MCS-51

MCS-51, as in the Intel Microcontroller? I'm trying to find some link between that chip and the VHS standard, but I'm not immediately coming up with anything. From my reading, I see that some variants of the MCS-51 incorporate DSP functionality, which would make for a good analogue media device, but I'm not seeing any VHS VCRs that use one.

I REGRET buying an nvidia adapter when I had the opportunity to buy an AMD/Radeon adapter.

During the pandemic, I purchased an GeForce GTX 1650. It's an older, Turing hardware-based card, so you'd think the driver support would be pretty mature, right? It has been NOTHING but problems.

On nouveau, it's stable, but 3d acceleration just doesn't work right. Under the nvidia open source driver, it corrupts the screen after boot and locks up entirely second later. Under the proprietary driver, it freezes on boot a good amount of the time.

Now, once I get it booted, it's solid as a rock. I've gotta crank the engine over five or six times every time I DO boot, though. If I had it to do over again, I'd definitely have stuck with AMD.

You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.

This. Too many partitions for a home system can get pretty stupid pretty quick. But OP has just the right amount of separation between system and data. I've known people that were uncomfortable without breaking /var (or /var/log) off into its own partition, but that's really overkill for a stable, personal system, IMO.

computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.

I feel personally called out by this statement!

Seriously, the big one for me, is that I like having drive encryption. It protects my computer and data should it fall into the hands of, say, burglers. I also like turning it up to the elevens simply because I'm a bit TOO paranoid. You really need more than 1GB of ram to do argon2id key derivation, which is what fde is all moving to for unlocking purposes, and BIOS just can't do that. My main workstation is using a powerful, but older mobo with gigabyte's old, horrid faux EFI support.

Another good one for the security-conscientious person is Secure Boot, meaning that you control what kernels and bootloading code is allowed to boot on your computer, preventing Evil Maid-type attacks: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

That's pretty far fetched, but maybe not too out of the question if you, say, work for a bank or accountant.

Of course none of that matters if you don't practice good operational security.

My favorites:

Mono:

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

Period. Full stop. A line of nothing but exclamation points. The Iosevka family blows every other mono-width font out of the water with at LEAST one, if not more, of its extremely customizable variations.

F/W:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comfortaa

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Rowdies

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway

Manjaro was NOTHING but problems when I installed it.

I am offended by snaps. I feel they're a disingenuous attempt to control the FOSS ecosystem.

I am OFFENDED by content blocking and policing. It's a very blatant attempt to keep kids from getting important healthcare information. It ends up spreading disease and creating miserable people.

I, personally, think that many rabbis would be offended at making a symbol the focus of your worship, and that a certain rabbi in particular would be perhaps more than offended if you made the particular gibbet they nailed him to the focus of your worship.

This. My spouse is working on an online business and needed a laptop to carry around to do inventory with. I happen to have an old Asus 32-bit Celeron netbook collecting dust, so I gave it a bit of a wipedown, installed the latest version of Debian with XFCE on it, and let them install what they needed from there.

So if you get a 64-bit machine AT ALL, it will absolutely run the latest versions of Linux.

(Why is this a thing?

Lots of computers in industry are very low-spec. They use less power and have fewer requirements. As long as there are people who use that hardware and/or are willing to port fixes and new kernel features to it, it'll keep getting updates. You only run into the 'dropped compatibility' thing when really no one is using it.)

I'm always nervous when hearing about new filesystems since a certain high profile news incident a several years back.

I really, really, really hope that Kent Overstreet has a really good relationship with any partner or spouse he may or may not have.

Start with Mint or Pop!OS. I'm not familiar with the Surface hardware, but Mint, in particular, seems to make driver handling a breeze. I'm very comfortable recommending Mint to folks new to Linux.

The last version of PS I seriously spent time to try to get working on WINE was CS2, which is now 'EOL' according to Adobe. It's quite a few years old at this point, so things may be different with newer versions.

There are technical issues, which may have changed since, like PS's scratch file handling. Adobe stuff in general tends (tended) to simply ignore the fact that modern operating systems all do swap files or partitions and do all their own virtual memory. WINE just didn't work well with this approach, and various memory-related errors were common, especially when working with larger files.

The single biggest issue for me actually working with the painting tools was WINE tended to vomit when PS wanted to display any kind of hardware-accelerated cursor on screen, like for most painting brushes. Selection tools tended to be okay, but my experience was that when you wanted a painting brush, WINE would simply not render what PS was trying to do, even for things as simple as the round brush outline.

The most immediate thing I can't find on that list that I need and have run into recently is better single-channel editing. For example, by default you can't just edit a channel's alpha/transparency. This makes it very difficult for me to do additive masks. There are ways to do this, but they are much more difficult for me.

One I ran into yesterday, and doesn't seem to be on the list is an inability to edit gradients in a live manner. Clicking 'Edit this gradient' brings up the gradient palette, but most of its menu options simply don't respond.

There are lines in the roadmap list about improving the tool palettes, but nothing pertaining to these issues.

In the past, I've attempted to submit feature requests for selection handling, only to have those requests ignored, or in one case being directly told, 'That's not something we're interested in working on or accepting patches for.' Investigating others' requests led me to understand that was a very common thing to hear from the GIMP team.

That was about three years ago. I'd LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing 'Yeah, we'll never do that,' is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.