Depending on the state, some agencies will test drinking water samples for a small fee that is much less than $200. In Michigan, the department of health did it for me. This is likely hard water. And if it’s from a well, it should be tested every so often anyways.

Check to see if your local government does this instead.

Try it out. It is a great utility.

I went from GUI to terminal and I’ll never go back. Especially with interactive add, git add -i

Portable monitors have been extremely convenient when I used to travel to a client site to program. A cheap one is worth getting.

Debian is 30 years old for a reason.

Debian is more stable than Windows or Mac. It’s 30 years old for a reason.

This is the answer.

I liked Ubuntu prior to snap. I’ve gone back to Debian and aside from a slightly complex install, I think that the distro is the epitome of stability and “just works”, especially for the normal software stuff I do. It’s 30 years old for a reason.

My experiences with arch are that it just broke if you looked at it funny and I like stuff that doesn’t require the constant tinkering. This is the same reason I don’t do smart tech and still own dumb and mechanical watches.

I feel like I’m in the minority in this community lately.

Understand programmatic approaches to testing, unit testing, test driven development (TDD), behavioral driven development (BDD), and integration tests.

Understanding TDD and practicing it as a new developer forces you to understand the end result wholly. It’s one thing to understand how to solve a problem, but understanding how to validate that the problem is solved programmatically, before you have implemented the solution makes you a better developer. It gives you a better view of what you are doing and will change you way of thinking about solving problems.

What’s wrong with Debian?

I’ve been a software developer for 7 years and I’ve grown to hate terneries entirely. They only hinder readability. Readability is the biggest factor in maintainability. Code that is hard to maintain makes bugs.

I always mark PRs with nested terneries as “needs work”.

And honestly, nano as the default makes sense, it’s lightweight and gets the job done. I still have that as my default.

Honestly, most of the defaults are good enough for me. I just run vi and it does the job well enough. If I need to configure a good dev environment, I’ll just install stuff with apt-get install and mangle stuff onto my PATH.

It works with WINE ok, but you might get better luck with someone more native.

Seconding SumatraPDF, it has steered me through storms for years.

Debian, because I can just have a computer without needing to fiddle with a million things. I work in tech and don’t want to mess with any more code or configurations if I’m on my own computer. It’s worked for me for 5 years and has worked for others for 30 years.

Test driven development has really helped me understand bugs and functional changes well. Doing a red green change has done wonders for me over the years.

What’s with everyone recommending a different distro instead of trying to help the user in the thread?

Color me confused, but what’s wrong with stock Debian?