As someone who’s been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I’ve always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I’m not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.

Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.

Nope, it’s a terrible one. Everyone will be constantly looking for new jobs. And would do the bate minimum to not get fired, that’s the contract you’re signing, bare minimum pay for bare minimum work.

Regardless of what you do, it’s likely that you’ll need multiple times the amount of employees to get shit done, because one dedicated employee is worth several doing bare minimum, depending on the job some works simply won’t happen because no one gets paid enough to do them.

Besides that you’ll suffer brain drain, i.e. anyone good enough will leave you, and they won’t accept a raise to stay because if someone offered them double their salary and you tried to match it they would immediately see the bullshit you’d put them through and know that the only way to get a better pay again would be to get a new offer from someplace else.

Anyone bad enough that other companies don’t want would be stuck with you, but there’s a reason other companies don’t want them.

You wouldn’t be able to pull any new talent, you’d get stuck just getting people no one else wants because they’re the only ones willing to work for that low.

This will be almost impossible. The short answer is that those pictures might be 95% similar but their binary data might be 100% different.

Long answer:

Images are essentially a long list of pixels, each pixel is 3 numbers for Red, Green and Blue (and optionally Alpha if you’re dealing with a transparent image, but you’re talking pictures so I’ll ignore that). This is a simple but very stupid way to store the data of an image, because it’s very likely that the image will use the same color in multiple places, so you can instead list all of the colors a image uses, and then represent the pixels as the number in that list, this makes images occupy a LOT less space. Some formats add to that, because your eye can’t see the difference between two very close colors, they group all colors that are similar into one only color, making their list of colors used on the image WAY smaller, thus having the entire image be a LOT more compressed (but you might noticed we lost information in this step). Because of this it’s possible that one image choose color X in position Y, while the other choose Z in position W, the binaries are now completely different, but an image comparison tool can tell you that color X and Z are similar enough to be the same, and they account for a given percentage of the image depending on the amount minimum of the values Y and W. But outside of image software, nothing else knows that these two completely different binaries are the same. If you hadn’t loss data by compressing get images in the first place you could theoretically use data from different images to compress (but the results wouldn’t be great, since even uncompressed images won’t be as similar as you think), but images can be compressed a LOT more by losing unimportant data so the tradeoffs are not worth it, which is why JPEG is so ubiquitous nowadays.

All of that being said, a compression algorithm specifically designed for images could take advantage of this, but no general purpose compression can, and it’s unlikely someone went to the trouble of building a compression for this specific case, when each image is already compressed there’s little to be gained by writing something that takes colors from multiple images in consideration, needing to decide if an image is similar enough to be bundled in together with that group or not, etc. This is an interesting question, and I wouldn’t br surprised to know that Google has one such algorithm to store all images you snap together that it can already know will be sequential. But for home NAS I think it’s unlikely you’ll find something.

Besides all of this, storage is cheap, just buy an extra disk and move over some files there, that’s likely to be your best way forward anyways.

I didn’t understood your criticism, what are they unwilling to release? What are they claiming all of? Why would ownership rules cause an OOM?

Sharing stack memory is a bad practice in C as well btw.

I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?

Nope. My laptop for example doesn’t automatically use an output when plugged in, but that doesn’t bother me because I know other DEs would do that, and it’s my choice of having a minimal window manager that causes that.

And this goes into your next point, because I know that this comes from decisions I made, I’m okay with that. I also know I could probably fix it somehow, even if just by running a script in the background that checks if an output is plugged and tries to use it.

And for me that’s the big difference. As a general rule when things break or don’t work are not the fault of Linux as a general, but of a specific piece of the stack, and more often than not it’s because that piece was backwards engineered without any help from the manufacturers of the hardware it’s meant to be controlling, so I can be very tolerant of these errors since the bad guys here are the third-party who’s refusing to make their things work on Linux. But even things that don’t work as I want to, I can make them do so, and that’s a huge change in viewpoint.

