If you can see a polar bear it’s a threat.

They really aren’t like other bear species. They are an apex predator in an area where basically nothing other than another polar bear can even harm them. They see most things as food, including humans.

As a bonus, Iceland has a pretty wonky ecosystem that needs protecting as is and polar bears aren’t native to the island. They have to swim extreme distances to get there, making relocation extremely difficult and expensive, plus if they leave it be it will entirely disrupt other wildlife in the area, to say nothing of the human population.

As others have said, it sucks that it got shot, but Iceland especially has very limited options on how else to deal with it. Shoot on sight is, unfortunately, a very reasonable policy for them.

It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.

You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.

C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

Uh, I kind of assume you’re trolling at this point since a) you got notably more unpleasant in a hurry, and b) if you think exes work the same way every time you have lived a weirdly blessed life.

I hope you sort out your package management problems sometime but this has clearly gotten unproductive. Cheers!

The discover store comes with KDE nowadays. GNOME has a similar store. Most recommended distros will preinstall one of those two. Ubuntu has a similar snap store, I think.

I guess the steam flatpak is unofficial. Works, though. Very simple, lazy solution. Could have gone through the fedora repos, too, where they’ve gone through the effort of repacking the deb for their users.

Dunno what your package manager problem is. Don’t even know what you’re running. Mine works fine, and certainly better than the windows store 🤷

Appimages sure aren’t recognized as system apps. They’re basically like an exe on windows. I’d rather manually add my rare appimage to the menu than go through the installer hell windows has.

Your point seems a little silly because, honestly, my experience is that developers have largely made the Linux desktop experience so simple and stable that it works better than any windows machine I’ve used in the past decade. I’m sorry this hasn’t been your experience, but in the last couple of years I’ve pretty much only needed to open the terminal because I want to, not because I need to.

I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).

I don’t know what distro/de/wm you’re using right now but what you’re saying doesn’t need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.

Some libraries will also retry prints if they don’t look right, or will consult with you if it’s something really weird or complex. As long as a print doesn’t have really specific tolerances it should turn out fine with no additional effort, though.

Yep, not usually safe to reuse your prints or put them in heat or get them wet, but for a single batch of cookies the risk of a 3d printed cookie cutter is pretty minimal.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.