Qt Framework HakFoo • 4w ago • 100%

Theming / Font configuration: "bold" inherited unexpectedly

I've been trying to style my Qt apps since I discovered the old Motif-look Style Plugin still exists; maybe I can have software not made in 1994 that looks like it was! In the process, I noticed an odd behaviour. I set up `QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct` so I could use qt5ct to do the basic configuration. If I set the "general" font as bold, and the "fixed width" value as non-bold, when I reload qt5ct, it's switched to bold. This can also be seen in other Qt programs. If I manually force the issue by editing qt5ct.conf, manually setting up a block like this, the bold fixed-width font still shows `[Fonts]` `fixed="Go Mono,11,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0,Regular"` `general="Helvetica,11,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0,Bold"` I thought this might be some weirdness due to the specific fonts I chose, but swapping in "Liberation Sans" and "Courier 10 Pitch" produce the same situation. The only way I can have my fixed-width font be "regular" is to also leave the general font as "regular". This is not a connection I expected. Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround?

Rant HakFoo • 3mo ago • 94%

The super-rich are disappointingly boring.

So many of the .001% seem to have no visible interests other than running up the score. I mean, most of us, you get to $50 billion, hell, $50 million, and you'd probably quit and spend your days doing something you found personally rewarding, rather than continuing to chase further growth. It's not like they're still working until they can afford that Jet Ski, and then bailing for Ford Lauterdale. I almost wonder if it's meaningful to try to evaluate them as humans-- to consider whether they're consciously evil-- since it seems like they act like the Paperclip Optimizer from bad sci-fi parables. I've seen more emotional depth from a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet. You'd think that their spending habits would reveal some element of what little soul they might have-- personal quirks, tastes, foibles. This goes beyond the usual "they could afford to end hunger and disease with couch change" complaint. They aren't doing anything interesting in ANY space! If they had any sort of interests or feelings, they have more than enough resources to make a dramatic statement with their money, and yet, they don't. Why aren't they indulging their fancies in comical, over-the-top fashion? Instead of a box of Lionel electric trains, they could fund the [T-1 Trust](https://prrt1steamlocomotivetrust.org/). If they wanted to collect coins, they could get a [1804 dollar](https://www.money.org/money-museum/virtual-exhibits-1804dollar/) and wear it to public events as a brooch. If they spent too much time playing Sid Meier's Civilization, surely they could buy into the executive house of some third-world country with the GDP of a typical Quizno's. Probably much better value for money than buying a flaky Mastodon-a-like to use as a Rube Goldberg machine to flip elections. At best, they strap a rocket under their ass and pay a couple plebs' life earnings for 30 seconds release from those pesky Van Allen belts, but even that seems to be just "the generic thing billionaires do" rather than being the obvious conclusion of a rich lifetime interest in astronomy or flight. Even in their personal estates, does anyone remember anything special about them? Or is it just infinity pools, granite countertops, and rapidly-obsolescing smart technology, the same as men a hundred times poorer, but on a slightly bigger scale? Who will be so bold as to build something that will at least be a cherished monument or celebrated folly in 500 years? What is our era's Versailles or Neuschwanstein? Hell, one of the few things we can measure from their behaviour is that they're petty and selfish, so why don't we see them systematically buying any company that ever hires their ex just so they can systematically sack them again and again? Or paying hundreds of actors so they can relive their senior year of high school, except this time, they're Prom King. Again, an excellent way to toss around your excessive status and wealth while chasing down the demons that you won't be able to smother in stock options. At most, there might be some slant towards discernible tastes in where they splash their charitable cash, but even that plays second fiddle to collecting an efficient tax-management strategy. Maybe they toss a few bucks towards research for a disease that their sister happened to have, or to make school kids study the things you think are important, but it's still just one on the list of cheques they write because their accountants tell them to. We should demand better. It's common to make fun of the gauche behaviour of the sudden nouveau riche-- the 19-year-old with the sportsball contract or $10 million lottery win who buys a safety orange Lamborghini and a gold necklace that Flavor Flav dismissed as too tacky, but at least they look like they are having fun with the money, like they had some idea of "let's do something cool with it" rather than letting it moulder on a spreadsheet somewhere. At least they could do a more entertaining job of gilding their public presence-- sponsoring statues of themselves in major cities to pretend they were an important general, walking around every day like they were refugees from a catwalk or the Met Gala, running infomercials disguised as glowing life-story documentaries on cheap late-night broadcast time. Hell, use their immense commercial wrath to demand that everyone around them use some invented cockamamie title they can strut around with. Surely they can assign themselves a higher rank than a chicken fryer!

