Money and time.

Tons of people build cool projects during their time in university, but the vast vast majority of people don’t because they are eating beans and rice and ramen and pizza and studying, not spending 500€-1000€ on iterative prototyping and the equipment to test everything.

The few things I don’t like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):

• Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss

• Digital signing simply doesn’t work, won’t work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,

• Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don’t (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)

• The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)

But besides those small things, it seem great to me.

Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.

If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.

But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc… In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc… On the big HDDs.

I’m sorry. There are people who go to an adult hardcore porn site and then type in “Suitable for work”??? Like do you think the site wouldn’t get flagged at your work?

KNX.

Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)

If you ever need a language buddy, let me know.

There is also a Learn Dutch discord that is fairly active.

Duolingo sucks ass for learning languages. Dutchpod101 is pretty good, but the best is a combination of dutch books + listening like dhtchpod101 or some simple news podcasts or so.

Maybe people have gotten Saned for network scanning working on other things than bazzite, but I can’t figure it out and the discord is never helpful.

But document signing is a technical limitation caused by flatpak. You can technically do it by installing your entire office and authentication suite on a rooted distrobox, but then that is defeating a fair amount of the point of ease of use and sandboxing. I haven’t tested that though so even that might have some bugs or not work.

There are but trackers on different upstream flatpak software for it like Firefox, but it has been completely dead for 5 years with no plans on looking at it.

Bazzite or an immutable if you do gaming and don’t need a lot of special functionality (e.g. network scanning doesn’t work, document signing doesn’t work and will never work, managing gpg keys, embedded firmware development, Belgian EID, etc…)

Mint if you don’t have a brand new system and just want an easy experience.

Arch if you want all niche software to simply be available through the package manager and never have to find rpm/deb packages.

Debian for a server (or maybe opensuse MicroOS nowadays)

Opensuse if you really want an EU OS or something very integrated with a snapshot system.

And of course, Hannah Montana Linux if you are enlightened.

You can also look at the MKBHD 2024 smartphone camera comparison test with the FP5. I would suggest taking the test yourself if that is still possible.

I would guess that the camera will be comparable. (Everything below if FP5 assuming about the same performance with the FP6)

For me, daylight pics were after all of the pixels but before anything else. I like the more neutral not supremely over-saturated over-sharpened/smoothed pictures that many phones take nowadays.

For me, it was middle of the pack for dimly lit photos.

For the overall ELO with everyone, FP5 was on the mid-lower end (of a comparison of all flagships + pixel A series), but perfectly usable for people who aren’t doing social media as a job.

Don’t get a tablet if you already have a Linux laptop or a dedicated workspace.

Get a drawing pad. They are better, more cost-effective, have a better feel (non-display versions), have better pens, and you aren’t restricted to neutered programs offered on android/iOS.

Wacom is traditional, but expensive and their pen tech is kind of aging at this point, but they always work flawlessly.

XPPen is the great value alternative (with even better stuff on the top end). i have an XPPen Deco Pro Gen2 and it is an absolutely great pad with the texture of paper, and their little macropad with a scroll wheel works well. The downside is that you need a screen, but it is quite ergonomic.

The few actual artists I know use the XPPen Artist Pro series which is a drawing pad with a screen, and then they just plug it into their laptop and close the lid. Not as portable, but generally as good or better experience

XPpen also has good Linux drivers. They work in the kernel by default often, but the macropad and pressure sensitivity customization won’t work globally without their drivers.

XP-pen has much more cost-effective options that are just as good nowadays since wacom hasn’t innovated in like 15 years lol.

They also work out of the box in Linux, but for all of the shortcuts, they also have driver packages for every distribution and if it isn’t available, support will package the newest version for you (in my experience) in your chosen format and then send it to you and update the driver downloads.

The XP Pen Deco Pro Gen2 is an absolute beast for a drawing tablet.

XPPen also has a android drawing pad but that is normal android I think.

If OP wants the drawing tablet experience with a screen, they can also get XPPen Artist Pro display tablet series which of the few artists I know in real life, are what most of them use.