In other words, on Windows I used to be of the thought of things you can do, and things you can’t, with time I noticed that in Linux this thought shifted, to the point that the only question I ever ask myself is: “HOW do I do this?”. This implies that there are no impossible things in Linux, which is obviously false, but I would argue that the correct way to think about this is “things that are impossible on Linux, for now”, and that’s a huge difference, because Linux is always evolving and getting better and better, things you thought are impossible now might be trivial in a few months or years whenever someone with the knowledge to fix it gets bothered with it.

First of all you’re missing the point.

Drivers are automatic during setup.

That still means third-party drivers, so it’s still not a Windows win but rather a “windows is so ubiquitous that Logitech (or whoever) was forced to release a driver for it”, which is what the comment you’re replying was talking about.

Secondly, bullshit. In my 20 years using Linux I have never, ever, plugged in a mouse that didn’t get immediately recognized and worked as expected. What mouse do you have? You said Logitech, which model? The only thing that I ever needed specialized software on a Logitech mouse was to configure extra buttons or to pair it to a different dongle (both stuffs that also need specialized software only provided by Logitech on Windows)

Those are the usual problems in Linux, they can be summed up by “Third party companies don’t support Linux”, and they are especially annoying because with time you learn that there’s no reason that thing shouldn’t work, other than because the company either purposefully figures out if you’re running Linux and crashes the program (e g. DRM, anti-cheat, etc) or because they created their own closed proprietary protocol and refuse to share the public API for it so it needs to be reverse engineered.

At the same time I think most people don’t think about how much prior knowledge you need to just be able to use Windows or Mac. And for someone without ANY prior knowledge all of them are the same.

Story time, my MiL is a zero when it gets to computer literacy, to the point that every week I had to solve something for her. Eventually I gave her a laptop with Linux in it to make it easier for me to do support, and to my surprise she had lots of problems the first months when setting things up and until learning the ropes, but afterwards there were almost no problems.

The thing is that people have a lot of Windows knowledge, so when they try Linux they expect it to be Windows and get frustrated when it’s not.

I’m fairly certain that SSH and whatever else you’re exposing has had vulnerabilities fixed since then, especially if modern distros refuse to use the ssh key you were using, this screams of “we found something so critical here we don’t want to touch it”. If your server exposes anything in a standard port, e.g. SSH on 22, you probably should do a fresh install (although I would definitely not know how to rebuild a system I built almost 20 years ago).

That being said, it’s amazing that an almost 20 year old system can work for almost 10 years without touching anything.

Any OS can break and need reinstalling if you screw stuff up, but the majority of them would have a hard time running constantly for almost a decade without so much as a side glance.

Came to say this, I remember when I first looked at VLC version and saw Rincewind (I think it was), and was like “this has to be a Discworld reference”

Realistically whatever problems you see in python will be there for any other language. Python is the most ubiquitously available thing after bash for a reason.

Also you mentioned provisioning scripts, is that Ansible? If so python is already there, if you mean really just bash scripts I can tell you that does not scale well. Also if you already have some scriptsz what language are they on? Why not write the function there?

Also you’re running syncthing on these machines, I don’t think python is larger than that (but I might be wrong).

Again even if that was the case the fact that you have a button you can click to go into offline mode to play completely negates that this is a form of DRM. How is it the “play anyways” button different from the “go into offline mode” one?

Why do you think backing up an installer is anything different from backing up a folder? What do you think an installer does that’s so special?

You claim I’m emotionally attached to Steam and claim you use GoG because it’s DRM free, and yet I show you GoG is not DRM free and that Steam has DRM-free games and your answer is that “but that doesn’t count because the folder is not inside an installer”.

It’s okay that you prefer GoG, but it’s not because of them being DRM free because they’re not. It might be because you prefer your hames backed up in installer format, or you might have developed an emotional bond over the DRM free claim. You’re the one making an argument from emotion, because you feel that different methods of backup are better or worse, and stick to GoG despite the reason you claimed being false.

Not sure if sarcasm, but in case it isn’t yes they have an offline mode so you can play games and still get achievements, cloud saves, etc while offline and then when you go back to being online it syncs those up.

Not sure why they needed an actual offline mode instead of just trying stuff and caching it for later if it fails (which I think it’s what they do now), but it’s there.

I agree that most of those are non-issue, which is why I specifically pointed at the EAC one.

