Couldn’t you just add up the germs found in successive swabs to the total and increase the total count with each test?

(I assume you have certain testing and evaluation standards you’re bound to, so that’s a “No”, but I like the idea of the results getting worse rather than better)

What would newer equipment do differently to make it less prone to hygiene issues?

What, can’t you just… idk, check better to see how clean it actually is? That can’t be right, you probably got your samples contaminated. Were those really from that machine? Maybe you got them mixed up. Well you’re really itching to find contaminants, aren’t you? Of course you’ll find something if you look hard enough…

I don’t know how your business works, so I’m trying to project the managers I know onto it - am I so far off that I look like a manager?

As a Data Analyst / Business Analyst, let me assure you: Not all of us are stupid (some are, for sure), but there’s only so much you can do about stupid managers. If they decide that a certain measure is key, it can be really hard to explain why it isn’t that important or where a certain distortion comes from. To compound this, some managers genuinely don’t understand their business processes and are unwilling to have it explained to them. They’ll make assumptions about how things work, then base their demands on those.

For an entirely made up example, consider a department manager looking to monitor a software development team’s workload. That workload, to them, consists of bug tickets and feature implementations. Not counted here are feature requests because, apparently, fielding them and discussing their feasibility isn’t actual development work. That’s management work, which is the Product Manager’s job… Except the Product Manager can’t unilaterally decide whether something is feasible without consulting those actually familiar with the code, taking up the developer’s time. On the other hand, since it’s an internally developed tool for other units, they can’t just say No to every request or else they risk people calling their team’s funding into question.

Now, you have the choice between frustrating yourself and annoying the manager by trying to explain all that, or gritting your teeth and just giving them the stupid chart on bugs closed and feature implementations completed over time. Guess which one is healthier for your employment prospects?

And we haven’t even started talking about the variance in effort of bug fixes or about non-feature work for code stability or QA. Eventually, we’ll reach the point where the measure becomes a target and you have to start reframing bug fixes as features and splitting features up into smaller features just to make the figures look nicer.

What I’m getting at is this: Sometimes, the analysts aren’t to blame, but the managers making decisions.

That’s not to say there aren’t absolutely shitty business analysts out there that will gladly figure out ways to polish the figures and then cash the check for making the figures look better.

It’s a day with a Y in it, so obviously I’m over it
I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired
I tried not to worry, and I tried being sorry
For being born in the wrong place at the wrong time

Cause I’ve been
Messed up, stressed out, talking to myself again
Locked up, left out, terrified of everything
Wound up, found out, waiting round for something to give

Frank Turner - Haven’t Been Doing So Well

The song is about anxiety, but the Venn Diagram between these communities is just about a circle anyways as far as I can tell.

Don’t you ever wake up and suspect
That you were simply never cut out to be
The kind of person they expect
The person you intended to be
And I keep it all in with my idiot grin
And I’m doing my best, but there’s very little left
So cut me some slack if I crawl back into my shell
I haven’t been doing so well

Listening to Deathcore as my focus music

So I’m allowed to like moist pineapple pizza?

Such a clumsy, pathetic imitation too. He’s not even standing upright and firm. The fuck is his mouth doing? The whole point of the gesture is to signal strength and control, not twitch about like a kid yeeting a frisbee.

The difference is that a frisbee can’t do nearly as much damage as a corpo-fash in a position of power, and that I’d never condone beating up a kid for throwing a frisbee.

In imperative style, everything is an instruction (to suffer)

Bikes are faster than walking

…but put me at a higher risk of hurting myself because I’m bloody clumsy (impaired balance and coordination). Joke aside, good point.

As for people with mobility issues, where i live they have a dedicated branch of the public transit for them. On train you can go with wheelchair and if you need extra help in the city they can send you someone with minibuss to help you. Same if youre not in a wheelchair but limited because of your age.

That is awesome!

Of course these arent cheap to solve

In the short term, no, it’s probably an expensive project. But in the long term, even aside from environmental impact, I think it would save money.

Just not for the car manufacturers… Those poor, poor billionaires will need to find a different income I guess.

I take a 10-minute detour on the way home from the light rail station, fit one or two or sometimes even three days worth of groceries in my backpack, maybe make another trip of about 25 minutes + time in store (which you’d have anyway) for some more after dinner. Some extra walking doesn’t hurt my pudge, and I’d rather do more walking now than be unable to later.

