Wasted entire evening trying to get the new version of Flik Pay working unsuccessfully. Maybe it's time to go back to analog ways.

Perhaps Android modding is really dead now. Just another walled garden.

Replaced the old Crucial MX300 750GB SSD with Samsung 870 EVO 4TB SSD on my "modern" system (it's over 11 years old now) and installed Linux Mint as my daily driver. I switched to Linux a year ago and chose Kubuntu after some testing around back then, I liked KDE more than GNOME.

But now that Win10 support is getting dropped I need to replace it with something on my mothers laptop. It does support Win11 but I ain't touching that, I'm done with modern Windows as daily driver. I just don't trust Win11 or Microsoft in general anymore, so Linux it is.

While I've gotten fairly comfortable with Linux during the past year I'm still pretty new to it, so I decided to use the same distro on my own system and on my mothers laptop to make things easier for me if/when I need to act as phone support. I could have picked Kubuntu again but I had some issues with it and also the current long support release of Linux Mint is good for two years more than Kubuntu, so I went with Mint.

So far so good. Honestly I'm positively surprised all in all, my only gripes with it are just visual. Still not the biggest fan of how it looks, the start menu isn't entirely to my liking and the system settings pages make me feel like I'm using android on my desktop which isn't great but I can live with such minor issues.

Especially since everything else seems to work just fine. Even found a good text editor called Geany that lets you turn off remembering cursor position after closing files. That annoyed me to no end on Kubuntu with Kate, text files opened constantly all over the place. Doesn't seem like there's a text editor that is on par with Notepad++ unfortunately. Oh well, good enough.

Grub boot menu is also nice, letting me boot to Win7 from there. This stupid cheapo motherboard doesn't have shortcut key for boot override, you need to go through BIOS for that.

I can't figure out why Visual Studio Code's syntax highlighting in JavaScript is broken on my home PC. At work, it normally highlights everything, fresh install. Pretty sure it worked at home when I messed with XUL version of uBlock Origin months ago, now it only highlights common reserved words and strings, doesn't highlight variable names. The amount of settings is insane.

I've been messing with web app that I deal with at work, I thought it would be cool to be able to use USB card reader from the web browser. The reader makes virtual COM port (serial over USB), so at least it's possible with Chromium based browsers that have Web Serial API. As the exercise for myself, I got the basics to work, still need to handle some aspect of the GUI if reader is unplugged. If I got it where I want, I'll ask if they'd be interested in merging the feature.

Why is programming so hard? Takes me good while to get couple of lines of code right. Even the easiest part, code for reading the hex string from the reader and extracting card number from it looked ugly at first.

I'm not employed as programmer there, but if that place isn't disorganized as hell with its management living in some fantasy land... Not only there are always bugs when it comes to basics, but they're working on something entirely new not related to the main "bread and butter" of the company while features that customers have been asking for years still haven't been implemented. Couple of years back, the big longtime client went somewhere else. They didn't even flinch.

I've encountered bunch of bugs working there that I'd fix myself if I had access to code repository. And it wouldn't take months!

UCyborg wrote on 2025-07-19, 06:06:

Why is programming so hard? Takes me good while to get couple of lines of code right. Even the easiest part, code for reading the hex string from the reader and extracting card number from it looked ugly at first.

when you do programming irregularly, and swap development tools and languages often, there is a kind of 'remembering how to' barrier that makes things difficult. if you stay with one toolset for a long time, and use daily, it starts to become easy. you build an 'experience library' of know-how in terms of the task and implementing the steps, but it slowly slips away if not maintained.

One thing i noticed - lots of devs and others now use LLMs for code - if its used for handling very specific tasks i'm sometimes amazed by how good it is - but then it is really the same as you reading hundreds of manuals and resources and then all relevant forum posts over the last 30 years, remembering everything that seems important and then synthesising a probable solution from all of that without typing..! For tackling things lots of people have done before its impressive.

If used to generate many disparate solutions and then gluing them together though, you end up with a repetitive, messy and inefficient application often with subtle bugs

anyway, you might find a use for it in narrow tasks

While there are differences with tools / languages, you still have to figure out the logic to make it work. It's not something I could do every day I think. And it takes so much code before anything interesting happens!

I fixed Visual Studio Code by deleting %AppData%\Code folder.

gerry wrote on 2025-07-21, 13:09:

when you do programming irregularly, and swap development tools and languages often, there is a kind of 'remembering how to' barrier that makes things difficult. if you stay with one toolset for a long time, and use daily, it starts to become easy. you build an 'experience library' of know-how in terms of the task and implementing the steps, but it slowly slips away if not maintained.

It still seems like you still spend more time debugging than actually writing code, even if you do it every day.

Now I'm being reminded of work again. I don't do any programming, but I make enough FPGA boards to get to know the firmware department well.

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

GigAHerZ wrote on Yesterday, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

LoStSOul wrote on Yesterday, 22:05:

GigAHerZ wrote on Yesterday, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

Thanks.

I know there's a tool for tl866. That's why i mentioned that i still do prefer that XGPro software.
What's the graphics setup in vmware for your setup? I have not seen any non-passthrough VM setup where the latency between mouse movement and response on display is so low that i can forget i'm in the vm.
I've read from quite many places that people recommend OnlyOffice. I currently have the preinstalled LibreOffice. I would be fine with that, too. But MS Office's integration with OneDrive syncing is something that is hard to beat. (Closest experience is actually Microsoft's own web-based office applications!)

I'm waiting for full official Debian 13 release and I may then try to jump over. 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on Yesterday, 22:11:

Thanks. […]
Show full quote

LoStSOul wrote on Yesterday, 22:05:

GigAHerZ wrote on Yesterday, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

Thanks.

I know there's a tool for tl866. That's why i mentioned that i still do prefer that XGPro software.
What's the graphics setup in vmware for your setup? I have not seen any non-passthrough VM setup where the latency between mouse movement and response on display is so low that i can forget i'm in the vm.
I've read from quite many places that people recommend OnlyOffice. I currently have the preinstalled LibreOffice. I would be fine with that, too. But MS Office's integration with OneDrive syncing is something that is hard to beat. (Closest experience is actually Microsoft's own web-based office applications!)

I'm waiting for full official Debian 13 release and I may then try to jump over. 😀

I have installed vmware tools on guest, enabled 3d hardware aceleration, enable virtualization engine VT-x or AMD-V
On vmware->edit->preferences-> memory, i choose "fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM"