Meme liberated from reddit

Isn't it a bit strange not to change your wallpaper to something different than the default Windows one?

The default wallpaper is meant to be pleasing, and I guess it's meant to appeal to the average person? I've known several people that don't change their wallpapers or that use that automatic carousel thing with a different image every time you wake the device.

I usually set my wallpaper once right after install then never change it. I only see it for a few seconds right after boot anyways. If you see your wallpaper then you aren't really doing anything.

I love how just...normal...Linus is. Like...humble. Content.

Like, hey, I revolutionized the world with a pet project. Nbd.

When I was a kid I worshipped Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I'm glad I realized later that Linus and Woz are the real heroes.

You've got that backwards:

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For the Arch defaults, I find their stock wallpapers generally pleasing in a weird n-dimensional way. When I was a young microslopper, it was always whatever brought me joy from newgrounds that week.

The average tech bro doesn't have the skill to maintain a single system long enough for customizations to matter.

You just gotta be careful which automatic carousel you use...

https://www.techspot.com/news/105673-official-bing-wallpaper-app-does-nasty-malware-like.html

Maybe Linus also has that background.

But we wouldn't know since his screen is off.

looks at image with ten visible LED fans

I don't have a problem with people decorating their computers however they want. They paid for it. It's their computer. Everyone's got their own aesthetic preferences.

However, the last build I did, I was getting a little exasperated with how increasingly-hard it is to just find desktop components that don't have RGB lighting on them any more. I mean, to me, the desktop computer is a box that has a bunch of circuit boards in it. I'm generally not looking at my RAM sticks or motherboard segments, and don't have a glass window on the side to admire it (it gets dust in there, and I'd rather have a sturdier case without glass). I could do without the extra light pollution in my life. Most stuff can be disabled, but it's kind of obnoxious to be buying and figuring out how to disable hordes of little RGB LEDs.

I'd also add that where LEDs exist, they have multiplied over the decades not just in number, but also in brightness.

If I wanted to have my computer be a light show, which I don't, I'd get a DMX512 controller for it, and real lighting effects hardware.

Maybe going for rack-mount hardware is an option. It's something that I've thought about sporadically over the years, and it does have certain benefits, if you're willing to give up portability. But rack-mount builds generally command a premium due to the market being less price-sensitive, and noise is often a more of a factor, since datacenters don't care about keeping things quiet for employees.

since i have family and cant change it to prn,i keep it at default too. Honestly though, i barely see it. Theres always some ui over it.

IDK man, I like knowing that Frieren is looking out for me in the background. Even if I don't see it, I appreciate that it's there.

Hilarious btw

If you see your wallpaper then you aren’t really doing anything.

I use sway these days. It's tiling, so I rarely see my desktop background anymore.

But not everyone uses a tiling system.

While I like the idea of avoiding having onscreen pixels wasted showing useless information, and I think that tiling systems do help achieve this, I avoided tiling systems for some years, as a fair bit of software still didn't play well with it (e.g. I remember default behavior with GIMP being half of the screen being the main window, half being the GIMP toolbar window). I think that we're past that phase now, but there are people who prefer stacking window systems for various reasons and don't use tiling systems.

I think that there's a legit rejoinder of "Why aren't you optimizing the code to reduce compilation time, if it's such a problem?"

For something like C++, ccache, distcc, PIMPL (to reduce use of templates, which blows up C++ compilation time), precompiled headers, make code more modular to reduce the size of the compilation unit that changes when any one change happens, break stuff into libraries, etc. Look to see whether there are things like build timestamps being inserted into headers that are producing unnecessary recompilations. clang and gcc can profile compilations to identify what's chewing up time.

that xkcd comic is coming up on 20 years old. most computers didn't have multiple cores yet.

I mean, none of the optimizations I listed rely on multiple cores.

It's true that just running parallel compilation jobs on your build machine is a simple way to speed things up, no disagreement, but it's not like optimizing compilation time isn't a thing outside of that.

Never meet your heroes. Have you ever seen the way he rages at people on the mailing list? Don't get me wrong, he's made some incredible technical contributions that I'm thankful for, but I have to push back against claims that he is a well-adjusted dude.

i was thinking more about tooling, most of that stuff didn't exist as widely as today and you couldn't really look for it when waiting for a compile either.

Arch… defaults?? Are you thinking of cachyOS or maybe plasma’s defaults?

I never look at the wallpaper long enough to care about changing whatever is default

No, the base CLI is pleasing

Not sure about this new Ali G reboot, to be honest.

The problem is the recast. It'll never take off

pet project

Which one?

I never pick a custom image for my my OS background, I never see it

Sometimes I switch it to grey or black

He's had to adjust quite a bit I'd say he's thoroughly and well adjusted.

Well...the in-compiler time analysis I think wasn't as good then, though I recall doing my own ad-hoc profiling, logging time for each unit. But the refactoring stuff should be available.

I dunno how far back distcc goes.

checks git repository

The git log goes back to 2008, so almost 20 years, but it's also talking about release 3.0 then, so there might have been time outside a VCS or with history that didn't get imported.

Wikipedia says that ccache goes back 24 years.

Yeah, Linus today is nothing like Linus in the 90s/00s

I was actually going to comment on that as well but I didn't remember the exact history of git.

His newsgroup post announcing Linux is legendary, though.

Or are you referring to his guitar pedals?

If it's any consolation I also worshipped Carmack and Zoid Kirsch (credited then by deadname)....

If people do things differently, one of them must be bad!!!

every now and then I like going through and reading Linus' commit messages for uemacs. It's impressive that he's still maintaining that thing on a near weekly basis.

Also he writes some of the longest commit messages known to man to the point where i'm like "I didn't know you could write them that long"

What's wrong with Carmack? I'm genuinely curious.

guys dont idealize Linus he's a jerk and a weirdo

Different guy, but I like my Plasma wallpapers. I mean I rarely get to see it cause I got stuff to do, but they are nice enough.

I think his joining Meta to work on VR was... an interesting decision.

Bruh if everything I said to people was recorded and searchable, I'd seem like an unhinged egomaniac with anger issues too, but people can change, and get more mellow.

In my experience, [proprietary] projects are doing well if their Makefile isn't so broken that they have to run it twice just to make sure everything actually compiles. And you want them to actually optimize it...?!

No one wants to face that truth, they think they need to blindly worship him like steve jobs.

Nothing...I was hoping to have some childhood heroes I can still keep.

But then he quit.

John Carmack ended his Meta resignation letter with: "Make better decisions and fill your products with 'Give a Damn!'"

Plasma, le derp, ty

This is also a true experience xD

People need to understand we are all humans and stop idolizing-idealizing people, aren't you all bored of celebrities/famous people abusing their status?

It's not like he joined in the early startup days. Carmack knew (or could have known) full well what a shit company Meta is.

He now has a fancier PC, courtesy of LTT.