Programmer Humor HakFoo • 3mo ago • 98%

Account Required, 2FA, Contract Signed In Blood... to see a PDF.

(Alt: The Drake meme. Upper panel shows him hiding his face from "Securing Customer Data". Lower panel shows him smirking at "Securing Public API Documentation")

San Francisco Bay Area HakFoo • 3mo ago • 100%

Any computer scrap/surplus shops worth visiting?

I'm coming to SF for a few days next month, and am a bit of a retrocomputing enthusiast. Obviously, one of the first items on my itinerary is the Computer History Museum, but is there any place worth visiting if I want vintage-computing souvenirs, not just photographs? On my last holiday, I went to Toronto and ended up spending a day heading out to the fringes of the city and rooting a scrap dealer's boxes for ISA cards instead of exploring culture, art, or history. :) I know I should have shown up 10 years ago if I wanted to see the heyday of scrap dealers, but linear time and all. :P Someone mentioned Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, but I'm staying downtown and it looks like it's 2 hours each way from there via public transport, and even an hour plus from the CHM. I suspect getting a Waymo may cost a fortune if they'd even cover that area... I try not to be in cars when on holiday, but I can sort of make an exception for a technological novelty.

Spiders HakFoo • 4mo ago • 90%

ID request (Phoenix area)

In this corner, we've had a large female widow for a year or so, but haven't seen her in a couple weeks. There are a few Pholcidae around, but this looks different. Maybe 10-12mm long legspan.

Linux Gaming HakFoo • 6mo ago • 96%

Some Wine games go blank when I leave the window

Currently using an X11 system, on an AMD GPU; the window manager is FVWM because I'm a nostalgic old git. I use two screens, and most games tend to full-screen on one. Had decent enough results with Proton via Steam on many titles. A few of them needed to be explicitly tagged "don't draw a frame around the full screen window" in the FVWM config, and I had a few where movies did that "show a test card instead of video" but no biggie. I've recently had two harder nuts to crack. I'm using two games with Lutris: The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (it was $20 cheaper on GOG than Steam at the time!), and Genshin Impact. Both of them play fine, so long as you keep the mouse within the full-screen capture area. But if I leave the window (say, using a keyboard combination or pulling the mouse outside the capture area), the games go blank. SNK shifts the black box somewhat off of its original position, and I think Genshin just goes blank. I experimented a bit with SNK's "wine configuration" options in Lutris. "Automatically Capture the Mouse in Full-Screen Window": This reduced accidental leave-the-screen problems, but still had failures if you used a keyboard command to switch windows. De-selecting "allow the window manager to control the window" causes the window to turn into a weird Win95-esque "mini taskbar icon" instead of going black Pressing the "restore" and "maximize" buttons resizes it to near full screen but retains an ugly Win95 style title bar. Once you restore it in that mode, it's actually well-behaved-- you can move the mouse in and out of the window without it breaking (it seems to freeze when you move the mouse away, but that may be intentional) But still, the weird titlebar and it not working that way until you first "freeze and unwedge it" sucks. Genshin, at least sometimes, could have its black box minimized and restored and come back to life. I've yet to try the Wine tweaks there. I suspect the common theme might be that the games are trying to deactivate themselves when they lose focus, but not doing so gracefully. ISTR Genshin on Windows would minimize itself if you switched to another task, and I haven't tried SNK on actual Windows. I'm wondering if there's some unified fix that tells the game it's running in a single screen and when the mouse leaves, it just stayed there. There seems to have been some sort of "cage Wine apps in a virtual desktop" feature, but it seems to no longer be supported.