Oh, they’re putting up road barriers? No? Are they taking away cars? Also no? Do the new shops create so much traffic that it’s just not feasible to leave? Also no?

Then how the hell are they restricting anything?

conspiracy

Oh right. I forgot what type of people we’re dealing with.

My condolences, best wishes and hopefully justified congratulations!

That doesn’t work if the grocery store is too far to walk or for larger grocery hauls (which often go hand in hand - the further away, the fewer trips you’ll want to make). I’ve been told that some places just genuinely don’t have a grocer within 20min walking distance, because some construction planning apparently prefers huge zones of housing without any kind of commercial usage allowed - no baker, no grocer, no hairstylist, no doctor - making it effectively impossible to have any of those amenities in range.

Obviously, that is a planning issue and ought to be fixed. You’ll have to contend with NIMBYs, but you’d have to do that with any changes anyway. Alternatively or additionally, you could install a usable network of bus lines and trams (though they shouldn’t be run for profit, so it’ll be a tough sell too).

There is also the issue of accessibility, but I think that would be trivial to solve as a side effect: If the streets are less crowded with cars, it’s easier to offer special accommodation for people with limited mobility or anxiety issues.

You said something about security patching, testing and production. I thought I’d let you know that those three words don’t really go together.

“Production” implies a professional environment, where “testing” usually applies to the newly added features (and if you’re lucky, to past features or even regression tests against bugs) but to my knowledge never to security. Security patching does happen, but I’ve never seen it tested before applying it in professional environments. And finally, the one instance I know where security patches were tested before applying them was in a college course, that is: not a professional, productive context.

Should you?

Yes, please. I’m running out of stories to go with my popcorn. All I’ve got are the type that would go with a tub of comfort ice cream (or a strong drink, if that’s your poison).

Honestly, “I found this useful/interesting/amusing/worth leaving a positive comment avout” is the only award I need. Thanks for the words of appreciation ❤️

Approximation is an important tool for compressing information into useable forms. All labels are limited approximations too. Such compression is inevitably lossy, but that is a sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The important question is what level of compression is acceptable for a given context. If I describe the location of a chess piece on the board, I don’t need to specify how far off-center on its square a given piece is, so a 0-7 offset along each of the two axes is enough for game purposes.

When it comes to gender, I think we all agree that [0, 1] is insufficient, but how do we determine what is sufficient? Do we argue that a 2-bit vector (masc, fem) is enough to describe {neither, fem, masc, both} for rough rounding, or do we need more detailed values along those axes, or perhaps a third axis too (or more)?

There are n types of people in this world: Those who don’t understand numeral systems, those who understand base x systems for x ∈ [2, n] and those who get pedantic about this meta-joke.

because you don’t like a word

I have no issue with the word, but with the spiteful mentality of “the more people suggest I change it, the less I want to”.

Yeah, and if you click enough links on Wikipedia you always wind up at logic, math, or philosophy. At some point, you are going to have to read new words to learn new things. And it will get increasingly technical as you go deeper.

Provided you’re willing to dig deep, yes, but Wikipedia usually offers a summary of the term at the top. In the event, I found Wikipedia’s explanation of cloud native much more useful than the link to the ublue page about it, or the CNCF’s definition.

Scaring folks away to seek out another distro where they will almost certainly have to learn more to get started is hurting your stated cause.

I don’t have an accurate sense of how much you’d have to learn about bazzite, so I’ll have trust you on this when it comes to the usage. I personally didn’t have difficulties with other distros, but I’m also not entirely new to the OS world, so my experience may be skewed.

My proximate issue is the pitch, the entry point, the first impression. Evidently, there are people who come across that term and worry that it may mean what “cloud” in many other contexts means: “Your data is somewhere else you have no control over.” And how would they know they’re wrong? If they click on the link, they’re faced with a stack of technical terms they might not understand. Even if they concluded that nothing explicitly says their system will be running in the cloud, how could they trust that conclusion built on unknowns?That insecurity creates an entry barrier for those looking at the website, the impact of which we can’t measure, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s negligible.

The underlying issue, however, is the philosophy behind doubling down on that. If you’re faced with evidence of misunderstandings, people pointing out that barrier, and make a point of not just ignoring it but explicitly saying “Now I want to keep that barrier even more”, that speaks to a mindset that I personally am strongly opposed to. Handing people guides and saying “here, climb over that barrier on your own” doesn’t fully mitigate that.

