What is the best stick?

There is a difference between a cocktail stick, a quarterstaff, a stick used to lever up a trapdoor, a stick for a dog to chase, a stick for a small child to run around with, a stick to knock something stuck up a tree, a shitty stick, a liquorice stick, a twig and, I could carry on all day, a walking stick. This is by no means and exhaustive list of sticks.

How is the stick intended to be used? Obviously a cocktail stick versus a monster that came up from the trapdoor is no use at all, levered up with a sturdy hardwood stick by someone called Berk who has since left - stick and all, but maybe the monster likes liquorice sticks and would be ameliorated by being given some to chew on. On the other hand maybe a person could take a harder line and decide we do not negotiate with trapdoor monsters and use the quarterstaff - the success of which would mostly depend on our ability to use a quarterstaff.

It's also contingent on how the stick is maintained. It may need to be weatherproofed, it may wear down, it may form part of a den, or makeshift shelter, it could be disposable and need to be replaced.

But...

Substitute stick for stuff, and ignore all the stick specific examples: How stuff is intended to be used, how skillfully we use stuff, and how stuff will be maintained.

If we say a thing has a fitness for 'how stuff is intended to be used' - we'll call that 'a', how skillful we are at using stuff - we'll call that 'b', and the current condition of stuff - we'll call that 'c'. Each on a scale from 0-100%. Then how good stuff is, and I accept this is all highly subjective - and stuff is uncountable, is ((a/100)(b/100)(b/100)*100)%.

So a quarterstaff in perfect condition vs. trapdoor monster (100% - we'll assume it's a small monster who's not that fast) wielded by an amateur: a = 100 (a quarterstaff is good), b = 50 (not so great at using it, but could get lucky), c = 100 (it'll be stored in a cupboard). So the best stick rating is a nice and simple 50%. (Simplified a bit: (a*b*c)/10^4 = percentage).

Leaving aside fashion, and the subjective nature of such a whimsical formula, it applies to everything from a Ferrari in a traffic jam, Vim used to type this rather than typing '5000i arseburgers' as a command - to everything way beyond technology. This isn't an argument against nice things and for bad things - just an argument that maybe we're not encouraged to be objective about stuff.

Anyway, back to the laptop

So I've had a laptop for about a decade, an HP 2570p, and it's a good laptop but the screen resolution is limited so I bought a second hand laptop which is objectively better. The new laptop doesn't boot as fast (how technical do you want me to get?) but has much better screen. I can comfortably have three or four windows open without problems. Compile speed is like going from a 486DX2 to a Pentium (old processors from the early 1990s - the Pentium was a major leap forward in computing power available to home users).

I don't want Windows so I installed (as a dual boot) a Linux distribution. Linux made my world bigger and more interesting. I owe Linux a lot. When I was about 15 years old I sourced a copy of Borland C++ from a super grungey second hand computer store, in an obscure part of a light industrial estate, staffed by people who looked liked literal embodiments of D&D characters, and it was expensive. Nowhere near as expensive as the what the corporation it had been 'surplussed' from paid for it. It came with big heavy manuals.

A person could not just choose to learn something for profit or for fun. The gatekeepers were thse holding the keys to the software and, more importantly in some ways, the way things are done. A person wasn't just buying a piece of software, but a piece of software that was also a restriction on how it was used. Buying X often means doing it X way with X's software. While with open standards and open source software it is ultra-competitive because services are an abstraction from software. People still don't get that but it's fundamentally not an anti-profit thing. The internet, at its heart, is open standards.

So the laptop had to be Linux or similar because, where possible*, I think it's better. Or, at least, it's better for me**. Linux has played a big part in stimulating me.

Choosing a distro

A distro is internet baby talk for a distribution. Linux is not an operating system by itself. It's the bit at the core; for instance, 43.5% of UK mobile phones run Android - which uses the Linux kernel - the bits underneath everything like seeds to a forest, 87% of phones globally. And loads of other stuff. A Linux distribution is a like Windows or MacOS or Android. An operating system, or the front end to the use of a computer and its interaction with other things. A Linux distribution is just a particular way of doing Linux - which is great for choice. Also confusing.

There are distributions for beginners, distributions for specific tasks, and distributions for experts. For beginners I'd recommend Ubuntu. In the specific tasks there are security oriented Linux distributions, distributions for giving old computers new life, science based distributions, music distributions and others, generally maintained by those who benefit financially and/or enthusiasts. The 'expert' distributions are generally like not just baking a cake from scratch, but grinding the wheat, bothering hens, hustling the sugar and manually taking the temperature of the oven. The expert distros are rewarding experiences but not necessarily better in the end (especially when in a hurry).

I went down the route of installing an expert distro and then decided I am not an expert and don't have the time***. I opted for Manjaro with a particular way of doing the windows called a 'tiling windows manager'. Manjaro have a download option for i3 which as been my window manager of choice for some time. It's not for beginners, not because it's difficult, but because beginners may lack the confidence to learn. I've documented in previous blog posts how this site is made and the workflow.

The picture is of the desktop as I type this, YouTube on Making the Most of the Micro (a TV show from 1983), Zola running as basic webserver so I can see this page as displayed while I type it.

* It's not possible for good reasons, as well as bad. It may be company policy or standards requirements, or just a person is used to something else. Or it doesn't run a game. Or someone hasn't the time.

** I like to tinker. I know what I want to do and what I'm doing it with. I have been lucky, or nerdy enough, to have invested in the time learning.

*** I have gone down the route of running Gentoo and OpenBSD in the past. OpenBSD looks involved but isn't massively fiddly once one knows what one is doing. Some of the Linux distros required manually doing routine tasks. Which makes sense from a learning perspective, but not a 'I've done this 100 times before and what to get on with using the laptop' perspective. Gentoo and Arch are great, I have no problem with them, just not the right stick.

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