Stable Diffusion Art HakFoo • 6mo ago • 58%

(sigh) Another Blasted Mortal

Original parameters: (full body male vampire hunk), (shirtless), (thin necklace), (standing in graveyard), hunk, (long hair), (red eyes), (holding scepter), (wide angle), masterpiece, detailed, (moonlight background), realistic, (wind blown) Negative prompt: (head cut off), (extra fingers), (moustache), (beard), (anime), jeans, female Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 6, Seed: 3375192227, Size: 704x384, Model hash: 6ce0161689, Model: v1-5-pruned-emaonly, Denoising strength: 0.01, Hires upscale: 3.75, Hires upscaler: DAT x2, Version: v1.8.0 For years, I've had a wallpaper in rotation of the cover of the manhwa 'Rebirth' volume 1, (reference https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347683512i/29540.jpg) featuring the vampire protagonist in the moonlight with a decidedly surly pose. I've been smashing my 6900XT into the wall trying to get it to spit out something with a similar vibe, but a few more pixels than I can get out of denoising a 800dpi scan of a small book cover. This doesn't *quite* do it, but the upturned nose and downward pointed weapon (SD seems to go completely off the rails with almost any weapon you ask for, except torches for some reason), convey an interesting contempt for the viewer. With some cleanup, I get something like this: https://imgur.com/a/9QwQwlW I've taken to generating batches of 10 thumbnails images at a time, deciding if anything's worth upscaling to wallpaper size, and cleaning up more in GIMP. Upscaling seems to put way more stress on the GPU than generating the original image-- once my machine politely shut itself down which I assume was the way of responding to a thermal threshold trip (~115C peaks) After scaling, seems like most of the effort is things like trying to add actual eyes instead of dark spots, cleaning up superfluous features, and a lot of reworking mouths.

The wallpaper is one of the standard XBM images included with the X11 distribution (in OpenBSD, it's at /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/mensetmanus). The fonts are the Modern DOS collection (8x8 for the battery status, 8x16 for the terminal). The window titles use the classic bitmap Helvetica which has no antialiasing and gives it a unique "Vintage system" vibe. I was going to give it a full CDE install, but the build guides don't seem to work right; I might switch to SparkyLinux for this machine because suspending fails *just often enough* to be annoying.

THE_PACK HakFoo • 7mo ago • 98%

[Meta question] where does THE_PACK imagery come from?

It seems like there's an infinite supply of standoffish warriors and grim reapers for this community to caption, usually with motorcycles. But what was its original use case? I jokingly proposed "It's the equivalent of the art on Lisa Frank binders, but for boys." But not really: it's too aggressive to sell to kids whose parents (and likely schools and similar community norm-setters) would veto it, and it's too fantastical for adults; I'd expect if you had it on display at home, it's in the same category of Grown Up Mature Decor Don't that anime wallscrolls or action movie posters are. That pretty much leaves T-shirt designs for self-described badasses and maybe posters for college dorms-- is there enough of that to fuel this ecosystem? Or is there a community which generates thus stuff out of internal demand (like the furry subculture and high-intensity fandoms)

OPNsense HakFoo • 9mo ago • 100%

Turnkey mini-PC for home-routing duties.

After a home rewire, I'm ready to bump up to 2.5GbE, and demote my old 1Gbps router/wifi box to "AP Only mode". I want at least ~~five~~ six total ports, four of which need to be 2.5+ (three to different rooms, one for uplink, one 1G+ for the AP, and one "any speed is enough" for the networked printer :) ) It seems like the "mini-PC with a bunch of 2.5GbE ports running OPNSense" option fits neatly between "Build a router out of my old i5-2500K and some eBay NICs and ignore the USD450 electric bill", and "enterprise rackmount gear with Delta fans left over from people overclocking their Socket A Athlons." I see a lot of machines of the form "fanless case with a little castle of fins on top, Intel N100 CPU, six 2.5G ports from I226 chipset". A representative example is https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806214512701.html I suspect they may all be re-brands of the same basic product, but I wanted to know real-world experiences: * Basic question: can anyone vouch for any specific one of these devices/sellers and confirm it worked for them? * I understand the i225-v LAN chipset was much buggier than the i226-v and to be avoided; still the case? I see a few products that are like USD50 cheaper, with different CPUs and i225-based LAN. * For routing/firewall duties (probably 4 PCs, 3 phones, a couple printers, and some smart devices) , are the bottom-of-the-line configs (8GB RAM/128G disc) suitable? Is the CPU sufficient? The N100 makes me laugh-- Intel doesn't even want to give it a brand name. * Regarding WiFi, should I just block out that little Mini-PCIe slot on the board from my mind? I know that FreeBSD WiFi has been sort of a fourth-class citizen for years, but I was wondering if there had been a breakthrough, or at least a "here is one specific card you can buy for a largely drama-free experience" * Weird question: Any problems with RF noise? I have had some devices where the power brick made a mess of a neighbour's AM radio reception, and I don't want to start a war with him. I figure when you're buying a device with a 60w wall-wart from a random brand, it might not be the cleanest.

