Not sure if you’re the one to ask, but are there any good alternatives to Strava built on OSM? I don’t need all the fitness analysis and social features, I just want to track my walk route and get basic info like miles traveled, elevation change, average speed, etc

Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from

9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.

That’s fair. Another example of what you describe that I’m more familiar with is Epic (medical records software). My hypothesis is that the differences that matter are:

1. Cost of switching is higher and/or
2. The people making the decision (business manager, hospital admin) are farther from the actual users of the software.

Could be lots of other reasons too, but these are the ones that jump out at me.

Really the only thing that I miss on Linux is creative cloud stuff. Yeah, gimp and inkscape cover 80% of the functionality of PS and Illustrator right out of the gate, and I bet I could get to 90% if I sank a bunch of hours into learning the differences. Which is amazing for open source software.

But there’s a gap when you have a team of dedicated and highly paid developers and hordes of creatives testing everything out and demanding progress that’s going to be hard to overcome.

That’s basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows “start”… I don’t know what it’s called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.

You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.

Normally running a command does execute a binary.

I’m not certain, but I’m wondering if OP means that new programs don’t automatically get a “desktop” app or whatever. I’m often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu

“May” is doing a lot of work here. This is a low-level regulatory element of a systemic protein. It’s a neat result - this kind of biochemical investigation is hard and worthwhile - but it’s miles from any kind of therapeutic AFAICT

And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.

Nah, it’s really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.

success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.

No doubt. And listen, I’m on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There’s some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn’t stop me.

I guess my point is that it’s obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.

I do these things. I also refuse to review for-profit journals and paper mills, post all of my code in open source repositories, and advocate for these practices whenever I get the chance. When I had a popular science blog over 10 years ago, writing about this stuff a bunch.

But as long as hiring committees are scanning CVs for the number of Nature/Science/Cell journals, and granting agencies aren’t insisting on different practices, this shit will continue.

I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.

The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.

I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn’t participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.

I’ve also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it’s pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it’s quite a bit better.

You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don’t. Is there something motivating you to switch?

The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn’t get to work with openconnect, and Cisco’s AnyConnect won’t run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.