"I went from thinking this was the job to realizing it wasn't going to work and trying to figure out how to tell my wife that I was going to have to start the job hunt all over again."
I just wanted to say - I have been there, and I feel you. When I read that, it was visceral - took me right back to the couple times I've had those moments. Good on you for keeping on, and using what the experience offered to make things better afterwards.
Saw that, but then why not mark it as supported on Linux? For me, €30 is fairly steep for something that's bound to give me problems that I have no reason to expect they'll feel like solving.
One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.
When I was at Princeton, a lot of clusters ran Springdale Linux[1], which is a Princeton/IAS version of RHEL compiled from RHEL source. I wonder why they didn't simply choose CentOS, and if there's any institution outside Princeton using Springdale.
Btw: it doesn't seem to have been ported to RHEL 8 (?).
They address that particular question even before the FAQ on their site:
"This project was started long before CentOS or other projects were available."
I bet the have calculated that their work maintaining this is rather simple and well-worth it, or they would have changed over to CentOS a long time ago.
Support. Commercial software packages that you may want to run often come with a list of supported operating systems which usually only includes RedHat and maybe SuSE. Ubuntu and Debian are rarely officially supported. And although you usually can get things to work somehow, your application software support will be useless because all tickets get closed with "unsupported OS, use RedHat". With CentOS you at least might have a chance to get a non-useless answer from you application's support team.
Scientific was discontinued and the sponsoring organisations switched to CentOS 8. It looks like the work involved in rebuilding RHEL 8 was too much to deal with.
I’ve had a long career in technology, and for most of it I was doing project and product management, with some light coding on my own time as a hobby. Five years ago I’d finally had it with all that and went to a great coding boot camp. I did end up landing a job after that, but it was a grueling experience to go back to zero in finding jobs.
Comparing yourself to others can be incredibly draining. Not only are many of these people at different stages in their careers than you are, but you’re seeing the best faces they can put forward when you look at LinkedIn.
My advice is - own who and where you are right now. You have done a hell of a lot of work to get where you are now, and you can be proud of that. And if a company isn’t looking for someone like you - if 20 companies aren’t - that’s not on you. Keep working on your craft, keep following what networking angles you can in this crazy year, and keep the faith.
I -just- decoupled Facebook from my Oculus account in preparation for deleting Facebook. I guess in two years I make a throw-away account, or better yet, move to Valve's current offering.
I'm able to play Half Life: Alyx natively on Linux with my Valve Index, as well as other games running through Proton. Not only does Valve support Linux natively; they've been funding development on GFX drivers and things like DXVK. Unfortunately OpenHMD (which would let you use the headset completely decoupled from Steam) doesn't support the Index yet, but it has been worked on and it looks like it just needs someone to finish up that work. Not that you necessarily care about Linux support, but it gives you an idea of how they feel about their products and their community.
The headset itself is expensive but it's the best consumer headset in existence right now. I can play for hours (depending on the game) without feeling like I need to stop. There's no single thing that's dramatically better than other headsets, but just about everything about it is at least somewhat better. Comfort, tracking, visuals, adjustability, and so on.
Anyway, Valve is just night-and-day different from Facebook. In fact they're the ones maintaining support for the Rift on Steam, not the other way around. Valve wants VR to be an open platform, and Facebook wants it to be a part of Facebook, entirely owned and controlled by them.
Same plan here. The Quest I got earlier this year is my first and will be my last Oculus device. Hopefully someone else makes a comparable headset soon (comparable = full wireless PCVR capability, like what the Quest + Virtual Desktop offers), ideally at a comparable price point as well... how hard can it be, the Quest is 1.5 years old by now, there's gotta be something at least similar in the works somewhere.
Theoretically, but their history suggests they won't. This is the company that made gaming on Linux viable, has a platform open to all VR hardware, and lets people sell keys on alternative stores without even taking a cut even though they are clearly in a very dominant market position.
They have their faults, but acting like a modern big tech company isn't one of them.
Started using YNAB almost a month ago, and I love it. I had previously tried Mint (terribly frustrating for all the promise it has, but it’s been left to wither) and my own spreadsheets. YNAB solves several pain points I had - budgeting for non-monthly recurring expenses was a big one.
Past that, I use a great credit union for liquid cash and mostly liquid emergency fund. The later we have pegged at 6 months of burn. Investments are across a couple institutions and consist of Roth IRAs and 401k stuff - that all goes in index funds.
One thing I’ve seen: feature priority driven by what is expected to drive sales. This is a feature that I could see, justified or not, as not driving adoption.
