20 years ago I saw a computer scientist on TV saying that operating systems should come up with a better way to organize and present files, something that took into consideration the files we used the most and the ones we were likely to use again. Not just a recent files menu, but some form of AI prediction that would prepare our desktops with little intervention. This, of course, didn't happen, but I think about it from time to time. I would love to have an AI that would understand my workflow and do a bunch of things for me.

This is obviously way too advanced as an answer to this thread, but I'm curious: what did you expect to already exist in the field of computer science, but simply didn't pan out?

What is the programming language you enjoy the most, or otherwise define as your favourite? Why is that particular language your favourite?

Bonus: add just a little bit of code in it that you think exposes its beauty.

This is of course the age old debate, which on other sites has been known to quickly devolve (one of the Internet ‘holy wars’ of yore). Nonetheless, I am curious.

I personally use vim. Part of the reason is surely that it is just the first one of the two that I happened to use, and thus by the time I tried emacs I was used to vim. But more broadly, I enjoy using vim because once you get over the hump of ‘weird’ commands and modes, I feel that vim most closely emulates the feelings and thought process that you have when building something with your hands. You can pick up different tools, yank pieces out and rearrange them, turn the object around in your hands to see different parts, etc etc. Once you internalize the movement and editing you really start flying around. At that point the interface seems less like a barrier between you and the text and more like a way to ‘hold’ it.

Of course, people have different preferences.

Those of you who keep hundreds of tabs open: I'm curious how and why you use them. I'd hoard tabs in the past, but in a sad incident a browser (Firefox) restart caused the loss of all my 10s of open tabs that was accumulated over weeks long research about a topic, I decided to never trust tabs again. Now I'm making use of my bookmars toolbar, Org mode and Instapaper for most of the stuff having many tabs open was the method before. So, for me, tabs were for keeping stuff handy during research, read-it-later lists, and temporary bookmarks. What are the use cases for you?

I saw back in January that a lot of you were on Linux, I guess I should've expected that considering it's ~comp but I'm curious how the trend is going. But to spice things up a little bit more, tell us about you favourite programs, any hidden gems?

I personally run a fairly standard Fedora 30 install running gnome and some flatpaks. I'd say my favourite programs are

Gnome Builder :

Well, I've been trying to fight the electron uprising while still using a modern and open source IDE and well, I think it works great and looks pretty good too.

Dino.im (Using the Flatpak PR) :

It's light, supports XMPP and looks relatively modern, what more could you ask?

Firefox gnome theme :

It's not really a program and just really a skin for Firefox but I really like it. It integrates pretty neatly with the rest of the desktop. Can't wait for the Gnome 3.32 changes to come in though since it kinda clashes with the new theme.

I have found this to be a semi controversial topic. Its almost becoming a required point for getting a new job to have open source work that you can show. Some people just enjoy working on programming side projects and others don't want to do any more after they leave the office.

Whats your opinion on this? Do you work on any side projects? Do you think its reasonable for interviewers to look for open source work when hiring?

Pretty straight forward question, but basically I was watching a discussion panel the other day talking about the ethics of Self-Driving cars. A topic came up about people writing crappy code, and more than that, people not testing their code. And if they do, they do point testing. I am in my last semester of uni and I am working with some companies where we are doing pretty extensive testing, happy flows and a lot of alternate flows, as well as UI/UX testing. I wanted to extend this question to you, do you guys do testing, what type? How much do you focus on it? And if u love it/hate it?

Previous threads:

What DE and distro do you use and why?

What's your OS and how does it look?

What does your desktop look like? What tools do you swear by?

I've recently switched to Arch and today, it's finally done! You have no idea how hard it was to even turn it off. So I wanted to make another OS/screenshot thread, especially since it's been quite a long time since the last one, and Tildes population increased inbetween, so we might find something interesting again :-)

What's your OS, what do you love about it and how does it look?

My pick is Perl5. Even though a lot people (mostly those who’ve never touched Perl) say it’s a “write only” language, I think it does a lot right. It’s easy to prototype with, and it gives you a lot of freedom in how you want to solve a problem; which I think is one of the most important features of a programming language.

