Why promise to release files? Just release them if you’ve got 'em!

This is the same MFer who said he could declassify files with his mind, by the way.

Why? Just… why?

Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be “elegance”. And then they block you.

Making KDE look like a Mac is an entire genre of easily downloaded and installed themes:

https://store.kde.org/p/1400409

https://store.kde.org/p/1305006

https://store.kde.org/p/1398837

https://store.kde.org/p/2229017/

Crimping a push fit terminal of some sort on the end would make a handy static wrist strap hookup too I’d imagine.

Plus, you’d get to see the horrified looks on your friend’s faces when they see you plugging your wrist strap into a wall outlet!

For the sake of completeness I assume I plug in the plug and it’s just using the house’s earth?

Yes! Heh, I guess I forgot that part. I should add it in, just in case.

What do you even do with independent virtual desktops per monitor?

I’ve got 8 virtual desktops and 6 monitors, but I want the content of all 6 monitors to change when I switch virtual desktops. Having to do each monitor independently sounds like a huge pain.

(And, of course, there are a couple things I want on every virtual desktop. But it’s easy to set certain windows to be on all desktops.)

What shortcuts does Windows have that KDE doesn’t?

Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.

Yep. KDE is feature-rich, but it’s also highly optimized these days, and the RAM usage is actually competitive with the best of them.

You can get RAM usage lower on a very stripped down, barebones system, but if you want a full ‘normal computer’ desktop experience that has all the things you’d expect a computer to have, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that uses significantly less RAM than KDE. (Yes, there are some that get lower … but not a lot lower. And unless you’re running on some extremely limited hardware, are those extra 20MB of RAM really going to make a difference in your everyday life?)

Including examples really helps make it clear what these notations mean.

but for God’s sake just introduce basic usages first

And include practical examples!

Much easier to figure out the correct formatting of some command by just seeing the formatting used properly!

It’s also a great place to sneakily introduce the most common and useful ways to use the command, by including those as the examples! (Are you documenting, say, a command to compress images and documents, and even though most people never use it for video, you want people to know that it works with some video formats as well? Then include compressing .mp4 file as one of your example commands!)

And yet you’re here, posting about it, presumably for free?

Or did someone pay you for this post?

and label the boards with different part numbers, so rather than replacing a resistor you’d just have to replace that board.

Aaaand a replacement board costs 70% as much as just buying a brand new appliance that’s under warranty…

You are talking about a manual that explains how to make your washing machine wash. That is important, yes, but I am talking about a manual that explains how an appliance works.

Many appliances have service manuals and wiring diagrams hidden inside their cover plates somewhere, even today.

This vacuum is not water resistant and no part of it shall come into contact with water. Do not operate this vacuum on wet floors.

(Which you, of course, find in the manual of your robo-vacuum that runs automatically and has no way to know if the floors are wet or not.)

What you need to…

…do is like, comment, subscribe, and hit that bell for notifications! (Insert 20 seconds of their janky-ass logo and AI-generated intro song.) Now, before I get to the fix, first I want to take a moment to talk about today’s sponsor, Nord VPN…

(And then they’ll add a bunch of filler and nonsense to make sure the video goes over 10 minutes so it can be monetized better.)

Discharging capacitors (and anything else that might hold a charge) isn’t that hard and dangerous if you know how. I used to work on radar systems with 32KV on big capacitor banks.

1: Connect a thick, beefy wire to a solid and reliable ground connection.

2: Rig up a way to hold that wire in a well-insulated way, so that you have thick, non-conductive insulation between you and the wire, but you can still move it around freely and easily.

3: Firmly touch the tip of that wire to the contacts of any capacitors you can see, any bare metal contacts you can see, and anything else that might be at all dangerous. If in any doubt at all, touch the wire to it. Do it twice, just to be sure you didn’t miss any. (There may possibly be sparks when you do this. That’s okay – it means it’s working. Do make sure you’re not close to anything that’s very flammable, though.)

After doing that, everything will be discharged and completely safe to work on.

For something the size of a microwave, you could build a capacitor discharge tool very simply and easily by taking any three-pronged power cord, cutting it in the middle, disconnecting and isolating the two power connections (leaving only the ground connection), leaving a bit of bare wire from the ground wire exposed at the end, and then wrapping your handle area in some extra layers of electrical tape (just in case some of those capacitors have voltages above ~300V). (Or if you want to be ultra-safe, tape a plastic or wooden handle to the wire instead.) Plug that modified 3-prong cable into any standard 3-prong household outlet to connect it to a reliable ground.

If you want to be a bit more professional about it, a grounding wire from an ordinary welder setup should be able to safely discharge just about anything you’d ever encounter.

It’s more likely than you’d think!

(Most new appliances come with warranties. And if the appliance breaks under warranty, the company will need to pay to send a technician to fix it. The technician may or may not be familiar with that exact appliance. Now, which would be more cost-effective for the company? A: Pay the technician’s hourly rate while he spends time trying to look up the manual and the wiring diagram for this exact version and this exact revision of this exact appliance. B: Include a printed manual and wiring diagram inside the appliance’s cover that the technician can quickly and efficiently locate. The company often decides Option B is more cost-effective, so they include a manual hidden inside for the warranty repair technician to find. Happily for us, that manual doesn’t disappear when the warranty expires.)

but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.

To be fair, you’re only seeing the dumb ones.

If that user-installed RAM stick had worked, they wouldn’t have come to you about it.

If they had installed their dual boot Ubuntu setup correctly, they wouldn’t come to you about it.

Presumably, there are a lot of smart students out there fucking with their laptops without breaking them, which you never know about because they never bring those laptops to you to fix. And locking down the computers would prevent those smart students from being able to do the things they want.

I once bought a physical copy of SuSE back in the before times, when downloading would take a prohibitively long time on a shitty dial-up connection (and then you’d still have to burn it on an expensive CD-R in order to install).

It did, in fact, come with a handbook for the DE.

Then it should be pronounced “Gee-nome” and be a homonym with “genome”.