This is a great summary. Thanks!

It looks like you are running XFCE instead of GNOME (the normal Ubuntu desktop). I’m not sure how that happened… but you an always just install another desktop.

For instance, you can try to make sure you have the ubuntu-desktop or ubuntu-desktop-minimal metapackage installed:

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-minimal

After that, the login manager should allow you to select the Ubuntu session rather than the XFCE one.

Still using mutt after two decades (with isync for fetching).

Yes, based on the diagrams on their blog, it looks like this only impacts Snaps.

From the Discourse Blog:

The Linux desktop provides XDG Desktop Portals as a standardised way for applications to access resources that are outside of the sandbox. Applications that have been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals will continue to use them. Prompting is not intended to replace XDG Desktop Portals but to complement them by providing the desktop an alternative way to ask the user for permission. Either when an application has not been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals, or when it makes access requests not covered by XDG Desktop Portals.

Since prompting works at the syscall level, it does not require an application’s awareness or cooperation to work and extends the set of applications that can be run inside of a sandbox, allowing for a safer desktop. It is designed to enable desktop applications to take full advantage of snap packaging that might otherwise require classic confinement.

So this looks like it complements and not replaces the XDG Desktop Portals, especially for applications that have not implemented the Portals. It allows you to still run those applications in confinement while providing some more granular access controls.

I think you meant Pop!_OS (is developed by System76). TuxedoOS is developed by Tuxedo Computers, which is a European Linux focused hardware company.

That said, the point stands… there are hardware companies making Linux supported devices.

+1 For xournal++. That is what I usually use for annotating slides and drawing with my wacom tablet.

I agree that the amount of work for many students can get quite out of hand and to be honest when I first started teaching, I was pretty guilty of having very work intensive courses.

That said, over the years, I’ve worked to streamline my courses to only have what I believe to be absolutely critical to learning and have added a lot of scaffolding and automated tests (for immediate results). In general, I try to have no busy work and make sure everything assignment is meaningful (as much as it can be anyway).

Additionally, because I understand that sometimes life happens, I have built-in facilities for automate extensions for assignments and even have a system for dropping certain homeworks.

This not to say that there isn’t work in my classes… it’s just that the work is intended to be relevant and reasonable, which most students seem to agree with these days.

I think students should be expected to work less over a longer period of time.

I think this would be a great idea. Or rather, I think it would be great to allow students to learn at different rates… some may want to go faster, some may want or need to go slower.

I think the modern course-based education system is often too rigid and not flexible enough to adequately accommodate the needs of students with different experience levels, resources, or constraints. Something like a Montessori model would be a lot better IMHO.

First off, 10 is an integer square root. Of 100.

Right, what I was trying to say is that 10 itself is not a perfect square. You cannot take the square root of 10 and get an integer (ie. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, etc.).

I was told by multiple English teachers (including the head of the department) that I was a math student and should never attempt to write because I saw through the regurgitation assignments, didn’t agree with teacher assessments of what Dickens “was trying to do” and had zero interest in confirming their biases.

I think that is unfortunate and probably inappropriate. I try to avoid classifying students as particular types and generally try to encourage them whenever possible to pursue whatever their interests are (even if I disagree or don’t have the same interest myself).

College coursework on the whole is a waste of time reinventing wheels. I don’t need to spend a couple of weeks working up to “Hello, world!” in C and as such left CS as a major my first quarter at uni.

There is a reason for reinventing wheels; it is to understand why they are round and why they are so effective. To build the future, it helps to understand the past.

That said, perhaps the course was too slow for you, which is understandable… I frequently hear that about various classes (including ones I’ve taught).

But teachers do this shit every day, year after year, and we blindly say they’re doing important work even as they discourage people from finding their path and voice, because god forbid a 16-year-old challenges someone in their 50s.

Again, I think you’ve had an unfortunate experience and I think it’s a good thing to challenge your teachers. I certainly did when I was a student and I appreciate it now when students do that with me. I recognize that I am not perfect nor do I know everything. I make mistakes and can be wrong.

I wish you had a more supportive environment in secondary school and I have a better understanding of your perspective. Thanks for the dialogue.

Sure, some people acquire the capability through repetition. But all that matters in the end is if you are capable or not.

I guess the question is how do you develop that capability if you are cheating or using a tool to do things for you? If I use GrubHub to order food or pay someone else to cook for me, does it make sense to say I can cook? After all, I am capable of acquiring cooked food even though I didn’t actually do any of the work nor do I understand how to well, actually make food.

The how is relevant if you are trying to actually learn and develop skills, rather than simply getting something done.

No, the point is to get an irrelevant piece of paper that in the end doesn’t actually indicate a persons capabilities.

Perhaps the piece of paper doesn’t actually indicate a person’s capabilities in part because enough students cheat to the point where getting a degree is meaningless. I do not object to that assessment.

Look, I’m not arguing that schooling is perfect. It’s not. Far from it. All I am saying is that if your goal is to actually learn and grow in skill, development, and understanding, then there is no shortcut. You have to do the work.

