if anybody knows where I can find more tech tutorials/courses/etc. with built-in challenges I would love to hear about it! this is a dramatically better way for me to learn and I didn’t realize it was a possibility until now

a problem that I often run into when learning a new Tech Thing is figuring out how to apply the knowledge that I’m learning about, without asking myself to do something that’s too hard with my current knowledge. but this Haskell MOOC does all the work for me and that’s amazing

specifically it comes with a git repo that I can clone. for each chapter there’s a premade file full of stub code and comments that describe what the code should do. and I just edit the stub code in order to make it work. then there’s another file that I can run to unit-test those challenges. that way I instantly know if I did each challenge right

this is genuinely a lot of fun to do and it helps reassure me that I am actually absorbing the information that I’m reading

I really wish that there were more courses(?) like this for learning tech stuff. even just something at the end of each chapter like “here are some optional challenges that you might want to try at this point” would go a long way

@lycanmatriarch omg thank you - this is so validating to hear. I feel like Fedi is so incredibly Linux-oriented that for the most part they just can’t understand how anyone could have problems with Linux - and if they do have problems then they don’t understand how those problems could be difficult to solve - and it’s so frustrating

aaa now the Arch laptop fucked up my cloud storage too and I don’t even know why. I literally haven’t touched this stupid laptop in like 6 months and suddenly everything is broken

giving me retractable claws is gender affirming care

@fargate I’ve been watching Gopher’s Fallout: London series and really enjoying it. I had no idea Fallout: London was so good! like it genuinely seems so much drastically better than Fallout 4 so far - it’s crazy that it was fan-made. also Gopher is so perfect for this game because of how British he is lol

this was another great recommendation - thank you 💙

I think the reason why I like programming and software tinkering but not OS tinkering is because with the former two I get to decide when I do the tinkering

but if I start tinkering with my OS then it decides when I do the tinkering. it can just suddenly be like “hahaha I broke myself! time to learn about partition resizing!”

which is not great when I leave in a few days and need a functioning laptop and do not have the energy or patience for Linuxing

@buncube also omg I had no idea that Flathub existed, and I wish that Arch had done something to proactively tell me that it did - or maybe even had it preinstalled

@buncube the main problem that I’m having with Arch is pacman. it’s a pain to look up the specific command-line flags that I have to use to do anything. if I wait too long between updates then I get a pretty arcane error message about GPG keys and I have to go to someone for help so they can find the weird pacman command that fixes it. if I get one letter wrong then I can break stuff. also there’s some blog somewhere and I can never remember where it is, but I have to read it every time I update things or stuff might get silently broken (which happened to me in the past). idk it just sucks for me to use - there are so many secret footguns that can bork things if I don’t memorize a bunch of weird rules (and Arch never bothered to tell me about the footguns or the rules - my friends had to let me know)

also installing Arch in the first place is very technical and very error-prone, even with the install script. I don’t know if a beginner could manage it (I was able to on a virtual machine after a fair bit of trial-and-error, but even then it took several hours)

I’ve heard that Linux Mint is a distro that “just works”, though I’ve never tried it. so assuming that’s the case it sounds a lot better than my experience with Arch

@tempest yeah I honestly thought that 32 GB for my / would be plenty of space but it all filled up so fast T_T I’m still going to have to resize it at some point probably but I have time to do that now thanks to you 💙

if you want to try Linux don’t use Arch it’s a trap. I’ve heard Linux Mint is good instead

also make one big partition don’t have a separate /home partition

@codingcoyote thank you! I just installed gparted and I’m trying to figure it out now. I appreciate the suggestion

ugghhh I’m going to have to learn how to resize a partition on Linux. this is definitely going to suck and there’s a nonzero chance I’m going to bork my laptop