Networking HakFoo • 9mo ago • 100%

2.5GbE router for home use

I've been prepping my home network for the promise of "fibre coming soon" in my city. That meant wrapping the house in Cat6A like a giant arachnid nest, and having a couple desktops with 2.5GbE on board, but I'm not sure what to do about the routing setup. I have three Ethernet runs to "30cm from the ISP equipment" now. For gigabit in this scenario, the turnkey solution is any random Wi-Fi/router/firewall box which has 1Gb WAN and four 1Gb LAN ports. But where do you go when you start wanting 2.5GbE? It seems like the "Wifi/Router/firewall" boxes with 2.5GbE ports are quite spendy, especially if you want more than one LAN port. I know a lot of this cost is because they tend to be the latest-and-greatest in terms of Wi-Fi, with 82 antennae, but that's only a secondary consideration for me with the heavy users on wires. Hell, my smartphone only supports the 2.4GHz band! It seems like other options include: * 2-box solution: A slightly cheaper Wifi-Router with 2.5GbE WAN and one LAN port and using a cheap unmanaged 2.5 switch to provide the desired port count. * 3-box solution: Said cheap unmanaged switch, plus a wired-centric router, and use the old Wifi/Router as an access point only I'm sort of not thrilled about the two or three-box solutions as they have poor "wife acceptance factor" as they say. A bunch of random boxes that inevitably won't stack neatly and have three big ugly wall warts. Is there some magic product that would fit my needs perfectly I'm missing?

Guild Wars 2 HakFoo • 10mo ago • 100%

Cleaning my overstuffed inventory

I'm trying to get back into GW2, in large part because it's one of the few MMOs I've liked that actually works well under Linux. For a frame of reference, my main was a Nord Necromancer with ~33 mastery points, and the three easier-to-acquire mounts. I completed the main story and HoT, and sort of drifted out in the middle of PoF for like two years. Just bought the EoD expansion while it's on sale. I've got one 20-slot bag and four 15-slots, and maybe 1-2 slots free at any given time. I suspect my problem is less "bag space" per se, and more a hoarding tendency-- crafting items, "turn it into some NPC for a quest" items, seasonal tonics and exchange items. Hell, I still have the Level 80 token that came with the original purchase, because I figured if I skipped to 80, I'd miss the Personal Story. Is there a good rundown for discard/sell/keep somewhere? One thing I've seen in other games that I appreciate is when they say "these seasonal items are now obsolete and will be deleted/can be auto-sold for trifling sums". Alternatively, should I just treat this character as a walking treasure chest, park him, and try to shared-slot things of actual value to a new character? Part of me says to fire up a revenant-- I always mean to try it, but I suspect now I'll be disappointed after spending my holiday playing too much Code Vein, where it was the term for "formally speaking not vampires, but, yeah... vampires."

Electronics HakFoo • 10mo ago • 96%

PSA: Buy some LED Christmas lights today

I got a Sylvania-branded strand of 50 "warm-white" LEDs (plus two loose spares) for USD 2.50 at the local grocery store, which I'm pretty sure is cheaper than buying a bag of the bare LEDs would run. They also come in other colours (blue, cool-white, bright red, multicolour) The individual LEDs come in plastic shells which can be cracked open to retrieve the goodies inside, and have plenty long leads that are folded over to fit the "bulb" mounting.

Mildly Interesting HakFoo • 11mo ago • 98%

This 9v battery contained six cells stacked like a layer cake

Picture of a disassembled Duracell 9v battery. Below the terminal assembly is a clear plastic case where you can see six sets of stacked rectangular terminals and fillings.

