Just hold your ground and keep reading your book, eating alone etc. If someone enters personal territory, shut it down by being honest “I don’t want to talk about that” and move on. Resist peer pressure and be who you are, it’s the same as it was in school.

Also, talk to your coworkers (I know it’s hard) about whether they think it’s appropriate. You have an impression they’re on board with this level of “intimacy” but it’s possible they are just going along to get along.

If persisting doesn’t work then it’s probably time to find another job. Plenty of workplaces out there that just want you to do your job and no more.

HR is definitely not on your side either, unless you can point to specific violations of policy. They exist specifically to cover their own ass, not to actually make your life better.

For XP, the machine KVM presents as may be too new, but that isn’t an issue with non-virtualized QEMU.

I agree, as much as I hate Reddit’s leadership and a lot of the toxicity of the hivemind, it will be a long time before anything reaches the level of niche communities it has with a critical mass of users and I miss some of them.

Sometimes you just want to geek out about something small with the 40 people across the planet that actually care about it.

TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything like a DE.

But you’re right, it’s hyped, I just think the hype is real.

This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It’s a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.

As for the rest, you’re right the end user doesn’t care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.