The molecular mechanical modeller NAMD and its viewer use TCL as the CLI interface, and it's...fine. I would prefer BASH or python, but it works just fine.

Also Tk is how most LaTeX drawing is dealt with, so trying to modify, say circuit diagrams or chemical structures drawn directly in LaTeX (I.e. chemfig) requires using some Tcl. Again, it's...fine. No huge complaints.

Edit: bad memory, the drawing program in LaTeX is TikZ not TkZ, its unrelated to Tk.

I mean both Red Hat and Ubuntu did ship updates to change the config of cups-browsed, so I don't think that's correct.

Yeahhhhh thats a pretty niche product and is basically a HID driver interface, so any functionality would have to be rebuilt from the ground up on Linux. It'll certainly take some time, if theres enough interest to make it worthwhile to someone.

Oh my god if you are a new user please do not go straight to Arch or Manjaro. By far the two distros most likely to breaky irreparably.

I kinda suspect it won't show up as a normal HID keyboard, I had some issues with that with a Razer mouse/keyboard, I think they did some proprietary BS to make sure the shortcuts worked for actions that couldn't be done via keypresses. But I hope it does! It would be cool to see.

Yeah definitely the latter, but phrasing it as generation is very very wierd. Literally physically impossible.

Deeply confused by what the hell this is

Yup. Most of the mems devices will essentially shut down the device if they go out of tolerance. This is a pretty common-knowledge fact among folks who work with large magnets, or with helium or hydrogen gas.

Funnily enough, it also happens with equipment microcontrollers which are unlikely to have a MEMS unit in them -- for instance, any benchtop centrifuge made after the mid-90s will shut down, and I'm pretty sure those are still on quartz clocks. It also effects things like on-chip thermometers.

Helium is tiny, and will diffuse though pretty much anything other than continuous welded metal pipe very very quickly. The elastomer seals on a phone would slow it down slightly, but the article's from 2018, before so many phones were watertight. I remember my old iPhone had a little piezo cooling fan in one of the grates on the bottom, so helium would have no trouble at all.

Can't speak for MEMS specifically, but it absolutely can make chips shut down whole instruments by changing their properties. It intercalates slower, but has much the same effect once it's in there.

Well we wouldn't want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s

It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.

To be honest, their demand that OpenSUSE rebrand left a bad taste in my mouth. I get the logic behind it, but the time for that passed a long time ago (probably about 15 years ago).

They're ways to search on a specific site from the engine's search bar. For instance, !gsch cows will search for cows on google scholar from DuckDuckGo. I don't know how stamdardized bangs are across engines, but they're super useful if you use a bunch of obscure search tools on the day to day.

So all their products are breaking...

To be honest, I'm not sure if it would be more concerning for them to have just one fatal issue with their process, or two unrelated ones.

What happened with all the privacy invading stuff which Audacity went through a couple years ago? I never heard whether it got reverted or not.

That is weird. I don't think i've ever seen a sample dewar that couldn't last two weeks, most are fine for a month or more. How the hell are they designing their sample storage system, that it's only go of for four days? Are they insulating with Styrofoam?

I can only assume they're trying to talk about concrete 3D printing, but oh boy is that not ready for anything which needs strength.

Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.

For a $240 case, no review is going to make me want to buy it, but god is it funny to watch Steve's frustration with it.

I want to use it, but if I'm going to commit to learning a new system for my work, I need to know that 1) it will remain open source (like LaTeX), 2) its going to remain maintained, 3) it has a robust package library, 4) it has to understand bibtex. I dont think typst has committed to the first, its not mature enough for 2 or 3, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to automate translation between bibtex and their funky format.

For anyone else who was wondering, it's major releases only, and so far it's been:

• The Luggage
• Twoflower
• Rincewind
• Weatherwax
• Vetinari

Not sure Havelock would look kindly at being left til 5th, but you can't please everyone.

Tenacity looks great, and I didn't even know about it! Thanks for the reminder, we should definitely be supporting the fork thats actually proper FOSS.

You're going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they're currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:

• Package manager: which are you used to?
• Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
• Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it's not "normie", and unless you really know what you're doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.

For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it. I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.