Hence, in absence of personal experience on the usage, I’ll argue from a position of principle. It’s not a mindset I want to endorse, and so I attempt to steer people away from what I perceived as a higher barrier of entry.

The Bazzite homepage also makes numerous references to it being “installable on all your favorite devices” so it becomes quickly apparent to most folks that it isn’t hosted “in the cloud”.

Thin clients connected to some cloud-hosted VM are also installable on many devices. Microsoft 365 is available as apps, but still runs in the cloud (but it doesn’t even pitch that, it just says “all in one place” - the mention of cloud is further down the page, after some other feature pitches). How would I know “native” doesn’t mean “lives in the cloud”? It wouldn’t be the first time marketing fudges terms.

And again, I advise against making assumptions about what becomes apparent to most folks. Most folks aren’t confident in their technical understanding and may err on the side of caution. I’ve tried guiding people through the simplest things, and if there was one detail they weren’t sure they understood, the immediate response was to abort the process for fear of breaking something. A message box pops up and they panic “Aaah what’s happening, what does that mean” because they don’t trust their understanding. I’ve watched people click on some explanation, get confused at some term and resort to fleeing the page back to things they know better…

I get that you don’t like the term cloud native image

I have no issue with the term. Technical terms are useful in their respective technical contexts, where people know what they’re a shorthand for. If I talk to a data analyst, I’ll use the term DFM. If I talk to a database engineer, I might use the term denormalisation. But if I talk to a sales manager and use either of those, they’ll stare at me blankly. And that’s what I dislike: Using the term in a context where I feel it’s out of place and is known to cause confusion.

really a very small piece of a very user friendly pie

…but may well be the first piece they taste.

But like I said, my issue isn’t with the piece of pie, but the baking practice: “The more people tell me they don’t like raisins, the more I want to add raisins to spite them.” Their pie may otherwise be delicious, but I still wouldn’t recommend that baker.

To put a line under all this, I might give Bazzite a try myself, see how I get along with it, but that won’t change the fact that I find such a spiteful mentality unfit for recommendation.

I believe in the value of user-friendly presentation, not just systems, because the presentation matters to many users. I also believe that the Linux community at large should present itself more helpful and user-friendly, and comments like the one that sparked the thread don’t help that image.

I want to see the Linux ecosystem grow, and I believe that requires a willingness to cater to the least technical users as well. Yes, some amount of learning will be inevitable, but the first contact at least should welcome users as simply and comfortably as possible.

And as a side effect, being more willing to explain and help each other will also help the rest of us. Spite and elitism don’t help anyone.

You mean the link that aays

Universal Blue rests on the idea of bringing cloud native patterns to the operating system. We leverage standard cloud tools like the OCI standard images, Docker/Podman, and GitHub to build our images.

and assumes those terms already mean something to you? Oh wait, cloud native is a link again let’s see…

CNCF is the open source, vendor-neutral hub of cloud native computing, hosting projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus to make cloud native universal and sustainable.

Great! Two more technical terms! Oh, there’s another text further down the page.

As part of the Linux Foundation, we provide support, oversight and direction for fast-growing, cloud native projects, including Kubernetes, Envoy, and Prometheus.

Nope, still no explanation, but we’ve got another link, this time to an actual definition:

Cloud native practices empower organizations to develop, build, and deploy workloads in computing environments (public, private, hybrid cloud) to meet their organizational needs at scale in a programmatic and repeatable manner. It is characterized by loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable.

Cloud native technologies and architectures typically consist of some combination of containers, service meshes, multi-tenancy, microservices, immutable infrastructure, serverless, and declarative APIs — this list is non-exhaustive.

Aaaand it’s another wall of technical terms.

What is “easy to understand” about this, unless you’re already familiar enough with that specific technical field that it really isn’t an issue in the first place? A definition directed at experts is no explanation, and hitting a reader with a wall of terms they don’t even know how to classify, let alone understand, isn’t very accessible.

And on that note, you said you couldn’t find a definition of Atomic on Fedora’s site… So I clicked just one link from your posted link there and found this.

Sorry, I didn’t think I’d have to “Get started” on a particular distro to find a note on what the whole “atomic” thing they advertise is about. Wouldn’t have killed them to put that paragraph on the previous page already, just a small note at the top, to explain the selling point they’re using.

