Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 10 Posts
  • 348 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

    That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

    I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

    Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

    This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️




  • Had basically the same exact scenario with my parents earlier this year.

    Installed Linux Mint with the default Cinnamon desktop, installed a “Windows” theme. Put icons on the desktop exactly where there old ones were, and never looked back.

    It’s been great for them, does everything they need and took minimal effort from me to set up.



  • It’s the ease if use. In Windows, you select an option called kiosk mode, select a user account or create one to use, then tell Windows what webpage/site URL to use for the locked down browser interface. Then you click go and that’s it.

    You have a locked down, reasonably secure single-use kiosk for your Company HR portal, in-house web app, or training portal, literally takes less than 5 minutes, and is so simple, I could walk a non-techie through the whole process easily over the phone.

    Things like cage are already more technical and tough to setup than that, by a large margin.

    It’s great if you need something more powerful, or you want a bunch of kiosks that you can roll out on a low power SBC. But for one-off basic kiosks that use a little mini-tower, Windows kiosk mode is pretty great.


  • Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

    It’s the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

    Don’t get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

    In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

    If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.




  • Modern web engines are basically mini operating systems. Long gone are the days where a web browser just needed to render basic HTML pages, handle some simple protocol actions, and render images.

    To build something that supports all of the latest web standards, is secure, is always up to date, and on top of all that, is performant, requires a large group of very skilled devs working constantly on all those components.

    Web development, for better or worse, has become a massive and rapidly evolving ecosystem that is constantly morphing and changing. Web apps are becoming the standard, and even “simple” modern websites are absolutely filled with different widgets and frameworks for all the different elements they contain.

    If a very large/rich org or company decided to dedicate a whole team of devs to build a FOSS web engine, it could happen, but that used to be Mozilla, and look how that has slowly been failing.

    What person with a website that has any significant traffic would willingly break it for 80+ percent of its users? That will never happen, sadly.






  • Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.

    It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.

    It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.


  • I worked for a classic MSP a while back, barely lasted 3 months. Such a toxic environment, tons of pressure to spread yourself thinner and thinner.

    It was one of those places where you were expected to be there an hour early, stay an hour late, and work through your lunch.

    Even though that’s illegal, it was never explicit, just one of those, wink wink type things. But the workload was always so heavy, you couldn’t stay on top of everything unless you were working 50+ hours a week.

    And of course, all salary, no overtime or double time for weekend work.

    I do internal IT now, much better. Trying to get my own one-person shop going to eventually be fully self-employed. Actually, it would be really cool to become a worker-owned co-op, but that’s still a faint dream.