Yeah I remember that conspiracy theory. Iirc, the claim was basically that any company which had any relationship with any US institution must be a honeypot. It was pretty out there, and as far as I'm aware it was very much debunked.

I'm pretty sure that the Google libraries F-droid are things like the push notification service, which afaik almost anything with notifications uses, even signal.

I've never actually compiled from source, but AFAIK they are open source. Its been convenient to use for me, just make very sure you don't lose your password!

Darktable if you're ok with a steep learning curve, RawTherapee if you prefer an easier-to-use UI with a few less features.

Man, I tried to learn FreeCAD, but coming from the Inventor/Solidworks paradigm it was hard.

Yeah! I only discovered them a couple of weeks ago through this community and they're fantastic.

Reading the paper was more informative and less hype-y: it seems like a remarkably good material for heterogenous photocatalysis. It's much more selective (the hardest part about carbon reduction, which Cu is traditionally bad at) than existing catalysts, and appears to be a lot more efficient as well. The only thing is, it seems pretty slow.

No new material is ever scalable initially. You always have to develop new processes for manufacturing the material, which often have few similarities to the way it was made at research scale. However, Cu@carbon nitride seems like mass-producing it would be a relatively small step. So yeah, it's actually pretty exciting, although not necessarily for the reasons the article hyped.

Yeah the issue is that so many companies were at the intersection of two monopolies -- either one failing has catastrophic effects, and there's no backup plan.

Looks like it from the readme!

Yeah I can explicitly not recommend modern HP or Toshiba laptops for reliability reasons. I've had serious hardware and structural issues with both. Also, in general 2-in-1s will break at the hinge in less time than other laptops. Lenovo 2-in-1s specifically have known issues with the hinge which can shatter the screen. If you want durability, go for a more traditional form factor with no touchscreen.

Edit: oops thought you said 2-in-1

This is my exact situation! It's not just uncomfortably small, either -- it's flat out unusable. I think its a hiDPI issue, but from the forum posts it sounds like its been an issue for 5-6 years. I even tried changing the QT startup settings, but no luck.

I don't mean use the RSS feed to actually deliver, I just mean a blog-style announcement. Of course, to be security conscious you shouldn't follow any links in that announcement to download it, but still.

Just a comment -- for InDesign-type work, I find something like Inkscape (or Scribus) easier to work with than LaTeX. I usually only use LaTeX for things where the layout needs to be pretty but not customized. Its possible to use it for design, but not a good use of time.

If you're OK with using inkscape and GIMP, if the background color is different than the chicken, you could apply a color filter to simplify the image to "chicken" and "not chicken" (basically, reduce the number of total colors to 16 or less), then use inkscape Trace Bitmap in Colors mode.

Tracing a bitmap to an SVG is really only practical if it's a line drawing or if it has less than 16 (preferably less than 8) colors, because each color becomes a different vector object. Its really not intended for full on photos, unfortunately.

Check for a ~/.config/chromium folder and delete it. dnf doesn't seem to have an equivalent to apt purge chromium which would be the other thing to do (while the package is installed).

I've tried to use scribus, but the interface is pretty clunky and it doesnt react well to high-dpi screens in my experience.

Thanks for spreading the word!

From OpenSUSE there's also leap micro. Never used it, but maybe worth looking at.

If you don't like fedora it might still be worth trying one of the fedora atomics, depending on what you didn't like. For instance, I could never get used to dnf, but it's largely irrelevant on an atomic distro anyways.

I would love to see a true atomic Debian-based distro, but I think that's a long way from maturity.

Edit: opensuse aeon will also be released soon, but at least the comments on this post seem to think that there's some important things missing from Suse atomic.

I can answer questions 2 and (tentatively) 4!

When freezing samples, they are cooled rapidly to form vitreous (noncrystalline) ice. If the ice warms enough (and that temp is still well below 0°C), it can transition into a crystalline form. This makes the ice expand and become spiky, which can damage proteins and cells.

For differences in LN2 usage, not every dewar is created equal. Age, the degree of vacuum between the walls, and the distance between the inner and outer walls can substantially affect the thermal conductivity, and thus the boil-off. Differences in how they are capped (which by nature can't be vacuum-insulated) can also change their efficiency.