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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2025

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  • Oof. Sorry you had such a bad experience.

    Pro tip for others: It takes time for volunteers to reverse engineer new proprietary laptop hardware.

    If the laptop manufacturers aren’t advertising Linux support, it’s up to the community to play guess and check, to figure out what the proprietary drivers do.

    You might get lucky and pick the same exact model as a passionate reverse engineer. Or you might not.

    With old stuff, your odds are much better that someone has figured it out for you.

    For new hardware, it’s still essential to pick a vendor that chooses to write and release Linux drivers.

    This will get better when truly open hardware platforms gain popularity.






  • Another tip I haven’t seen yet:

    • It varies by client, but Markdown generally works, here.

    • Spoiler tags seem to still be a separate extension from regular Markdown.

    • Many of us try to be more careful to include ALT Text with images, as it supports both blind users, and anyone whose server is just being slow to load images:

    Example of Image with Alt text in Markdown:

    ![alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Title")
    

  • Here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned yet: many of us explicitly state our intended tone after our comments, to avoid miscommunication. Particularly in busy threads.

    We have some great accessibility outreach communicators here, some of whom have shared how much it helps them or people they know.

    Some examples:

    • (Sarcasm)
    • (Genuine)
    • (Joke)

    Sometimes these are abbreviated, but we often even avoid abbreviation - for general clarity, but probably mainly because we’re always gaining new users who might not recognize the abbreviation.





  • Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare

    In my experience, installers are often a nightmare.

    For me, GUI vs CLI have about the same failure rate (for their operating system).

    But I appreciate that the CLI version gives me a message I can search for instead of a “fuck you buddy” pop up box with an “ok” button.

    Edit: There’s one case where I have a much harder time with CLI installs - when there’s only a CLI “installer” available. I don’t blame the CLI for that, I blame the person who shares seven CLI commands instead of writing an installer.