Geez, you could probably download the molecular formulas for all of the many chemical compounds in coffee and the ratios to combine them in to imitate various beans without using that much data.

I would expect Gentoo’s rankings on Distrowatch to be lower than its actual uptake. I mean, it’s an oddball distro, an old and well-known one whose reputation probably spreads more by word of mouth than anything else.

Gentoo doesn’t do user stats, so it’s impossible to tell.

I think the disconnect may be due to the article repeatedly mentioning that “this stuff is used by smartphones/websites!!!” but almost never mentioning that full-sized computers exist, even though most of the software being discussed is Linux-primary (and some of it is also used on Windows/Mac, like SQLite). It looked to me like the author’s target audience was “people who use a smartphone as their primary or only device.”

What’s missing in this article (or at least as much of it as I could read) is that much of the software listed has alternatives. For instance, bash can be replaced by a combination of some other shell (fish, zsh, dash . . .) and some other scripting language (python, perl . . .). There are other compression algorithms than xz, even if they’re less efficient. And so on.

Others are nice-to-haves, but their absence wouldn’t cause much actual technical dysfunction. If Harfbuzz vanished tomorrow, it would result in some ugly text displays. This is not the end of the world.

Some high percentage of them will be that stupid, yes, because the people making the decisions are not terribly computer-literate and just want things to go back to “normal” without having to learn anything new or retrain anyone.

You point out up front that self-checkouts are not a substitute and ideally list the ways that theirs are broken. In the case of the local management, talk over them if you have to in order to make your point.

And yes, I complain about having to punp gas, too.

Do it anyway. And complain to the management and the head office if that one staffed checkout is overburdened and you have to wait an unreasonable amount of time.

The thing about Indigenous tax breaks? Also relevant in Canada, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover there was something similar in Australia or New Zealand. It’s only one possible issue of several in that category, anyway. For instance, there’s a drugstore chain in my neck of the woods that provides discounts for seniors on one day of the week . . . but their self-checkouts can’t handle it and anyone who’s due a discount has to go to a cashier. Stuff like that.

The worst one I’ve run into appeared to be cobbled together from two different systems that barely talked to each other. At some point the main unit passed control to the other without any indication it was doing so, or that different instructions would be appearing on the smaller, monochrome screen that never showed up on the main one and had to be followed before following the next step on the main screen (no audio cues for anything on the secondary screen either, as far as I could tell, so anyone with vision issues was SOL). I don’t know what the hell the designer of this monstrosity was thinking, and I don’t care to know, but my cat could have done better. It wasn’t impossible to figure out, but it required time and brain cells that I wouldn’t have needed at a manned checkout. (Name of the store withheld to protect the guilty, but it was a major North American chain.)

My experience is that maybe a third of them are set up to accept cash. The others tend to have permanent “Credit or debit only” signage. (I pay in cash quite often, although I’ll grant you that I’m an outlier.)

You mean you’ve never run into one that’s got buggy software or non-obvious broken hardware? Lucky.

Um, no. There are many other categories of people who have issues with self-checkouts. Like anyone who’s legally or by the store’s rules due a discount or tax waiver (people with Indigenous status aren’t required to pay sales taxes in some jurisdictions, for instance), since the software often fails to account for these. Anyone paying cash. Anyone who knows anything at all about UI design or has wrestled with a self-checkout that just doesn’t function properly.

I’ll wait in line rather than deal with a machine that’s broken by design, thanks. Fortunately, the stores around here mostly have reasonable staffing practices, so the wait isn’t long unless some idiot tries to price-match against a flyer or something else weird and unusual.

Claim that it isn’t fully functional (which it isn’t, for the buyer’s use case), and therefore not as described?

Question is, what happens if you don’t have dmidecode installed? Even more interesting, what happens if you’ve replaced it with a fake that spews back values of your choosing? If they’re bundling it, given that it appears to be GPL2, they’re opening themselves to a lawsuit unless they provide source upon request.

(Somehow, I don’t think they’re actually using dmidecode.)

Meaning that their idea of ragebait is complaining about systemd.

Try a different search engine. At least part of the issue really is with Google, specifically.

If the opinions of shallow-minded wanna-be gender police matter that much to you, then there is nothing I can do to help.

Not if they let you send cash (although that is, alas, unlikely).

Part of being an adult is assessing what “everyone” knows and tells you to see whether it’s actually true, and if so whether it’s relevant to you and the life you want to make for yourself. Granted, this guy is only 23, so he’s got a long way to go with that process.