It’s been a learning experience. I am pretty much building it specifically for my use so it’s missing lots of stuff that’s standard on other fully featured OS’s. I’m mostly using a browser, Konsole terminal and KDE Kate as my editor.

I found an unexpected hobby in writing POSIX scripts because it’s teaching me the inner workings of Linux. In the future I’d like to expand that to including the sed and awk commands but I haven’t really found a project to use them with yet.

Alpine Linux does offer a setup-desktop command/script which will easily setup a few desktop environments such as Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Sway and Lxqt. That only sets up the basic desktop environment so a lot of other work is needed to set up things like sound, graphics and a few other things.

As I mentioned before, I still have Linux Mint DE installed. I mostly use it for Steam games but it has everything else I need for when I don’t feel like working out a problem because I wanted to simply open a .pdf file. However, it’s still really satisfying for me setting up a very specific work environment with the mininal tools I have available.

I think there is value in learning to work within a mininal environment to help give more life out of lower spec technology that’s currently available. Especially now with all the ram supply issues because of the AI rush.

I have nothing wrong with people sharing life experiences. I can learn from that.

I do have an issue with people forcing unasked advice on other people. That comes with judgement from a narrow perspective. That unwanted advice does not take my experiences, perspectives or my own future plans into consideration.

Someone elses lived experiences should not be forced on others. Someone else’s lived experiences can be shared in a way where it can create conversation or give others something to think about at a later time.

To me there is a difference.

In fairness, there may be times where unasked advice may be useful. For example someone’s immediate safety. However, in most other situation’s it’s not appropriate and often perceived as rude by the person receiving the unasked advice.

I used to work in the trades and the worst advice I ever got was from older men who forced their advice on me. I never asked for their advice. They just felt the need to trauma dump on me for all their regrets by giving me “advice” that was always meant for their younger selves.

If I had ever taken any of their unasked and unwanted advice, I would have ended up as miserable as they were and feeling like I lived a life of regret.

I could imagine an it would matter more to people working with embedded devices.

Also some people just like learning or doing random things. Nothing wrong with some exploration, discovery or learning.

I don’t have any answers, just my own experiences. Last year I decided to use Alpine Linux as my Operating System for a couple of self-hosted things running on a Raspberry Pi. I chose it because it’s super minimal and used less common tools (for example doas instead of sudo). That unintentionally forced me to learn how to use Linux using more basic commands that are more likely to be available on other Linux systems.

Alpine Linux uses Busybox-Ash which is a POSIX compliant shell that’s very small and very basic. The scripts I ended up writing tend to be POSIX portable meaning that they should work on a wider variety of systems. That comes at the cost of script simplicity and readability as well as missing out on many features that make Bash scripts more complex, robust and easier to work with.

I have a working example POSIX portable script. I’ve been adding to it all the things I’ve learned. You can check it out here if you’re interested.

I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver but still keep a copy of Linux Mint DE ready to use because it’s nice to have a fully featured work environment for the days I don’t want to think.

All my personal data is on encrypted partitions and drives. The only data that would be left behind is whatever I was hosting on my Raspberry Pi’s. Anyone can do what they please with that data, it doesn’t matter to me. The encrypted stuff can be easily wiped and the hardware can be reused by whoever comes after me.

That can possibly be it. I experimented with many types of music. Anything harder than punk and they’ll make themselves smaller and lower. I have mostly chill music and they’ll be relaxed but less curious.

Punk seems to hit the right spot for them to be relaxed and very animated. Also Katy Perry. One day a neighbour had a party and were blasting Katy Perry all day and the momma dove was just vibin’ the whole time.

Every year a Mourning Dove couple returns to lay eggs in one of our planters that hangs off the backyard patio railing. It’s slightly covered by the roof overhang so they are protected from rain, direct sunlight and circling prey overhead.

I usually leave a bowl of water for them nearby the planter and my dad will gently water the soil for the plants with all the birds staying put.

They generally don’t mind when people are outside on the patio as long as there are no sudden movements or loud noises.

I’ve noticed they are even more relaxed if I go outside and eat or play some music at a reasonable volume. Surprisingly they the most calm, curious and active when I play any punk music for them.

They’ve been returning for 5+ years now and I’m looking forward to seeing them again this spring.

I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver for browsing, writing scripts and to slowly customize my own work environment.

I have a Linux Mint DE partition that launchs directly to Steam for gaming. Tried Bazzite but the installer failed to find my SSD.

I also have a small partition that has an image of the LMDE .iso. It saves me from needing to grab a USB drive for when I inevitably fuck up the first two partitions and need a live USB environment to fix things.

I keep all my backups, music, work and sensitive data in a separate partition that’s encrypted so I can easily get back to work after any fuck ups. I’ve had of practice fixing my own fuck ups over the past year.