Sure. If you do enough basic math, you start to see things like how 2/8 can be simplified to 1/4 or you recognize that 10 is not a perfect square root or how you could reorder some operations to make things easier (sorry, examples from my kids). Little things like that where you don’t even think about it… it becomes second nature to you and that makes you a lot faster because you are not worrying about those basic ideas or mechanics. Instead, you can think about more complicated things such as which formulas to apply or the process to compute something.

As another example, since I teach computer science, a lot of novice students struggle with basic programming language syntax… How exactly do you declare a variable? What order do things go? How does a for loop work? Do you need a semicolon or parentheses, etc. If you do enough programming, however, these things become second nature and you stop thinking about it. You just seemily, intuitively, know these things and do them naturally without thinking, even though when you first started, it was really complicated and daunting and you probably spent a lot of time constructing a single line of code.

Once you develop a foundation however, you don’t need to worry about these low-level things. Instead you worry about high-level issues such as how to organize larger pieces of code into functions or how to I utilize different paradigums, etc.

This is why a basketball player, for instance, will shoot thousands of shots in practice or why a piano player will play a piece over and over for many hours. It’s so they don’t have to think about the low-level mechanics. It becomes muscle memory and it’s just natural to them.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource.

I generally agree. That’s why I’m no longer banning AI in my courses. I’m allowing students to use AI to explain concepts, help debug, or as a reference. As a resource or learning aid, it’s fine or possibly even great for students.

However, I am not allowing students to generate solutions, because that is harmful and doesn’t help with learning. They still need to do the work and go through the process, AI assisted or not.

This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill.

I disagree with your specific example here. You should learn to do math in your head because it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations. Without a foundational understanding of how to do the basics manually, it becomes very difficult to tackle more complicated problems or challenges even with a calculator. Eventually, you do want to graduate to using a calculator because it is more efficient (and probably more accurate), but you will be able to use it much more effectively if you have a strong understanding numbers and how the various operations work.

Your overall point about how a tool is used being important is true and I agree that if used wisely, AI or any other tool can be a good thing. That said, from my experience, I find that many students will take the easy way out and do as you noted at the top: “blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results”.

The how is irrelevant.

What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn’t for them to produce a particular artifact; it’s to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers… I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn’t the sorting program… it’s the process and experience.

How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.

How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.

How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.

To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.

So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.

Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.

AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.

I currently use Ubuntu for all my machines (desktops, laptops, and servers), but I used to use Void Linux on my machines for about 6 years, including on a couple of VPSes. Since you are familiar with Void Linux, you could stick with that and just use Docker/Podman for the individual services such as Matrix, Mastodon, etc.

In regards to Debian, while the packages are somewhat frozen, they do get security updates and backports by the Debian security team:

https://www.debian.org/security/

There is even a LTS version of Debian that will continue backporting security updates:

https://www.debian.org/lts/

Good luck!

Not a bad list. Off the top of my head, I would say it is missing two things:

1. Discrete Math (formal logic, sets, probability, etc)
2. Theory of Computing (not just algorithms, but things like Turing machines, NFAs, DFAs, etc.). These may not be strictly the most practical courses, but I think a Computer Science degree would be incomplete without these.

The “Introduction to Operating Systems” link no longer works (redirects to “Autonomous Systems” courses). Instead, I would recommend using Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, which is the textbook I use in my OS course.

Finally, something like The Missing Semester of Your CS Education would also be a nice extra.

For higher level widgets in ncurses, you can use a library like textual or urwid.

I’m not so sure… for the following reasons:

1. Despite using a version of the Linux kernel in ChromeOS, Chromebooks don’t always have the best hardware (ie. driver) support from the mainline kernel used by most distributions. That’s why there are niche distributions like GalliumOS which provide tweaks to support the touchpad and audio devices in many Chromebooks. It’s similar to how Android is Linux, but it’s not standard Linux as we are familiar with (so the hardware support is different).

2. Many Chromebooks have really poor specs: low-wattage CPUs, small amounts of storage, low amounts of RAM. While they may be newer, they are actually probably less performant than older laptops. This has changed in recent years with the new Chromebook plus program (or whatever it is called) which mandates a reasonable set of baseline features, but that is talking about current Chromebooks and not the ones from the COVID era.

3. Related to the previous point, many Chromebooks are not serviceable or upgradeable while Thinkpads and some recent laptops are. You are unlikely to open up a Chromebook and be able to replace say the RAM or SSD, which would be a show stopper for a lot of people that like Thinkpads.

So… unfortunately, I think this take is a bit of a miss and I dont’ really see it happening. I would be happy to be proven wrong though since my kids have two Chromebooks from the COVID era :}

If you want something graphical to install a single deb, you can install gdebi:

https://itsfoss.com/gdebi-default-ubuntu-software-center/

With this installed, anytime you download a deb, it will open the deb in gdebi and allow you to install the package graphically.

No, most likely Pipewire would be used to implement the protocol for various compositors.

Think of the protocols as high-level descriptions of interfaces (or designs) that specify what needs to be implemented to support a particular feature (in this case capturing images of a “screen”). Looking at this one, it describes a ext_image_capture_source_v1 object that has various methods such as create_source and destroy. Different compositors could then implement or support this interface with whatever technology they wish (most will rely on Pipewire).

This is already the case with the existing screensharing protocol. For instance wlroots uses pipewire buffers in xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.