spent nearly 3 decades slowly bending out around me and it has nothing superfluous to get in the way, and lots of tweaks for programs that think they know better...

But yeah if you just want a straightforward desktop that's not a straitjacket, XFCE is I reckon where it's at. I never got into KDE, I flirted with window maker a bit, but personally I find gnome also too much like a cut rate knock-off of commercial systems, not the best Linux that Linux can be.

I would say though trust the gnome desktop is dominant to the point where it had a huge amount of influence to break things that don't fit within it's philosophy. Combined with the occasional target obnoxious quote from some of the core people, I can see where some of the annoyance comes from.

It's the blue states where noncompete clauses had weight.

Like California... oh wait.

How about you get up off your blindly partisan arse and actually learn something for once.

Here's an actual breakdown of noncompetes by state:

https://www.sixfifty.com/resou...

A few states ban them completely. A few more have wage thresholds, and most have some sort of "reasonableness" requirement, though for Alabama, that's 2 years so it's pretty weak.

California protects 3 times the number of people from non competes as ALL the remaining states with a complete ban combined.

So what was that about blue states again?

Why on earth?

Well all I can say is welcome to planet earth. Is your boss a moron? How about your boss's boss? What about the boss above that, you know the exec with all the dumb ideas, no understanding of anything technical, no understanding that things take time and the attention span of a squirrel?

What about the layer of HR goons where you can't tell ifv they said supremely incompetent or just plain evil (which is if course a false dichotomy)?

Well guess what those guys run the companies. Why on earth would you expect companies run by people like that to make sensible decisions on anything?

Oh that's a shame: my cheap joke didn't work.

Damn you totally didn't read shit I wrote.

True, I did not because you didn't actually respond to the point I made.

I'm perfectly fine with the state of KDE + Wayland.

Then why are you so angry when I pointed out that missing features and attitudes like yours are why it probably won't be the year of the wayland desktop this year. You so you don't care but your bolded text says otherwise.

This "Year of the Wayland desktop" is just bullshit someone wrote

So why are you here?

Right now the vast majority of the sci-fi/fantasy books are all Game of Thrones type, set in some medieval-style world where evil lurks around every corner.

You can tell it's GRRM apeing, extra gritty "realistic" fantasy because you'll hear about "whores" within the first chapter. It's like my dude, cargo culting GRRM by sprinkling some of the same words like seasoning doesn't make you like GRRM.

High quality AR with normal glasses has an absolute crapload of obvious applications.

Games, I guess?

I mean I can certainly think of industrial usecases. I can't think of any outside of games for consumer AR. Of course a HUD for navigation can work, but we can do that already, it's not really AR, since the graphics aren't tightly registered to the world. There's other entertainment like a view to an extra screen, but... does the registration to the world help? Screens in a headset have been around but not very popular for decades.

I am genuinely curious.

I don't need it.

So you say, but you swanned into a thread on the year of the wayland desktop to bitch at me when I said I didn't think it was ready.

If you want people to stop commenting about missing features, then get off your lazy arse and code them up. Or don't join threads about whether Wayland is ready yet.

Pulseaudio was a very nice improvement over the horrors of getting ALSA configured properly.

When someone's busy stabbing your leg with a big fork it's nice when they stop and switch to a smaller fork. These days pulse audio mostly just works for me though on some machines, or in some usage patterns I'm not sure which it still needs killing every so often because it craps out. At least with this generation of distros I finally didn't have to build a newer version from source to get around the constant crashing.

I haven't tried pipewire yet, I hope we haven't switched to a new, flakey not complete one just as all the major bugs in pulse are finally hammered out. Fingers crossed!

I thought gnome was universally hated?

I've met a lot of Linux users over the years and I've never met anyone who loves Gnome, certainly not post 3. The never-customizers tolerate it, everyone else switches. I personally don't get it. It seems to be the one that gets the funding though.

this is cool i think .

I guess... though the sad thing is that it's even a thing to wonder. With NVidia cards, you can get anything from an ancient, crappy, bottom of the range 1050 up to an H100 and all of them work out of the box. For example, pytorch just works.

With AMD there's just so much compatibility checking, fuckery and uncertainty it's not really surprising they're getting nowhere.

It didn't ship the DNF package manager. Does that stand for "did not finish"?

I dislike exams in general, too much pressure put on one event. I had issues on some exam days. Coursework seems better, if it can be reasonably protected from having the parents do the work.

Or at uni level, other kinds of cheating. But yes.

There is no perfect form of assessment. Exams are bad. Coursework is bad. It's all bad.

I can think of plenty of counter examples of people who are just crap at exams and scraped a lower second (on the strength of coursework) while being technically incredible, and also people who blow away a first while being great at the kind of structured problem with known answers you get in a course but fall flat when presented with genuinely open ended problems.

And of course coursework usually has a somewhat higher marking load than exams, making it much more expensive.

I can't think of a better system than a mix of coursework and exams, imperfect as that is.

I read somewhere some years ago that it was the norm to appeal any grade that fell below expectation on an exam, and often re-marking the work would raise it. Is that true?

I can't speak for a global experience only personal experience and experience of people I know. Basically, no. It's somewhat rare to get appeals and the marks don't change by much. I'd say usually a few percentage points but it's as likely to go down as well as up.

In any case, it's an easy fix. Just randomize the order.

Yes... but that is still not entirely fair. I mean usually in the UK system, students are assigned a number, and that's the only identifying mark on the exam scripts, which does randomize the order, though now the bias is present it's just randomly assigned which isn't great.

The American system way over indexes on exams, apparently on the grounds that the more the better. Se also the obsession with standardised tests. Yes... standardised tests are good predictors of performance if the entire system is designed to reward people who do well on standardised tests...

Marking is generally a bit miserable and the more of it there is the worse it will be.

The only one I've done recently has involved the scripts being split into batches and marked (with brief notes on the marks for each question) by TAs, the detailed scheme is finalised then the entire lot is cross checked (much less bad than full marking) by the course lead. I don't think most people do it lie that but it works very well.

The best thing is to minimize the number of exams but make them be the best they can be and make them count.

It's not even about being bad or tired. I've done a fair bit of grading in my time.

Even if you're well rested and happy (you are not), you definitely change over the course of marking because you get used to the exam in some way. You start spotting patterns, and also of course update the internal mark scheme in your head.

It's easy of course if the student get the right answer (or writes nothing). It's those partial credit answers that are a bitch figuring out what the student did and crucially how many marks to award, so that overall the marks are fair. Sometimes you even have to go back and adjust all the marks based on a new insight into your own mark scheme. Students hate that, but the fact is you can only really make a quite broad brush mark scheme on a free form exam, the details are only going to get filled in when your battle plan meets the enemy.

Thing is though students aren't infinitely inventive. There'll be a few different obvious ways of tackling the problem (and very very rarely another way), with the same kinds of mistakes made, so by the time you've done about 25% (say) of the marks, you'll have seen most of the major variations and mistakes, which makes the remaining marking somewhat faster because it's much closer to pattern spotting.