I’ve seen a massive huntsman spider in Australia. I was trimming palm fronds with a saw on an extended pole and one palm frond hit the tree trunk on the way down. The huntsman managed to safety land on the tree trunk while the frond fell to the ground.

That spider was way bigger than my hand and demonically fast. Was super cool to see such a big one.

It’s nice that they are generally chill around people. I had a much smaller one living in my room’s air conditioning unit. It always came out at night and chilled on the wall while I slept and disappeared during the day.

I never handled a huntsman but I was never really bothered by them during my time in Australia.

I know Alpine Linux uses IRC for development. https://alpinelinux.org/community/

I go there from time to time when I have an issue I can’t figure out myself.

It’s mature and simple which is why I believe it’s used more often by developers.

My store uses a similar tag. It points to the price of the product on the shelf to indicate the product is “Canadian.”

If you look to the right of the board, you can see the tag tucked into the shelf.

Canada

Strength sometimes takes a lot of patience to help a person fuck up in front of the wrong line of people.

That’s very much what I did. While causing noise with management, I made friends with someone who worked for corporate HR. My first email to her basically predicated what would happen if I raised a complaint to management. I gained her trust by focusing on changing the work culture and not looking for retribution.

I got terminated, lawyers got involved and in the end I got a my severance and banned from working with that international corporate. The HR manager of my company was forced into leaving the company before her retirement. If I didn’t play nice with corporate HR, the company HR manager would have probably worked until retirement like nothing happened.

I now have a new hate for bureaucracy that’s on a deep and personal level but at least I came out with some wins at the cost of some sanity.

The grey walls of the workplace somehow lost even more colour after that realization

All the things I had to do to protect myself from manipulative people.

They needed my attention. I became more independent and denied giving them any attention. They don’t like that I’m not giving them the attention they think they deserve so they try and turn everyone against me.

It happens often because I’m quiet and kind. They think that makes me easy to manipulate. I’ve become hardened to manipulators. So much to the point that physical touch with other people has become awkward or uncomfortable.

The trades are the same way, unfortunately. When the first woman apprentice showed up, all these guys started acting like they’ve never seen a woman before.

The quiet guy who I thought was one of the nicest people there told the apprentice that she belonged in an office. Others wouldn’t let her do anything “dangerous” or over explained all the simple shit to her. Others would just hang around her for uncomfortable periods of time. It was truly bizarre to witness.

She ended up only coming to me for work related questions because I was one of the few people who treated her like a person and not like a little girl. That’s how I found out all the gross and fucked up things the guys were saying to her. She didn’t last long and left for another company which already had women working there. I worked until I got terminated for bringing up issues with the work culture.

During the fight about work culture with management, the vast majority of my coworkers turned their backs on me. Treated me like an idiot and isolated me. They were all so fragile and scared they would have to change their awful ways.

I ended up quitting my apprenticeship and decided to never return to the trades. I can’t stand the culture and I no longer have the energy to fight alone.

Any woman that can remain in the trades or STEM is way stronger than I’ll ever be. I couldn’t imagine myself dealing with that shit daily for an entire life.

I was building an automation line that was going to be used to manufacture the battery tray for Hummers. When I found out in 2020 that my workplace was considered essential service during the covid lockdowns, I pretty much lost my mind. Stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.

There’s nothing essential about an electric Hummer.

I don’t work there anymore.

I don’t have any answer but I feel your pain. Years ago I wanted to learn C++ for Arduino and asking questions always seemed to have answers that talked down to me and made me feel stupid for asking.

I even tried proving that I made an effort to learn before asking. That didn’t work either. People were still rude.

I gave up.

Years later I got into into Linux and started learning POSIX scripting and self-hosting. I again tried asking questions but still received mostly rude answers but this time there were people in the mix of replies that did try to help. It was slightly better.

I tried showing off a script I was proud of but I did something wrong and people rudely let me know about my mistake. They took no effort to educate me on why it was wrong. I asked for a reason to understand what I did wrong but was left with silence.

I didn’t give up this time but I stopped asking for help and I’m still afraid to show off my projects.

It’s the exact same bullshit I experienced in the trades. I quit my apprenticeship and left the trades because people refused to understand that someone else with less experience won’t instinctively know all the basics. Starting something new is overwhelming and it’s hard to retain all that information the first time learning it all.

I feel like rudeness towards beginners is one of the biggest hypocrisies when so much of progress is built on sharing knowledge.

One lesson I learned from a this is that I either take the time to answer a question fully or don’t. I can at least feel good about the few times I spent answering a question. The people that asked the question were always appreciative of the time and effort I took to help them understand what they wanted to know.

I found that out a few years ago when I moved here. Never knew I was surrounded by mourning doves in the bigger city that I grew up in. I also thought they were owls too.