CAD, CAM, EDA, audio/video production (NLVEs, DAWs, synthesisers etc.).

There are open source options sometimes, but they are all faaar behind the commercial options. No fiscally sane business or government department would use them (unless they only need a small job, or are quite masochistic).

Windows will actually stop you from deleting Program Files.

Nobody is asking for idiot-proof, just mistake-resistant. It’s ok, most people don’t understand this point.

they would have had to intentionally push past warnings to force the uninstall

Go and learn some basics about UX. Two different very smart people made this mistake.

IIRC there are no warnings. It will just list gnome in the list of packages to uninstall that you often get when uninstalling things, and can easily ignore.

Again to reinforce the point because many people do not understand it. Just because it was possible to avoid the issue if you were careful does not mean that it is not an issue. People make mistakes. Seatbelts exist.

Because my current company is too cheap to buy Macs, and the project I work on is full of Docker and bash scripts and obscure EDA tools. Would be a nightmare on Windows. WSL is a possibility I suppose.

Do you have 10k Linux laptops though? The places where I worked saw issues like this for a significant fraction of the dozens of Linux laptops (most people used Macs). There’s no way you could scale that issue rate to 10k machines.

That would be incredibly dumb. There are entire fields where the FOSS is just hilariously behind proprietary software (or sometimes the only option). Do you want to cripple public institutions by cutting them off entirely from proprietary software?

So why does it work for other people with the same laptop and OS?

you are telling me they can’t do better than hitting subscribe on Office365?

Yes I am absolutely telling you that.

I don’t think that’s the reason. It works for other people.

Yeah except that uninstalling Python 2 is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.

Why? I’ve worked in two companies where IT allows Linux as an option and people are constantly having issues (including me). And these are highly technical people. Two people who are not stupid managed to break their laptops by uninstalling Python 2 which Gnome depended on.

Yes that’s technically a UX issue, but there are plenty of good old bugs too, e.g. if you remove a VPN connection that a WiFi network autoconnects to then that WiFi network will entirely stop working with no error messages to speak of. Took me a long time to figure that out. Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3. The hardware fully supports it and it works for other people with the same OS and laptop. I never figured that out.

That’s just a taster… I almost never have issues like that on Windows or Mac.

Windows may cost more than “free” but the additional support costs for Linux are very far from free too.

Maybe something like Chromebooks makes sense if everything is in the cloud.

But you’d still be crazy to use it for either of those purposes, given how safety critical they are. I expect it would be more likely used in robots like Spot, or manufacturing robots.

PDF writing isn’t too bad IMO, since you don’t need to understand the whole spec. I’ve written a PDF writer for maps from scratch and it was fairly easy and not too much code.

PDF reading though… Yeah I’m happy to leave that to people with more time and use their libraries.

A modern format would be nice, but I don’t think it would be anywhere near nice enough to give up how universal PDF is.

Eh, it practice it works extremely well. I can’t remember a single instance where a PDF document rendered incorrectly.

The format is very old so it’s not surprising it has picked up a few WTFs. I’m happy to keep those hidden below the abstraction.

Is there any reason to use this now that Krita exists, sane name and all?

I agree, those are fantastic icons. Very clear.

There’s a “proper” version of this hack called early oom. I haven’t used it though and now that I look at it it seems like it uses the same completely broken “guess which process to kill, who cares if it’s init” system that the normal oom killer uses so your solution sounds better.

Is it so hard to just pause the system and ask the user which app to kill?

Interesting, so that’s sort of customising the image somehow? Does it use an overlay FS or something?

Hmmm I guess this kind of makes sense - most distros push Gnome above KDE (probably because it doesn’t look like this - where’s Tantacrul when you need him?). On the other hand, there’s already Kubuntu…

I’m a bit skeptical about immutable distros too. What if I want to install a package that isn’t already installed and isn’t available as a Flatpak/Snap? Seems like it’s going to run in similar issues to everything else that tries to wade upstream against the bad decisions of the existing Linux packaging zeitgeist, e.g. how Nix has to install everything in one root-owned directory because nobody cares about portable installation.

That’s cool, but in my experience if you get to the OOM killer then 80% of the time it’s too late and your system is basically dead. My laptop hard reboots most of the time when this happens.

Hopefully it works with the early-OOM hacks.