I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.

This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as “bytes.” These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++… and whether modern C++ cares about them.

I tried to do this before, but it did not work out.

I couldn’t make the meta key alone open overview. I also tried to add a dock there, but I can only have a panel when not in overview, which is the opposite of that I wanted. I also liked the notification menu and the quick toggles menu in top right corner.

I have been planning to get into plasma extension development to fix some of these issues.

It would help if you got the model right, and an exact one at that. As the others said, “iMac” isn’t a mac laptop, but an AIO desktop.

I run linux on one of these. Everything worked out of the box, except for wireless. See my 2-part adventure for how I solved it.

Mac “bios” isn’t exactly how you’d expect from PCs. Hold down alt key during startup to enter boot menu, and you’re good to go.

If your family member was a mac user before, they might be most comfortable on Gnome, as it has aped many ui features from mac os. It has a similar dock, fluid trackpad-friendly navigation that works the same way, and more.

I’m fine with python, because it’s consistent. In C I get nervous every time I see it.

goto fail;