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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2023

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  • Daeraxa@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlanti-snap stance is anti-consumer
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    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I think a lot of the flak directed towards snap would be mitigated if they made the backend open source. I know there are some efforts to produce alternative backends (although the one I knew about lol / lol-server seems to have gone dark).

    Another issue is Canonical's rather strong armed and forceful approach to making people use snaps rather than the OSs native packaging system, again, not something that should be an issue in theory but when people already have a negative view of the format to start with...

    Personally I don't really have an issue with Snaps. I've had more luck with them and fewer issues than Flatpaks (which I also tend to avoid like the plague) but that is probably just because I prefer to use appimages or native packages rather than having to fight the sandbox permissions and weird things it can do to apps that don't take Snaps and Flatpaks properly into account.


  • Common pipistrelle. It is a story I love telling people. One hot summer evening I heard one of my cats making weird noises, found her hunting something which was trying to get away. Thought it was a mouse but then it flew... I managed to remove said cat from the situation and came face to face with the little bat which was baring its teeth and squeaking at me but looked absolutely knackered with a couple of teeth marks where the cat had caught it.

    I found a box and trapped the poor thing under it and then realised that I now had an injured bat in a box and no idea what to do... So had a quick google of "what to do with injured bat". I found the website for the UK bat conversation group who have a handy page on "Help I've found a bat" and tells you exactly what to do (basically make a little box for the bat and phone the national bat helpline).

    As it was late I had to keep the little bat overnight and call the helpline again in the morning to get a bat rescuer volunteer to pick up the bat. Unfortunately when I did call they were all busy and the one who could get to me was going in completely the opposite direction. However I found out the nearest bat hospital was only about 10 miles down the road in a village not far from me. So I headed out on a stupidly hot (ok yes, hot for UK standards) day armed with my bat-in-a-box.

    When I got there it was literally somebody's (rather nice) house and they had converted a bunch of rooms downstairs to be dedicated to bat care. I got to see them examine the bat and put it in its new temporary home whilst they give it antibiotics (apparently being bitten by a cat with no antibiotics is nearly a certain death sentence). Then after being told some bat info and given a bat rescue pack I was sent on my way home with my story of my little bat friend.

    Here is a terrible picture of the bat:

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    And of the culprit:

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  • Pulsar (i.e. active fork of Atom) has a pretty comprehensive snippets package that comes bundled with the editor. Can be configured with some fairly simple cson, for example with Markdown:

    '.source.gfm':
      'Hello Lemmy':
        'prefix': 'helem'
        'body': 'Hello Lemmy!'
    

    You type helem then press tab and it will expand to Hello Lemmy! when using the Markdown grammar (source.gfm).
    It can handle custom tab stops too so you can make a longer preformatted sentence with gaps to insert words which you can just tab through (the $1, $2, $3).

    '.source.gfm':
      'My custom snippet':
        'prefix': 'mcs'
        'body': 'My snippet stops here $1 and then here $2 and then continues $3'
    

    You can even do multi-line snippets. For anyone wanting to try it out the docs are here





  • Yup, we even had a new release the other day. It will still be familiar to you as very little has otwardly changed, most of the updates have been behind the scenes - electron upgrades, a modern tree sitter implementation etc. We also have working package management thanks to a from scratch implementation of a new package backend. The blog section on the website has most of the backstory and is regularly updated.



  • Non fiction: Physical all the way Fiction: Whilst I like physical books I rarely make myself time to read them so I mostly consume them in audiobook format.

    I've never really got on well with ebooks, I had a cheap kindle about 8 years ago and I think I maybe read about 3 or 4 books on it - in fact I think it was Hugh Howey's Silo series and nothing else.


  • Entirely accidental. I'm not a developer and at most I had dabbled with a Linux in the past but nothing beyond a couple of VirtualBox VMs, I just didn't see or have a need for it.

    Around late 2020 the note taking app Evernote changed a bunch of stuff. I had been using Evernote for years and suddenly they updated to a new feature-poor app and placed a bunch of restrictions on the free accounts. That prompted me to look at "free" (free as in money, not as in freedom) alternatives. I stumbled upon Joplin and really liked it. I noticed a few things I thought could be improved as well as a few bugs so I joined and started hanging around on the forums. At some point I realised I could probably fix one of these small issues myself (without any programming knowledge beyond some SQL) and, with some help and encouragement from some of the maintainers, was able to build the app from source, fix the issue and create a PR. I then got more involved with the community and started to improve the documentation.

    That is when the open source bug bit me. I installed Linux as it just seemed (and was) easier than doing this kind of thing on Windows. I was invited to the Joplin team, got involved with Google Summer of Code as a mentor for Joplin and otherwise really got into it.

    Then it all stepped up massively last year when GitHub announced they were killing off the Atom text editor. Whilst looking for alternatives I got involved with atom-community which then split off to create a fork of Atom, Pulsar which was a mad rush to get everything together. Not only save what we could of Atom (the package repository wasn't open source) but also to keep momentum going and make sure that those people using Atom still had somewhere to go and try to gather some sort of community whilst it was still somewhat relevant.

    And yeah, otherwise now almost exclusively use open source stuff and try to get involved with the communities of other open source projects.



  • At least for the moment I'm doing it because it is fun. The main project I'm involved with is a fork of something that was pushed to the side and killed off by the big corporation developing it. Are there other tools that do the same job? Yes. But the fact that a small community came together to save the application they liked and is having fun working on it is the only justification I need.