tricks, no treats

Stories are appearing that Elon worked with his close staff over the past weekend to determine what Twitter staff to lay off in the coming weeks. Estimates put it at around 50% of current staff levels (but not 75%!). Other stories are appearing that long-time Twitter users are heading for the exits because Elon now owns it, and they all fear that the current bad situation at Twitter (i.e. before Elon bought it) will only get worse.

I thought I’d stick around just to watch what happens, but I’m to the point where I’m ready to back up all my tweets and then delete my account. Life is too short to be spending precious moments on Twitter.

switching back to linux mint 21

Four days ago I switched from Linux Mint 21 to Ubuntu 22.10, the interim release of Ubuntu. I stated a number of reasons why I switched, the biggest being the updated kernel and critical tools. Yesterday I swapped the SSD with Linux Mint still on it back into my machine in place of the SSD that I’d installed Ubuntu on.

The primary reason I switched back was the lack of certain types of development support. For example I had to install everything necessary to support a full build-out of Python 3.11. There were other missing library and development support packages. When I had to install the Fuse file system library support to run some AppImage applications, that’s when I realized I’d made a mistake for my daily driver usage and that I needed to switch back to Linux Mint. Fortunately for me I’d not made any changes that I hadn’t already saved elsewhere, such that switching back was completely painless.

Now that I’ve had this experience I’ve come to realize that Linux Mint can be considered the more supportive developer distribution compared to Ubuntu. That is, I can do more development without having to hunt down and install various libraries to make it all work. For example I run several AppImage applications. Before they would even execute I had to install the libfuse2 library. I did check with my Ubuntu 22.04 Parallels virtual machine, and that support is there. But it was missing in Ubuntu 22.10. Installation is all of 60 seconds, but the fact it was missing makes me suspicious, especially because Ubuntu is pushing (hard) Snap packages over all others. Was support for AppImage deliberately dropped in 22.10? As they say, things that make you go “hmmm.”

Ubuntu 22.10 will appeal to fans of Ubuntu and fans of the latest Gnome, and they’ll install it and use it without a second thought. But if you’re a developer, especially an embedded/IoT developer, make sure nothing breaks if you decide to install Ubuntu 22.10 and make it your daily driver. You may be unpleasantly surprised like I was.