Linux is going to have a LOT of terms a new user will have to learn. The idea of a cloud native image may cause a misconception, but no more so than any of the other myriad terms a new user will have to learn.

That’s an issue I’ve complained about before: The entry barrier is too high still. People shouldn’t have to learn a lot of new terms, if at all possible. In that vein, it’s better to start out with distros that require less learning, and if the interest grips you, start learning and exploring from there.

But if you have to learn terms, it should be ordered from most fundamental and universal to most specific, and I’d put “cloud native” in the back half of that spectrum. You’ll need to know what a file system is, for instance, may need to learn the term distro / distribution and many more, but for the immediate operation of a system, you don’t need to know what OCI, Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, Prometheus, deploying, workloads or “loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable” mean.

So I genuinely do recommend starting out with something less laden with technical terms, and working your way up from there. I started out with Ubuntu, now I’m using Nobara and plan to use my old spare drive to try some other flavours like Silverblue. It’s not that I don’t think the learning isn’t worth it, it’s just that it shouldn’t be frontloaded.

I read your posted argument from earlier, and I want to believe you when you argue your goal is to push for Linux to be more accessible. But the reality of your arguments seem to tell a different story. You seem more interested in dying on a pointless hills while dissuading interested converts from trying what is one of the most stable and user friendly distros I’ve ever tried.

My gripe with Bazzite isn’t whether it’s user friendly, but whether its maintainers are. The founder made a point of telling people “the more I see this whining the more I want to keep it on the website”, because it’s an accurate definition, no matter how useless. I like reasonable discussion, I can accept personal disagreement, but what I’m seeing here is a user providing a prime example of the confusion the word causes and the founder replying to the effect of “now I want to use it even more”.

That’s the exact opposite of accessibility. That’s someone saying “By the way, this is a barrier” and getting the reply “Yes, and people complaining about it makes me want to keep it.” It’s not even “Sorry, this can’t be helped” so much as “I want this barrier to be there” for no good reason.

So that is a hill I will fight on, not because of the specific term but because of the culture behind it that plagues the tech sphere at large. We’re building walls of technical understanding requirements instead of bridges of explanations. Some walls are reasonable, some necessary, some harmless. Some gaps are too wide for a single bridge to cross, so you’ll need to take a detour over other concepts. But building walls out of spite, along with (not represented here, but also common) scoffing at those looking to build bridges or telling people looking for entry “just scale the wall”, are communication culture issues that serve to isolate rather than integrate.

How would you recommend anyone measure this?

Not at all, that’s my point. We can’t measure absence.

So far the answer has been things like nvidia drivers and “anti-cheat doesn’t work”, which are things out of our control.

For the cases you get an explicit reason, yes. Again, we can’t measure or evaluate data that isn’t there. We can’t know how many potential users just weren’t convinced by the pitch.

If you don’t understand what something is, it may be that you are not the target audience!

So the target audience for Bazzite are people familiar with cloud-computing based development practices? Otherwise, they wouldn’t make it past the first five words of the pitch “Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops”.

Also, that’s a great way to build walls, but I’d prefer we build bridges and help people understand instead.

Laypeople don’t install operating systems.

Laypeople with respect to OS development or cloud development may well do so. Many Linux users - particularly the share of Windows Gaming converts - have no expertise with “standard cloud tools”, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t be an issue for using Linux.

If it is an issue for using Bazzite, specifically, that would again lead back to the point: Are Gamers in general the target audience, or just a specific subset?

Less technical users don’t care and go download the ISO, they don’t need to care about any of this.

How do you know? Here, we circle back to measuring absence. If less technical users read “cloud” and close the tab, there’s no way of detecting that.

The conventional marketing wisdom is to deliver strong selling points in your pitch. In the absence of statistical ways to test it, I would approach the question from the perspective of the “customer”, assuming that would be gamers: They want gaming, they want stability, they want to not worry about breaking their system. Bazzite can deliver on that, so why not put those points in the pitch instead?

Now, I understand that what you’re doing right now works well enough for you. What I don’t get is the strong reaction to an apparently frequent suggestion to improve a detail. The whole thread started with an unprovoked “the more I see this whining the more I want to keep it on the website.” Instead of eventually reconsidering or just ignoring the complaint, quarterlife felt the need to be explicitly spiteful.