Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn’t work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work… Then not even close O_o)

I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\

I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

Eh, guessing from a distance or playing favorites won’t be better though. Like I might get grumpy about a C-level guy or investor getting more than their “fair share”, but marketing for example is still an important job done by people that aren’t paid gobs of money. Without the ability to let the people that would buy it know about your product, it effectively doesn’t exist. We all love the story about a game that came out of nowhere, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I’ve used with Fedora, but it’s an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple’s locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish… I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.

Looking forward to giving VRR a shot again. Last time I tried a couple years ago was pretty underwhelming on a couple different machines. Some games worked well with it, but a lot of software felt subtly broken. A lot of weird micro-stuttering and stuff just not feeling smooth even when the average framerate was high compared to boring synced 144 hz.