so like the autopilot in Elite Dangerous. will it get you there? sure. will it get you there fast? …not exactly.

…either an empty string, a single character, or the same sequence of characters repeated more than once?

ohhh nooooo, who could possibly have seen this coming

not like that repo was getting constantly vandalized as people realized it contained copyrighted code that the winamp owners didn’t have the rights to which the project managers were halfheartedly playing whack-a-mole with

what kind of config file is short enough to fit on a single screen with line breaks?

Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I’ll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON – seriously? That’s probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!

Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.

XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.

Fun fact: Python is not named after an animal! It’s named after the comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

That is actually the best way of putting it.

have you considered just not listening to AI bros and not letting their opinions upset you

What smear campaign? Here’s the lead developer of the project responding to a pull request replacing “he” with “they” in the build instructions with “This project is not an appropriate avenue to advertise your personal politics.”

Cool, what’s it do that Aseprite doesn’t?

EDIT: Okay, using an entire image as a texture which an image references, allowing you to do pseudo-3D texturing on a 2D pixel sprite is pretty sick, I gotta admit

oh my god yes let them trot out the “it’s not copyright infringement, honest” argument in front of goddamn netflix

You know how vaccine skeptics are. They think the COVID jab is a Jewish plot or some similar bullshit designed to kill everyone who takes it.

You’ll eventually go back to Reddit and see it with new eyes, realising just how quickly it’s dying.

I don’t want to ruin the vibe for our newcomers, but… is it? Every subreddit I’ve subscribed to is an order of magnitude more active than all of the equivalent Lemmy communities spread across various instances put together, and from what I’ve read most Redditors remember the API blackouts as “that one time the moderators collectively had a tantrum” and they’re glad it’s over now, if indeed they remember it at all, and mentally group Lemmy in with Linux as that thing enthusiasts won’t shut up about, and yeah, maybe it’s better, for them. For goodness sake, half the content on Lemmy is reposts from Reddit. Don’t get me wrong, I hate spez with the fire of a thousand suns and I can’t wait to see more Redditors make the jump, I can’t help but think that the whole “Reddit is dying” narrative is just copium.

Welcome to the Fediverse! I think you’ll like it here.

I would argue the point that dual booting is any more complicated than a clean install, especially given the state of modern Linux installers

please do not put your actual installed system (read/write) on a flash drive. linux will let you. it will happily install to the flash drive and it will happily boot up. it will let you log in after just a few minutes. plus ten seconds every time you click something.

please don’t use flash drives for anything other than installation media unless you’re using a distro that’s specifically designed to be installed portably and doesn’t do a ton of disk I/O.

Ymal Markup Ain’t Language

OP, please don’t let the other users scare you off. I’ve installed Linux dozens of times on dozens of different computers and have never once lost data while doing it, not unless I explicitly choose the option installer telling it there was nothing I wanted to keep (which is labelled “DANGER - YOU WILL LOSE DATA” in red letters). Linux Mint installer has an option to let you keep your existing OS and install Linux alongside it in a “dual-boot” configuration. This means that when you install, you permanently set aside a portion of the capacity of your boot disk (hard drive, SSD etc.) for use by Linux. The total capacity of your Windows partition will shrink by that much and Linux will live in a new partition in that space (e.g. if you have a 1TB SSD and set aside 250GB for Linux, from then on Windows will start seeing your C: drive as being 750GB large and Linux will have a brand new 250GB volume as its equivalent of the C drive). You can change how much space each OS has down the line, but it’s really annoying and requires you to boot off a flash drive and not be able to use your computer for several hours while it rearranges its data.

After that, each time you turn your computer on, you’ll be asked whether you want to boot into Windows or Linux. (This will come in very handy if Linux borks itself and you need something working to be able to Google for solutions and use your computer as a computer until you can figure out how to fix it. Or if you decide down the road that the Linux way of doing things just gets under your skin and you want to go back to how your computer was before.) While booted into Linux, you’ll be able to access all the files on your Windows C: drive as though it were an external drive, but not vice versa. If you want to send files from Linux to Windows, you’ll have to boot into Linux and copy them over. Note that from the perspective of any apps you install on either OS, your Windows and Linux partitions are two totally separate computers, so expect to be asked to sign in again.

All that said, having backups is never a bad idea if you can afford it. If you can’t, a surefire way to keep Linux installer from erasing your Windows files is to put two SSDs in your machine, one for Windows and one for Linux, and disconnect the Windows one until you’ve finished installing Linux. This is what I usually do, and as a bonus gives more space for both OSes, although it’s by no means necessary.

OP, this is absolutely not the case. If you install in a dual-boot configuration (recommended for beginners), not only will you not lose your data, you won’t lose the ability to boot into Windows. You’ll get asked to choose which OS you want each time you restart and Linux can access all files on Windows (but not vice versa). Secondly, not only is windows not the only OS that markets itself to Just Work™ (that’s been MacOS’s entire shtick since its inception), modern Linux does that as well. You can install software and drivers, manage system configuration, etc. without even knowing what a terminal is. Knowing how to use the terminal is never a bad idea, but rest assured that by no means do you have to, especially when starting out.

I sincerely doubt the person I’m replying to has used a distro marketed towards Linux newbies at any point in the last five years.