It’s still nothing compared to Steam’s requirement of being online to at the very least install

This is a requirement everywhere, you need to be online to download the installer from GoG. And before you say you can backup the installer you can also backup the installed game on steam so they’re equivalent.

and first start of the game

Nope you don’t. This is game dependent, and many games don’t require it. I have several games that I backed up the folder and run them, some of which I’ve even copied to computers without steam to play in multiplayer lan mode with the games on Steam.

(so in 2 decades time when the Steam client doesn’t support any version of the OS supported by those games, they will be unplayable)

As long as Steam still supports Linux, and because of the strong backwards compatibility there (especially on wine) you will still be able to play them. If Windows breaks backwards compatibility with current GoG installers you’ll lose your GoG collection just as much.

and how due to Steam themselves having heavilly promoted amongst developers the tight integration of game features with Steam cloud, a dependency on Steam servers is very common even for Indie games, whilst almost all of the AAA stuff comes with their own additional (i.e. on top of Steam itself) sign-in to accounts on the maker’s own servers in order to play the game.

Here’s the thing, they don’t need to promote it, those features are good enough that developers want to integrate them. But lazy developers rely on them which is bad. Some game developers don’t though, it’s not Valve’s fault that a game doesn’t launch without steam, if I submit a game that requires GoG galaxy for offline play It would also not be on GoG’s hands, if it weren’t for the fact that they claim 100% DRM free.

Agree, I’m just explaining the reasoning behind it, that’s part of the risks of running a store. That being said even here in the EU you can’t get a full refund months after the purchase for a working product, which is what we’re talking about here so your example is not oranges to oranges.

GoG’s principle since the very beginning was “No DRM” and they never wavered on that.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they did, most of the claims there are petty but the fact that GoG allows games that use EAC anti-cheat for single player is damning evidence that they are not “DRM free” like they claim.

You can still launch the executable from the folder where it’s installed without using steam at all like you would do with DRM-dree games (assuming the game is DRM-free)

And you can also put steam in offline mode afterwards and keep using it, many times my internet went off and steam offered me to go to offline mode, so it doesn’t need to be prior to the PC disconnecting. So even if you were to consider this DRM it’s a DRM with a button to bypass it, which doesn’t sound like DRM at all.

But in fact going into offline mode is not even needed, for example on my Steam Deck when I wanted to play a game without people knowing I would just turn off the wireless in the configs since that was faster than putting it into offline mode and just play the game, doing exactly what you’re claiming is impossible.

Edit: Just to confirm I tried exactly that just now, installed a game, when it finished installing I unplugged the network cable and clicked play, steam said “Couldn’t sync cloud saves” I clicked in “Play anyways” and the game launched. No fuss, no needing to switch to offline mode, nothing of what you claim happened. How about you try it before asking others to do it?

Steam does have a record of when players actually got around to download the game and even when and for how long they ran it, so the refund clock should start when people actually tried the game or at least when they downloaded it. That refunds rules don’t actually follow logic but instead something else, probably means that such refunds don’t actually exist driven by genuine will for good customer experience but, more likely, because in some countries there is legislation for online purchases that forces refund windows linked to purchasing time.

You need to consider that Steam needs to pay the publishers at some point, if they followed that rule that you suggested they would need to sometimes wait years to pay a publisher, which makes it bad for publishers. I believe that 14 days is way too short, and they could easily do 30 days, but at some point they need to send that money to the publisher and at that point refunds are dangerous things. For example, imagine they allowed this and one company released a game which was very cheap with lots of promises, so lots of people buy it, eventually they abandon development so lots of people refund it, and no new sales will come for it, so any refund is a loss for Valve. Also credit cards also have some similar rules and problems, what if the card you bought the game is no longer valid?. This is why Valve needs some rules on time limit to protect themselves from those situations.

All of that being said, the time should be longer, and if it’s an active game that will give them more sells in the future that they can take the money from they should (and usually do) allow refunds over that time limit. It’s strange that yours was denied, I’ve refunded games over a month after purchasing for similar reasons, they did let me know of the policy but proceeded with the refund regardless.