PC Master Race HakFoo • 1y ago • 98%

Mini-Review: Gamemax Titan Silent chassis

Writing this up because I haven't seen a proper review. Note I've only been using the case for about a day so I don't have a strong baseline on thermals; this is mostly about the build experience. **Why I was interested** My preference towards cases is very old-school. I like external drive bays, and have no interest in tempered glass or RGB. My long-term daily driver was a Cooler Master HAF XB, which is a delight to build in and offers exceptional expandability for its size. The one place it's sort of limited is depth for GPU-- I have an ASRock OC Formula 6900XT, and it's 330mm, and you have to remove front fans and carefully wiggle to get it out of a slot. This has resulted in me breaking the stupid clip on my mainboard. So I had a $125 rebate voucher burning a hole in my pocket and a growing sense that most of the remaining cases with drive bays will be gone in another year or two, so I'd better get one now or it will be gone. **The obvious question** Yes, the front panel can be opened over the intake fans. It's a seperate piece held in with like 8 snaps. The pictures on product pages look like CGI, so it's not clear if this is a decorative cut or an actual removable panel. It's sort of unfinished-- a big "B" moulded into it. You could probably cut some mesh or 3-D print something and attach it with magnets for easier removal. **Positives** The case's aesthetics, as much as there are any (it's much plainer than old style plastic and metal cases tended to be) are defined by the "five-head" -- the big plastic shell that goes about 3cm above the top of the metal chassis itself. This actually does offer some nice features over the typical "stamped metal with a fan grille drilled in it" top panel: the top mesh element pops out on spring-loaded clips, and that gives you an extra degree of access to the internals from above. Obviously, the intent is to either mount fans there or leave the plastic sound deadeners in place, but this does help with the build. The drive bays are deep enough for modern optical drives with a bit of clearance, so they aren't intruding into the mainboard area. Both four-bay 3.5" cages can be removed. The captive screws and pressure springs to retain optical drives work well, but why only two sets of captive screws when there are three bays? **Negatives** There are numerous cable management holes, but they tend to be on the small size. My PSU (old Corsair RM1000x) has thick and inflexible cables because there are capacitors built into the cables, and the main ATX cable barely fit through the hole. I was able to get a fairly clean build with some effort though. (By detaching the ATX cable from the PSU and feeding it in that way, you avoid trying to cram the thickest part through the small hole. Only six standoffs are pre-installed. Three extra are included in the box (I'd prefer four, since many mainboards have 10 mounting holes and you can be pathological). When I went to install the other three, they were not smoothly pre-tapped; a small "nut driver" adapter is provided to mount them properly, but this was frustrating, and since I didn't notice the "nut driver" at first, I ended up fighting with a real nut driver that was too small to provide sufficient torque. It includes a GPU support, which is cleverly designed-- you can slot it into a rail, screw it down tight, and set an arm to prop the card up. Unfortunately, it was not suitable for the OC Formula 6900XT, a tall, 2.5 slot monstrosity-- you could only barely bolt it in at the edge of the rail, and the arm ends up in a poor position to engage the card-- it's simply too short and would end up having to poke directly into a fan. I ended up using the supplementary bracket ASRock provided with the card. **Neutral** The top and front plastic panels are held on with pressure-fit clips, you can pull them off manually. This makes it slightly precarious if you grab the top of the case the wrong way. It comes with three stock fans which are reasonably quiet, but I hear a mold hum with the case at ear-height. It's probably less noticable when the case is placed on the floor-- with no tempered glass, it's probably safer to kick. The fans are wired to a rudimentary fanbus (off-low-high), which has extra headers, but are only 3-pin models. I may end up replacing them with my old Arctic P12s and bypass the fanbus so I can get monitoring through the mainboard. Overall, I found you might not be able to use the most obvious cable routing for some cables, i. e. the front panel USB and audio, due to length and routing needs. This is obviously dependent on the choice of mainboard. I also ended up cracking out my extra-long SATA cables; your routing may be easier, but I had problems with the onboard SATA and optical drives, so I use a M.2 to SATA card to get some ports that work reliably. The aesthetic is a little weird due to the "five-head" design. While it's very subdued and plain in many ways, the idea that drive bays start a random-looking 5cm from the top of the case resonates strangely with me; it seems like if asked an AI to draw a full tower case. I suspect that it might be possible to coopt some of that space for something more useful, like a card reader, but I'm trying to avoid breaking out the Dremel just yet. The printed-on "Silent Titan" logo is odd; I already bought the case, you don't need to remind me what it is. **Overall** The case is serviceable and delivers on most of the important things I was looking for (screaming "IT HAS DRIVE BAYS" in that classic girl "IT HAS POCKETS" style). I suspect many of my issues with the build were due to corner-case compatibility issues.

askTO | Ask Torontonians Questions HakFoo • 1y ago • 80%

Specific shopping suggestions

I'm going to be coming up from the US for a week in a few days. (When I booked the trip back in May, Canada seemed a lot less... flammable :( ) For me, a big part of leisure travel is indulging nerdy fixations in shops that there are no local equivalents for, away from the rest of the family asking "you bought WHAT?" until it's far too late to feel shame. Any good suggestions for the following? (Extra points given for public-transit easy access; I enjoy a walking- and train-focused vacation) * Anime goods shop * Model-railway-centric hobby shop. * Electronics-surplus shops/long-lived computer shops that have backstock dating to the era of George VI. The sort of place where you might find a LS-120 drive, weird Commodore stuff, or a cache of ISA cards. * Neighbourhood-style coin shop (the sort of place that has albums for different series, and wouldn't take offense if I'm looking in the $50 range rather than the $50,000 range). On a related note, I'd like to try to get some of the 1968-1986-or-so nickel "Voyageur" dollars-- do banks typically have caches of them if you ask, or are they definitely something you'll have to go to a coin shop for?

