Yeah, definitely needed to move on after so long but I certainly learnt a lot from it!
Now said contributor works a bit more on the project and adds some great new functionality, but floorp don't agree it fits their plans. So the contributor decides to make their own fork called ceilingp and build from that. Nope, they don't have the license to do so. They can take the mpl parts. They can take their own parts (they didn't sign an exclusive release of their code). They can add their own new code. They can't use the rest of the floorp code though.
So floorp gets the benefits but no one else can build off it without permission (save for private use without releasing it and potentially having others do the same).
I was pretty much thrown in and learnt on the job. I shadowed another technician for a bit that showed the basic maintenance servicing steps for the major machines, but then went out on my own. I'm in Australia and we had instruments in all major cities as well as New Zealand, so it involved a lot of flying around and fitting in as many customers as possible. So I had to be able to troubleshoot fast and ideally fix things on the spot.
Often it involved figuring out a temporary workaround whilst a part would need to be ordered from the US or similar issues. My main skillset was being able to think quickly like this and improvise. Being able to understand exactly what a machine is doing (not just the theory the lab techs were thinking about, actual things like gas fill reservoir A, valve 3 open to reservoir B with vacuum guage etc) was more important than anything else I feel. Especially considering we were a small company so couldn't afford to carry around every conceivable spare part, not much of the machinery was based on off-the-shelf parts so we mostly carried the most likely parts to be needed in general.
My IT background was mostly useful for dealing with the inevitable issues with their terrible 16-bit era (!!) software and trying to get it running on Windows 10. Of course the manufacturer wanted them to just replace the system with the new model, but they were exactly the same internals with just newer controller cards running (very very slightly) updated software. This would cost up to a quarter of a million dollars, so you can imagine that not many customers were excited to jump on that!
I would say the automotive technician skillset likely overlaps a little better, especially if they are from the electrical side. My IT skills were useful as I mentioned (and I could talk-the-talk with the university or corporate IT teams in order to get required permissions etc) but most of the harder problems were physical and electronic in nature. As you mentioned, I was interested in the science part too, and funnily enough a couple of the universities got me in to teach the theory of what the systems were measuring, which I literally just figured out on the job haha
Of course, this all depends on exactly what kind of equipment you are talking about. For reference, I mostly dealt with gas adsorption, mercury porosimetry, laser or vision particle sizing and helium pycnometry. We also worked with a few other bits and pieces here and there, but that was the vast majority.
Oh, in terms of pay, I took a massive pay cut to work there. I'd been in IT for about 12 years and needed a change. I knew the boss of the company from Judo training and he asked if I'd be interested in joining. Not the most normal career path but I figured it sounded interesting.
Sorry for the rambling structure, I'm at work and was jumping back and forth to here as I could.
Mostly on the job learning. Had an IT background and basic electronics skills including crude soldering at the time, but mostly I was just good at troubleshooting and thinking through problems. Every machine was very specialised so it was hard to get much info and a lot of problems were unique to that machine for that user with that sample in that condition...
My old job was servicing niche scientific equipment. Glad to see you saw that opportunity - there are a lot of shitty products out there selling for five or six figures, and often running technology multiple decades out of date.
Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.
How does this compare to wlroots?
I absolutely love Hyprland but have no respect for Vaxry beyond his coding ability.
I really hope someone starts a good fork of it, I haven't found another wm I like as much but I hate to be seen as supporting that awful person.
They are not likely to be using the terminal. Pretty much every graphical file browser will ask for confirmation upon delete, and many will use a rubbish bin by default.
Before I had a proper internet connection (had to ask permission to borrow a dial up account) I bought a magazine that had a picture of a cow on it saying that Larry the cow was different. It was a DVD image of the stage one mirror of this new fangled Gentoo thing.
Learnt from the magazine how to install a bootloader and so on and then "bravely" typed emerge world into the terminal after configuring the list of all the packages I wanted. Including a full desktop (KDE I think but may have been Gnome). And Firefox. And Open Office. And some multimedia stuff I don't remember.
On a Pentium ii.
Took a week before I could do the next step :D
It's its own kind of sexy.
Old macbooks make great Linux machines!