I’d like to know what your picks are!

As someone who is not mainly a web developer, I can barely grasp the immensity of options when it comes to writing a web application.

So far everything I've written has been using PHP and the Slim microframework. PHP because I don't use languages like Python/Ruby/JS that much so I didn't have any prior knowledge of those, and I've found myself to be fairly productive with it. Slim because I didn't want a full-blown framework with 200 files to configure.

I've tried Go because I've used it in the past but I don't see it to be very fit when it comes to websites, I think it's fine for small microservices but doing MVC was a chore, maybe there's a framework out there that solves this.

As for the frontend I've been trying to use as little JavaScript as possible, always vanilla. As of HTML and CSS I'm no designer so I kind of get by copying code and tweaking things here and there.

However I've started a slightly bigger project and I don't fancy myself writing everything from scratch (specially security) besides, ORMs can be useful. Symfony4 is what I've been using for a couple of days, but I've had trouble setting up debugging, and the community/docs don't seem that great since this version is fairly new; so I'm considering trying out something more popular like Django.

So this is why I created the post, I know this will differ greatly depending on the use-case. But I would like to do a quick survey and hear some of your recommendations, both on the backend and frontend. Besides I think it's a good topic for discussion.

Cheers!

I’ve recently gotten to speak with a few folks who work at an enterprise security company. I asked what their security researchers set as company rules for allowed laptops. My one datapoint so far is “Dell or Apple.” So for example, no Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is arguably the best work laptop.

I am curious what other large security companies (or any of you security minded folks) set as rules for trusted laptops. Can anyone share their lists and theories as to why I heard Dell and Apple? BIOS is more trustworthy?

Blatantly stealing from the excellent post by /u/judah, I figured I'd make a sysadmin version because sysadmins tend to be underrepresented in tech discussions. Please keep your answers as cross-platform as possible without being uselessly generic.

I'll start. Realize that the system is going to go down, and accept that reality. Accept failure. How you respond to failure is how people who aren't sysadmins will see and value you.

Just a bit curious. Currently, mine looks like this. It runs Elementary OS, however considering hijacking it to Bedrock Linux, mainly to get cutting edge software from the AUR (for stuff like Firefox and GIMP) without losing all my data. I think I'll wait for Bedrock to go stable first, though.

It uses the ePapirus icon theme, which is just Papirus with better support for Elementary's UI. GTK theme is (if I remember correctly) Qogir and the Plank theme is the GTK one. What do yours look like?

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language:

(…) Go intentionally has a weak type system, and there are many restrictions that can be expressed in other languages but cannot be expressed in Go. Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types. (…)

I found this distinction, writing code vs. writing types, very insightful. In my experience, in a language like Rust or (modern fancy) C++ the programmer is constantly forced to think about types, while when I program in Go or C, I almost never think about them. Types are, in fact, almost always obvious. It is also interesting that languages like Haskell and Idris explicitly expect the programmer to program with types.

What do you think?

In the rare chance you haven't heard of Flutter, here's the link: https://flutter.io

Flutter just officially left beta with v1.0 December 4, last year. The code is written in Dart, and deploys on Android, and iOS (and will run natively on the rumored Fuchsia OS).

So for those of you that have used Flutter or are currently using Flutter.

• What are you working on?
• Why'd you choose Flutter?
• What do you like about Flutter?
• And what do you dislike about Flutter?

I'll start:

I'm working on a niche art app. I myself do not do that type of art, but knowing people that do, I wanted to create a tool to fill in the lackluckster market for Chromebooks and Android.
I chose Flutter because:

• I wanted to try something new, and what newer than something that was (at the time) in beta?
• Custom Views in Android are a hassle.
• I will be able to release on both Android and iOS (semi-)natively without having to code it twice.

