• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • We live in the real world. If you don’t submit the government forms how they want you to, they shrug and fine the shit out of you.

    Then you just don’t know the law. There is no legislation that enforces Acrobat in any civilized country without alternative.

    Quite the opposite: Send macroridden documents to any decently secure infrastructure and you get a big fat warning in the subject if it’s not filtered entirely. Officials LOVE to do that extra call ensuring that this document is really from you before opening it and no phishing attempt…not.

    Source: working >25 years in IT, >15 years for government IT

    EDIT: we got some real Adobe Acrobat Fanboy here, eh? ;-)






  • something like a drone or a router

    Highly customized/optimized Linux images certainly are one use case of gentoo.

    if it’s cool you might be willing to put up with the drawbacks

    The “cool factor” is a significant point. My gentoo laptop (which I update rarely besides browser/security updates) boots in under 3 seconds to graphical login :-)

    Compiling can be done by a the cluster

    Actually most compiling is pretty quick on modern systems (compile in DDR4 ramdisk, nvme, fast CPU etc.) I’d say, most stuff compiles as quickly as installing a binary nowadays.

    It’s the huge stuff that’s annoying: webkit, rust, Qt, boost, firefox/chromium etc. But one can skip updates easily or use precompiled binary packages that are provided for big stuff.

    Pi4 is perfectly doable. But Pi Zero won’t be a lot of fun.


  • Real benefit. For average users it’s debatable but if you want to exclude certain components or have complex dependencies “just work” without tons of docker images or need bleeding edge performance by tweaking everything, I don’t see any other choice.

    Also if you need to seamlessly integrate new projects that don’t provide packages, writing a live ebuild is straight forward and will keep updated from a regular git repo just like any other package.

    Want to compile certain stuff with clang and the rest with gcc? Or use libressl instead of openssl? Stuff like that? No problem. Just be aware that you might need to file bug reports if you do exotic stuff because gentoo won’t prevent you from doing stuff nobody did before.

    And installing gentoo by going through the install manual step-by-step, is certainly priceless for diving into linux under the hood. It’s a bit like a LFS but without the hassle.



  • Formulars, such as calculating a sum based on the preceding fields.

    • Field formatting, such as appending .00 to a currency amount

    You’re doing it wrong. PDF with embedded javascript is a nightmare and it still doesn’t make PDF equal to excel.

    Better generate your documents with your favourite HTML templating engine from your DB and convert them to simple PDF in the last step.

    LibreOffice notoriously renders Microsoft Office documents incorrectly in my experience.

    Only had that experience with badly designed, macro ridden documents which there’s no excuse for anyway nowadays. I use a lot of print templates (various label printers) and it works flawlessly.

    Also, exporting a non MS file format usually imports fine in LibreOffice, even with complex documents.

    The ability to quickly edit PDF makes it the office suite of my choice.