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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • you install a distro because of all the software it includes and how they interact out of the box

    you’re completely right that systemd is a background service that most people don’t care about, but it does make the whole system more reliable, and much easier to administer for servers or workstations (enterprise management; not personal)

    you certainly do want an init system… even sysv-init is an init system: you need something that runs as pid 1 that triggers other services. systemd starts services, and also ensures they’re in the correct security contexts, running as the correct users, makes sure they’re healthy, tracks dependencies (not just order; this speeds things up because it can be parallel, ensures failures don’t cascade, and means there’s far less jank in random bash scripts)

    this isn’t a big political statement: this is an acknowledgment that linux users - not all, but some - will want/require something like this… and systemd user database is the place where that information is stored on modern linux systems





  • because theyre being pragmatic… laws are starting to be introduced around the globe for parental controls - whatever that means in each jurisdiction. given that, there needs to be options available to people wanting to, or required to comply with said laws… the best place to do that is in a user record, as an optional field… extensible user records, in modern linux, are stored in systemd

    it needs it in a similar manner to how it needs location, email, real name, etc: it doesn’t functionally need it, but it’s a place to store the metadata associated with a user such that other applications can use it







  • idk about the don’t but inkjet… i don’t print much but got an epson surecolor (large format; prints up to a1 off a roll of paper… i got it because i think the idea of being able to do that is excellent more than actual use case) and it’s been absolutely glorious… the ink doesn’t dry out fast, and because it’s a borderline professional printer they don’t gouge you on the ink: they just sell you the printer for what it’s worth, and then sell the ink for what it’s worth

    i think there are reasonable arguments for ink, but i guess that if you have to give 1 recommendation (outside of a brand to go with), laser is probably a safe bet








  • no, actually, we do know that… things like cycle time, lifetime cycles, their durability < 20% and > 80%, performance in the cold, sustained current

    lots of these are to do with heat and degradation, but these are all problems that can be solved to improve batteries in general… some of them are inherently to lithium chemistry and easily solved with others

    sodium batteries, for example, are better in most categories other than wh/kg making them not useful for portable electronics and cars etc but for stationary applications these benefits can significantly outweigh the major downside because wh/kg is not a useful metric (eg grid storage)… especially true when sodium batteries are able to deal with higher operating temperatures which means you don’t need as much if any extra cooling, which is getting close to making up for even energy density of the system in some situations

    flow batteries are also real things, as are hydrogen fuel cells