Awesome! It was totally the colour scheme that was stopping me using SO. Absolutely nothing to do with mods calling me stupid for asking a question, marking it duplicate of a question it's absolutely not a duplicate of, then insisting the Only True Answer is the one from 2003.

I use Mint and so does my wife.

Two laptops that Win11 doesn't want to support, but we need them both and we don't have the budget to replace them. No problems on mine, but the wife's HP has some issues with closing the lid and I haven't found a good solution to that yet.

Sleep doesn't work because on wakeup the wifi and bluetooth are both dead; bluetooth doesn't matter but the wifi's needed for the internet and the only way to get it back up is to reboot the machine because it insists there's a hardware failure and refuses to accept that there isn't. I've even tried modprobe-ing the network stack but it has to be a full system restart (warm restart, not power cycle).

Hibernate threatens something nasty, can't remember what offhand but I'm not even considering it.

I don't want a lid shut to mean shutdown because shutting the lid shouldn't mean losing work. So I'm left with the only remaining option that shutting the lid does nothing, and the LT stays on, but then if she puts something on top of the LT as she's prone to do, some stuff can end up in a weird state, like taskbar icons following the mouse around even though they haven't been clicked on, and there's no way to stop them doing that without rebooting. I'm not sure how that happens; my hypothesis is that the keyboard and/or trackpad get activated, but no amount of me pressing on the lid in various places reproduces the problem.

Other than that she's had no problem adapting to Linux Mint. Everything's where she expects it. I've had to do some command-line jiggerypokery for various bits and bobs but a bit of DDG-ing finds that easily enough.

What a shame. Used to be such a great place. And to be fair some of the wider StackExchange communities still are (the PowerShell crowd stick out in my memory as being a friendly bunch).

But people need a place to be able to answer their dumb questions and have someone be kind to them. SO's insistence on being the primary repository of useful knowledge and having that principle take priority over user experience is what killed it. I tried suggesting they implemented a 2-tier question/answer system, where "quality" questions got promoted to the repository and the rest didn't get indexed, but it got marked as a duplicate of something it wasn't a duplicate of, so that was the end of that.

What StackOverflow also fails to understand is that as technology moves on, the "right" answer changes. So an answer that got 20 billion upvotes in 2003 could well be completely useless by now (heck, you don't even have to go back that far).

It's about keeping it simple: black and white only, which of course are RGB(0,0,0) and RGB(255,255,255). If you want to use colours, you need a colour selector which is unnecessary fluff at this point. Obviously it'll be a critical element fairly soon, but right at the start of the project it's (arguably of course) less important than the application structure and just getting an MVP together. If you want to do colours before you do File-Open and File-Save that's a valid choice.

There are a few basic things you need to sort out first. Keep it as simple as possible so start monochrome, and just add functionality to draw dots on a canvas. You'll need file handling capability almost immediately so figure out a way to (de-)serialise the information to recreate the artwork to read and write it to a file.

That'll keep you going for a few weeks, unless you're vibing it in which case months by which point you might have had other ideas of features to add, assuming you already know how to write GUI applications.

What kind of drawing? Art or technical?

Clicked on four things before it demanded money, including two annoying modal popups trying to train me in how to use one of the simplest applications in existence.

For what it's worth those two things I clicked looked alright.

But I'm not paying you to review your work. You should be paying me.

Not for me (4GB Pi5). I watch a lot of full screen video and Firefox just can't handle it at all even if it's the only application running and with only one tab. I tried all the "fixes". In the end I gave up, tried a few, and settled on Brave, which still gets a bit confused coming out of full screen which "F11 F11 restart" fixes.

I'm still looking forward to the day when I no longer have to execute a child every time I want to do literally anything on Linux.

We must be careful.

I usually drink coffee so the water goes in before the teabag, although to be fair the teabag never goes in.

AI is great for looking stuff up but rubbish at figuring stuff out. If you want some code to do X and the AI can find it, you're done. If you want code that does X and Y and smushes them together to get a Z, if nobody's written that exact code then you're out of luck, and the worst case solution that AI far too frequently offers is something that loosely approximates what you asked for instead of just saying it doesn't know.

The mistake too many people make with AI is conflating looking up with working out. AI is most definitely NOT doing the latter. It's a decent search engine, that's all.

I have gone round and round in circles with AI, with a short list of 5-6 items I want the code to do, and it always misses at least one of them out. "OK but you didn't do 5" "Oh, my mistake! Here's some code that does 5" "OK, but now it doesn't do 1." "Oops, here's some code that does 1." "Right, now it doesn't do 3 or 4, and 5 is wrong" "Thanks for the clarification! Here's some code that fixes 3, 4 and 5" "OK but now it doesn't do 2" "My mistake! Here's some code that does 2" "OK but now it doesn't do 5 again". And I was really quite persistent with it, going way beyond this short snapshot of the conversation.

So here's my valid reason for not using AI to write my code. Simple: it can't.