Mastodawn

Charlie Stross Feb 13, 2025

Time for a footnote to this: nearly 40 years of writing my stories on computers has taught me two things:

1. Always have backups. More than you think you need, too (backups can go bad).

2. Always have an exit strategy from a hardware, operating system, or writing software choice: vendors can go bad or remove support for older products.

Sub-footnote: Linux isn't an exit strategy, it's a 9-5 job. Open source is less bad than closed, but rug-pulls are still possible.
https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113995800386923701

Charlie Stross (@[email protected])

Time for Day 13 of #WritersCoffeeClub , many thanks to @johnhowesauthor . How do you organise your writing projects? I work in Scrivener. One project per novel. Possibly supplementary notes in SimpleNote, before I import them into Scriv when I begin writing. Each project lives in a folder along with supplementary stuff, namely generated drafts in export file formats, backups, and so on. Current "live" projects temporarily reside in a separate folder in my Dropbox (for cross-device syncing).

The Wandering Shop

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RoboRev Feb 13, 2025

@cstross I definitely think you are doing a disservice to Linux here... As a new user of Linux this year, I consider myself one of those “lowly” users. I agree that there needs to be a simpler overall experience to achieve wider adoption, but my time with Linux has been relatively headache free, at least no more than windows. Being on some forums, I was warned about older users like you who poo-poo Wayland, systemd and reject change even when they are objectively better…

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Daniel Lakeland Feb 13, 2025

@RoboRev @cstross

Thanks for bringing some perspective from the trenches. Your experience is about what I expect. I think there are many war wounded from the 2000-2010 era who are more gun-shy than is warranted today.

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Life is Tetris

@dlakelan @RoboRev @cstross I do wonder how #HaikuOS would do for your personal computing. Maybe it is what contributors should have been polishing all these years instead of donating their time to corporate bottomlines via Linux.

https://haiku-os.org it seems to be OK on older hardware, hosts its own code repository (not on Github), runs its own friendly forum at https://discuss.haiku-os.org and its few contributors have been steadily at it for decades.

Haiku Project

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by BeOS, Haiku is fast and easy to learn but very powerful.

Haiku Project