GenZedong HakFoo • 1y ago • 90%

The Chinese Expansionist Threat the Western Media won't tell you about!

From the description of some random eBay listing. The text reads: "Shipping: Free Economy Shipping from Greater China to worldwide. See details. International shipment of items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges. (information icon) Located in: Sofia, Bulgaria" We spent so long staring at Taipei that nobody noticed when the entire PLA burrowed its way through the Earth and popped up in Eastern Europe! Hopefully they brought some Belt and Road infrastructure cash. I don't think they've been doing so hot since the Warsaw Pact fell.

linuxmemes HakFoo • 1y ago • 92%

FVWM is all you really need

(screenshot of a rxvt window decorated with a fvwm theme. The title bar is rotated to the left and highlighted in red with white text, and reads 'marada@kalutika:~'. The window is green-on-black and contains a vim session with the text 'You may not like it, but this is what peak desktop performance looks like. Each window has a clear, square border around the edge. You know where one window ends and the next begins, and exactly where you can drag to resize them, even if you stack one Dark Mode window slightly ajar of another. There's a titlebar that has a huge segment which can be clicked and dragged to move the window, rather than tiny icons and a search bar eating up all but a handful of pixels. The active window has a distinct colour you can immediately pick out. That title bar is mounted on the side, so it's not consuming precious screen real estate when the trend is towards 52:9 aspect-ratio ultrawide monitors whichbarely have enough vertical space for one full-sized window. It's generated by a Window Manager. Not a Desktop Environment. Not a Compositor. It draws windows and menus, and launches other programs. It does not include a mixer, stopwatch timer, Mastodon feed reader, or half the video drivers. It has a memory footprint of fourteen megabytes, and a configuration file format that hasn't meaningfully changed since Bill Clinton was in the WhiteHouse. GNOME was a mistake.'

Hurtdesk 2.0 HakFoo • 1y ago • 100%

Putty

It said I should install putty to log in. So I got a big mess of plumbing putty from the hardware store and smeared it on my laptop. Now my keyboard feels mushy and it keeps beeping and saying "thermal warning". It's July, I'm not wearing anything thermal. The putty is also getting hard, do I have to re-apply it every day?

retrocomputing HakFoo • 1y ago • 100%

What did the original IBM PC do "better?"

At the time the original 5150 was released, there were already other 8088 and 8086 systems on the market. And it didn't really strain the envelope-- no IBM-exclusive chips, and the whole 8-bit bus and support chips angle. It undoubtedly succeeded in large part because it was a "known quantity" for commercial customers-- an approved vendor, known support and warranty policies, too big to fail. I know even as late as the mid-80s, Commodore was still advertising "You're paying $$$ more (for a PCjr instead of a 64) because the box says IBM on it" But I was curious if there was anything that it also offered that was uniquely compelling in the at the moment of launch. There are a few things I can think of, but I'm a little skeptical of most of them: * The monochrome display (5151) was very well-regarded; 80x25 of very legible text and a nice long-persistence phosphor. I had one for a while in the 90s and it was quite good even though the geometry was shot. But was it much better than other "professional" machines, particularly ones using dedicated terminals or custom monitors which might also offer better tubes/drive circuitry than a repurposed home TV? * Offering it as a turnkey package-- there were 8086 S-100 or similar setups far more robust than any 5150, but you were typically assembling it yourself, or relying on a much smaller vendor (i. e. Cromemco) to build a package deal. * The overall ergonomic package-- I feel like there weren't too many pre-1981 machines that match the overall layout of "modest size, all-inclusive desktop box you can use as a monitor riser, and quality detachable keyboard" A backplane box and seperate drive enclosures would start to get bulky, and keyboard-is-the-case seemed to become a signature of low-end home computers. If you walked into a brand-neutral shop in late 1981, what was the unique selling proposition for the IBM PC? The Apple II was biggest software/installed base, the Atari 800 had the best graphics, CP/M machines had established business software already.