An actual drawing pad is much better than even an IPad for drawing, and you can also use whatever program you want (like Krita), not just the neutered programs that come on iOS or android.

This is similar to what I do.

I have a USB drive with the whole bootloader + decryption keyfiles on it. I remove it while it is running as everything is stored in RAM and already booted.

Downside being it has to be plugged in to update the boot partition during an upgrade.

Just a note that dry canning is pretty bad and has a much much higher chance of botulism than other canning methods. (Botulism spores must be kept at-heat at 160C dry heat for over 2 hours, not the oven temperature, but the full temperature of the medium itself)

It doesn’t matter here much because it is already powdered, shelf-stable mix, but in general.

https://extension.psu.edu/dry-canning-is-not-recommended

https://extension.sdstate.edu/why-behind-unsafe-canning-practices

https://yesicanned.com/dry-canning/

https://nchfp.uga.edu/blog/dry-canning-raw-vegetables-is-an-unsafe-practice

It’s funny, because often they aren’t prettier. Well optimized and well made games from 5 or even 10 years ago often look on par better than the majority of AAA slop pushed out now (obviously with exceptions of some really good looking games like space marine and some others) and the disk size is still 10x what it was. They are just unrefined and unoptimized and try to use computationally expensive filters, lighting, sharpening, and antialiasing to make up for the mediocre quality.

And you are often paying 140-200 for a pi nowadays to make it have the same usability as a laptop (pi, power supply, sata hat, data drive because SD cards simply fail after a while under server IO) while you can get cheap used laptops for 0-100.

So unless you are running it for more than half a decade (which rarely happens with selfhosters for a main server), you are probably spending more in total on the pi.

I would be interested in how things like MATLAB and octave compare to R and python. But I guess it doesn’t matter as much because the relative time of those being run in a data analysis or research context is probably relatively low compared to production code.

True, but I have never seen an ECAD software that has implemented that because that opens up a whole other can of buggy worms of intentionally trying to connect nets and guessing the intention of the user. When do you push the net and when do you merge the net? Does dragging a net label connected to a net to intentionally attach it to a second net to connect the two not work due to pushing? When do you decide when dragging a net is an intentional connection vs not during the drag? When you drag a component, do all nets and connected components get dragged with it or do they push each other into a jumbled mess of traces jumping over each other like what sometimes happens with push behavior in layout routing? I think it is a pretty difficult problem to solve.

That’s why I personally like KiCAD’s choice just to not pull nets with component moving, but to each their own.

Nope, I mean in schematics. You can absolutely short two lines together. It will just silently merge them into a single net so it won’t show up in ERC. If you have an IC with 8 pins on each schematic symbol side in altium and drag the component one unit down, 7 and 7 pins will be shorted together (as an example) silently and become two nets.

As far as footprints:

You don’t technically need to, but altium’s spaghetti code makes things break so often and my company had some troubles with that so they recommend making a duplicate every time.

Not to mention that searching for the correct footprint is accomplished 3 different ways and each way is partially or fully broken so you pretty much need the exact sequential footprint symbol number to sort and scroll all the way to find it. It is horrific. No organization at all.

That is true.

However, the alternative is altium behavior where it drags all of the wire connections with you, so if you move anything attached to an IC or the IC itself, you get dozens of shorts immediately.

They both have pros and cons. I actually prefer kicad’s way because it will never lead to unintended un-ERC-discoverable shorts.

I have used both KiCAD and Altium regularly for years and there are many things that KiCAD simply does better but it is missing a ton of QoL things.

The one thing that I don’t like about KiCAD is that some shortcuts don’t have an alternative right click or toolbar menu item, which makes them undiscoverable unless you browse shortcuts.

I really like librePCBs approach to library management. Multiple pinouts for schematic symbols (meaning a BGA and QFN can have the same library item) and the categorization.

Though I can’t tell if they have reusable footprints and are able to simply reference them to a schematic symbol which is one of the nice things in KiCAD over altium

Bitwarden