Here's what I like about Flutter:

• Layouts are really simple.
  (though you can easily let it get clustered if you don't think too much about it.)
• Design isn't an afterthought.
  Animations are built in (and simple), themes aren't hard-coded, and Material Components get more attention here. (Still waiting for Shapes on Android)
• It's fast by design.
  Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine (Skia). I've never experienced any stutter with the built-in components, and when I caused lag (with heavy I/O) Flutter/Dart had tools in place for me to narrow down exactly what was causing it.

What I don't like about Flutter:

• It has poor mouse/trackpad support.
  Right clicks, not a thing. I can workaround this with a double-click/long-click, but for a desktop OS, this isn't optimal. Scrolling, that's panning, this should be differentiated. There's a difference between using a scrollwheel and moving finger around on the screen. According to Flutter there is not. There's also currently no support for mouse hovers which I have needed very much.
  There is a pull-request for adding support for all of these, but the developer hasn't done anything since code review.
• Keyboard support, while there, is lackluster.
  Ctrl, Shift, Alt. These have to be gotten with the meta code. There's no built-in function for checking those. Text fields don't support the tab key to navigate. And text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) isn't possible with text fields without the use of a library (or making it yourself).

I was trying to think of a third dislike, but I can't. My complaints are on missing APIs for Chromebooks. That's it. I really like Flutter, I plan on using it more, and if they won't add support for mouse/keyboard, maybe I'll have to contribute.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts about it is.

Between the recent discussions on the Useful Shell Scripts thread, and some of the tangents on the Desktop Usability thread, I thought it might be an interesting idea to have a desktop screenshot sharing / unixporn thread where we talk about our setups, preferred applications, and share some pointers. This doesn't specifically have to be a Unix circlejerk though. If you have a Windows/Android/ChromeOS/TempleOS setup with some novel innovations, you're more than welcome to share too.

Hey Tildes, I got a job directly supervising a small team of 4 software developers. I'm very excited at the prospect and would like to put my best foot forward. To that end, I would like to have a discussion around a few topics. Feel free to expand the scope if you believe the conversation would be beneficial. I'm sure I won't be the last person to be in this position. I've done research, read, and watched videos regarding several of these questions; however, since Tilde prioritizes high-quality discussion, I thought it would be a fun opportunity to chat with others about these topics.

• As a member of a software development team, what are things that your supervisor has done that has had the greatest (a) positive and (b) negative impact?
• Supervisors, when you joined your new team, what was your methodology for reviewing the team, projects, and processes? What was the scenarios behind your review and the outcome? What would you do differently?

I am looking for any resource that could tell me how much knowledge and training is needed to go from a beginner to expert, in let's say application software development for example. Or in artificial intelligence.

If there isn't any one source, are there any general type of sources I can use to piece together one mega-source?

Hey y'all, first time actually posting something here! Just curious what editor people use, whether its for coding, writing, or just the occasional note, whatever. I've gone through most of the well-known ones (vim, emacs, atom, vs code for starters), but only ever really messed around with vim enough to like it, and I've also been trying out gedit for the last little while and really liking it, but I'm curious to see what other people use!

Hey all,
I've been studying Common Lisp recently, and as far as I can see, this is a pretty capable, mature language. Moreover, Lisp has been around since the 60s and it doesn't see much usage (as far as I'm aware) outside of Emacs Lisp and AutoLISP. What gives?

I've been using Solus for years now as my main driver, but I think I may be switching to Arch soon. Or at least, start using Arch on my laptop, and keep Solus on my desktop. The main reason I wanna give Arch a try is because of how minimal it can be. I don't need a lot of applications, and I like to have the least amount of software installed on my machine as I can. Plus, distro-hopping is a disease, and it's time I try something new, haha.

So, I was just curious what DE people are using with Arch. Ideally I want something very minimal, but not too ugly. I liked using Budgie with Solus, so I may very well just use Budgie with my Arch install, but I thought I would see if anyone has any recommendations first! Thanks!

I feel that the mobile user interfaces has been developed and changed immensly compared to desktops, when it comes iOS and Android. While Windows has pushed some controversial but interesting features, macOS and Linux DEs has been kind of stagnant. Has desktop interfaces reached its peak form? Or is there more developments to come?