Employers in America often complain about a lack of qualified applications or applicants in general. To me it seems this issue is partially the fault of the employers themselves, There are issues in which the qualifications for a job are years of experience, a college degree, and advanced certification for jobs that pay little more than a stocker at Walmart.
Those are standard complaints about the state of American employment. But there are other issues such as the one I just encountered. A prospective employer (Scientific Gaming, they make and support video poker machines which amount to PCs with a couple of attachments for gambling). I can enter any certification into their application, except anything that has to do with the job. If I was certified as a nurse, I can select that from their dropdown certification menu. But literally, no technical certification can be selected from it or manually typed as you can see by the attachment. There's not a workaround to get past the screen, even by uploading the certifications. What's the result? They can hire a nurse or accountant to support their machines, but a CompTIA A+ certified person?
Historically I use either KDE or XFCE, but like to check in on other DEs. So the other night I downloaded the Fedora 35 ISO to experience the newest of GNOME in the pure state. It seems very clean, actually overly so. Compared to other desktops it seems like it takes an extra step to launch applications, view your files, etc, The problem comes from having to access everything from the "Activities" button in the top left of the screen or with the Meta key. Other desktops, of course, have one less step by being able to access commonly used applications from a panel or dock. While pressing an extra key doesn't seem like much, it becomes annoying very quickly.
Of course, this can be fixed with the extension "Dash to Dock". The result superficially resembles a Mac. But one should not have to install extensions that can break every 6 months to get basic functionality. Also in the "horizontal workflow", you can on see one virtual desktop at a time.
Another thing is the high RAM usage. When I booted the ISO, it was taking 2 gigs of memory without any applications launched. This isn't that much of a problem on a machine with 16 gigs but does seem awfully heavy.
What does anyone else think? Am I right, too critical, not understanding something?
I've come to the conclusion that Fox News is the most accurate and trustworthy news organization in the history of media. For example, what other news organization got the scoop that Russia's new fighter jet can fly at almost twice the speed of light? Fox continues to astound with its concise and accurate reporting!
It seems to me that Linux help sites often give users instructions that are the most confusing way to accomplish a task or even give users instructions that are wrong. Case in point: this morning I was installing the R-Studio on Ubuntu 21.04. R is a statistical programming language commonly used to generate visualizations from csv, Excel file, etc. A package called Tidyverse is an important component, that provides functions such ggplot (a R language command to generate a plot). The R base and the R-Studio IDE installed just fine, but Tinyverse did not. So I dutifully went R website to get instructions that told me that Tidyverse was only available for LTS releases and to try changing my sources list for Tidy to Ubuntu Focal. Of course, this failed.
But it turned out that the .deb file of Tidyverse for this version with Ubuntu was available in the Ubuntu repos the whole time. So I got frustrated that Cran (Comprehensive R Archive Network) and R Studio didn't give the simple instructions just to install it from Ubuntu repositories in the first place. It seems to beg the question why didn't Cran and R-Studio just tell users to install Tidyverse from the Ubuntu repos instead of giving such strange instructions and workarounds. But it seems to be a broader issue in Linux. Help sites throw the command line instructions at new users instead of just having them install software from the software center. Sure, for tech-savvy users sudo apt-get install (package) isn't confusing, but does text commands for simple tasks that can be done through the GUI make would-be Linux users switch back? Oh yeah, when the help file incorrectly advised users to change their sources, they didn't tell the users how to do this (again, for experienced users it's easy. Just find Tidyverse in the sources and change the Hirsute to Focal - but how does a new, would-be Linux user know this?)
Apparently, it's a common problem that Chrome and other Blink-based can no longer scroll using the mouse wheel. This happens across OSs. The fix people usually post is to disable smooth scrolling. That didn't work. But what did work is switching the display server from Wayland to X11.
